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.

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Magento SMTP, Gmail and Google Apps Email combined extension released (at last)

I have finally finished my Magento SMTP, Gmail and Google Apps Email combined extension. It will be available on Magento Connect shortly (as soon as Varien fix the little bugs in the ‘submit extension’ interface – namely version and stability appear to be required and missing from the form.

I won’t bore you with the details again – but I have tested this working on version 1.4 of Magento (along with 1.2 and 1.3 as always). So for those of you having trouble with email on Magento 1.4 – give this alpha release of my SMTP, Gmail and Google Apps email Magento extension a go. Please note it is a development release, and you should definitely not install it on a production site without first testing it in your development environment.

With this extension you can:

  1. Use Magento with your choice of SMTP server, port and authentication/encryption schemes
  2. Use Magento with Gmail or Google Apps Email very easily

Please download it and test it out, let me know any feedback you may have.

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 it here!

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Mailchimp + Magento: How to get autoresponders working with the API

Just a quick little how-to on Mailchimp and Magento using the existing extension by Ebizmarts. We want to be able to send customers who sign up for the newsletter through the Magento store a little thank you gift (discount code) X days after signing up using Mailchimp’s excellent autoresponders. This is supported by Mailchimp, but requires double opt-in or the following little 2 step work-around with the Mailchimp API.
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Sitemap Submit – Magento Extension to Submit your Google Sitemap

I’ve made a new Magento extension for submitting your store sitemap to Google, Yahoo, Ask and Bing. My new extension can submit automatically whenever the sitemap is regenerated, or on-demand from the admin UI. More about how I made it and how it works below, but first a little background.
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Magento Events Explained and a few Gotchas avoided!

This post is about the Magento Event system – a full explanation of how it works and a couple of issues I had with it resolved. Hope it is a help for people wrestling with the Magento event dispatch mechanism.

My particular situation was this: when automatically fetching tracking details from our carriers via a Magento cron job, the resulting Google Checkout Magento event did not fire, so the end customer was not receiving the notification properly – even though the ‘shipment’ object within Magento was correctly displaying the tracking details.
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Pre-release: SMTP Pro / Magento Gmail & Google Apps Email Beta testing (win a prize)

In a bid to help solve a weird 404 error that Kevin has been experiencing with the self test I offered him a pre-release copy of my upcoming ‘unified’ Magento email extension. It will support both SMTP and Google Apps/Gmail along with a few new features.

Anyway, if anyone is keen to try the extension please contact me or flick me an email or post a comment and let me know, I’ll send through the files, I’d rather not post it for public availability here yet, because it’s not as stable as I’d like. But expect it very soon!
Continue reading Pre-release: SMTP Pro / Magento Gmail & Google Apps Email Beta testing (win a prize)