Tag: magebase

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Magento Product Audit Extension – Monitor and Record Changes to your Products

I wrote up an article over on MageBase this weekend expanding on a tip I got from the Magento Developers Paradise. In the process of writing it, I went through a worked example and as usual with articles you want to make sure the code actually runs too, so I installed it on my local test Magento. Having done all of this, it occurred to me that the only missing part of what I had done to make it into a usable extension was an implementation of this function:

class Aschroder_ProductAudit_Model_Entity_Attribute_Backend_Audit extends Mage_Eav_Model_Entity_Attribute_Backend_Abstract {
 
    protected function _afterSave() {
		// This is where we would perform the audit (or any other logic we wanted)
		// We could email the changes to a store admin, for example
    }
}

So I went ahead an put a simple little implementation in the custom backend model. The result is Magento Product Audit, a trivial little extension that will let you know when your products change, and who changed them.
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Latest Magento Development projects, MageBase.com and Magento spotting

Just a quick note about several things, not really a full post. I’ve got a few cool Magento development projects on the go at the moment, blog posts are on the way. I’ve started contributing over at MageBase and I think the comment system here is sometimes broken, but I need some of your help fixing it.

MageBase.com

I wrote up a little article over at MageBase.com to help you spot Magento stores in the wild. I thought it’d be a good opportunity to promote MageBase – it’s a growing community of Magento developers started by a few members of the Auckland Magento User Group.

Check it out. Feedback, article ideas and harsh criticism welcome.

Magento Development

In other news, I’m not dead, but close I got quite sick last week and have been now trying to catch up on a lot of things. I promise I’ll write some fascinating blog articles shortly – some of the exciting things I have been working on:

  • Auto responders that will follow up with a customer based on what they purchased a product-specific number of days later – for example an email that says “Time for the 3-6 month widget?” 3 months after someone buys a 0-3 month size widget.
  • The ability to automatically import a Google Docs spreadsheet and as store inventory, products and categories, allowing inventory management entirely outside of Magento.
  • An offsite cloud backup and restore extension that will give your store’s highly redundant data storage in a secure offsite facility.

Comments

One last thing, if you have been getting the blank page of death after posting comments on my blog I am so sorry. Thanks to Greg from Nexcess for pointing that out. I’m having trouble replicating it, please contact me if it happens to you so I can figure out why. This is also an excellent opportunity to tell you about one of my favorite Firefox extensions: Lazarus. It recovers lost form data when shitty websites lose your information (like my blog is apparently doing to some people posting comments). I can’t tell you how many times it has saved the day for me.