Category: Magento

I have been using Magento for ecommerce development and really like it. I’ll share tips and advice for working with it and improving your Magento Development.

Posted on

Installing a Magento Extension manually via FTP or SSH

A number of people have been having some difficulty installing my extension manually, and so they should, they are not designed to be installed manually but rather through Magento Connect. This will be a short and sweet guide to installing my Magento extension through FTP or SSH. This could probably be applied to installing any extension manually, so if you just need help knowing where to put extension files, read on.

Those that follow this blog (all 3 of you) will know that I’ve been unable to upload my latest release to Magento Connect and have been offering it for download through my site directly in the meantime. Quite a number of you have been able to install it without a hitch, but the confusing nature of the extension layout is blocking some people from being able to use the extension. Let’s hope this guide helps.
Continue reading Installing a Magento Extension manually via FTP or SSH

Posted on

Magento 1.4.0.1 Tax Calculation error – Out by a factor of 100

I was just setting up a store with GST tax on Magento 1.4.0.1 and got caught up on a bug where the tax on a product would be calculated correctly, but the total on the cart page would show it 100x (yes 100 times!) lower than it actually was, leading to an incorrect total being calculated for when tax is included.

With a bit of Google’ing and I found this forum post which had the answer. A clean way of making this little patch while we await a core fix is:
Continue reading Magento 1.4.0.1 Tax Calculation error – Out by a factor of 100

Posted on

New Magento SMTP features: Email logging and email sending events

I had a longer than usual train ride on Friday, thanks to missing my usual one by about 20 seconds! The good news is, during the extended train ride I have added some new functionality to my SMTP Pro magento extension – it now optionally logs all emails to a database table and you can view the detail of them from within the Magento admin interface. I still can’t upload it to Magento connect however, so please download the release from here and let me know how it goes. Update: Fixed bug pointed out by Luis below – new release is 1.1.1.

I have also added a nice little event firing mechanism – I’m inviting fellow developers to suggest events they want fired, to make manipulating outbound emails easier for other extension developers. Currently the only one is smtppro_email_after_send but there is scope for adding many more – contact me!

I’ll add some notes about the new functionality below, but just to recap using my free smtp extension for Magento you can now:

  • Configure Magento for sending email with any SMTP server
  • Easily configure Magento to send email with GMail or Google Apps Email
  • Diagnose connection problems using the email self test
  • Send using a number of different gmail/google addresses if your email volumes are very high
  • Enable a development mode and an email suppression mode
  • View a log of all email sent from within Magento, the date they were sent and search and filter the list of emails
  • Hook into a growing number of email related events to extend the email capability of Magento

All for free too, I think it compares favorably with the commercial extensions that offer the same functionality. I’d appreciate any opinions on that, as I’m aiming to have the best email extension for Magento. Anyway here’s some info about the new features, in case you care.
Continue reading New Magento SMTP features: Email logging and email sending events

Posted on

Magento Developer Conference vs Volcanic Ash

I was so very excited about presenting at the Magento Developer Conference but thanks to the Volcano in Iceland, I was instead grounded in Dubai – I got to within 2 hours of London, check this out for a bizarre flight path.

Turned back 2 hours away from LHR - thanks volcanic ash!
Turned back 2 hours away from LHR - thanks volcanic ash!

Anyway – Dubai turned out to be a fairly interesting place – I got to ride a camel and snowboard in a shopping mall. Emirates were very good to us as well, so I really cannot complain. I’ll put up a blog post with some content that would have been in my presentation in case anyone is interested.

With a bit of luck there will be another Magento conference in the future, and I’ll get to head along to that one. I’ll look forward to it.

Posted on

Gmail and Google Apps 500 emails per day sending limit and Magento

I’ve had a couple of fellow Magento users contact me over the last couple of weeks about the 500 emails per day Google Apps and Gmail limit. I’m sure it’s in the class of good problems to have when you have more than 500 order related emails, or new customer sign-ups everyday! In this post I’ll detail my simple solution to the 500 email limit that Google imposed on their Gmail and Google Apps accounts when you are using an account as your transactional email sending account for Magento.

First, the problem is that you can only send 500 emails per day through Gmail or Google Apps – that’s fair enough, the accounts are supposed to be suitable for humans, not Magento stores. Also, you can pay for premier and get 2000 emails, so that’s not too bad either for $50/user!

Never fear though, I have modified my extension to help out. Basically here is how the change works, and how it is implemented. You can get the new version over on Magento Connect

Update: you can’t at the moment, so download directly from me for the time being.

Update: Thanks to Paulius there is a specially packaged version of the extension that will make it easy to install manually until I can get the Magento Connect version updated (which is still failing). Get that version here!

Continue reading Gmail and Google Apps 500 emails per day sending limit and Magento