Design, develop, and deploy feature-rich Magento online stores with PHP coding.

If you are a PHP developer who wants to understand the architecture of Magento, learn how to extend the system with PHP code, add new features, and integrate Magento with a third-party CMS, this book is for you.

You are expected to be a confident PHP 5 developer. No experience of Magento development is expected, although you should be familiar with the operation of Magento. No experience of the Zend framework is expected.

What you will learn from this book

• Install and upgrade Magento to get ready for development
• Get familiar with the architecture and internal structure of Magento
• Learn about the best modules available and what they can do for you out of the box
• Build a Shipping module for your Magento store to give users options for receiving their items once they have paid for them
• Create a payment method for Magento and the various aspects that go together to complete the payment process
• Speed up your module creation process using the Module Creator script
• Build a basic brand-management module for Magento to manage brands and display their details
• Integrate your favourite CMS into Magento including a walkthrough of integrating Wordpress into Magento
• Create, update, delete, and retrieve customer data from within Magento by implementing the customer API
• Integrate Magento data into an existing external web application or script using the Magento Core API
• Import/export files to retrieve and store information from and to external sources using Excel Spreadsheet or CSV data

Find out more

Some interesting examples of beautiful sketches for website prototypes for your daily inspiration, collected by Antonio Lupetti on woorkup.com.

When you start designing a new website it’s very useful to sketch out a first idea of page layout using paper and stencil. This approach help you define easily a working draft of the final version of your website. In general this is a top-down process: you can start sketching first the main sections and then adding more details progressively.

If you are a graphic or web designer you should understand the importance of color combinations. Nice colors and color combinations are much coveted among graphic designers, interior designers and landscapers. You must have used Kuler in Photoshop CS4. ColoRotate is a similar kind of online color palette creator that lets you browse through the color palettes, create new palettes and share them with the online community.

There is a sliders mode as well. This will bring up color sliders for editing the colors. You can choose various modes like RGB, CMYK, LAB, HSV, HLS, NCS while adjusting these sliders. You won’t need to remember the color values and jot them down as you can download the palettes directly in .act format.

You can also browse through the palettes , sort or search for palettes based on tags. There’s also a very information description about colors and how the human eye perceives colors, color models. Checkout Learn Colorotate

Today, Jon Lebensold from ZendCast has put together an video introduction to Doctrine 1.2 integration with the Zend Framework. Doctrine is a fantastic ORM (object-relational mapping tool). If you’ve jumped from NHibernate or Hibernate and are itching to have a powerful tool for handling database relationships, Doctrine is probably your best bet.

Read more

It was quite common to use Zend_Db_Table as base models class, but it was simply not practical. When you start dealing with relations and hierarchical data types it starts to get really tricky, because simply Zend_Db_Table doesn’t provide an extensive enough functionality. So half a year ago Zend Framework developers started to look for better solutions.

An alternative (and a very powerful one at that) was found in Doctrine – an object relational mapper tool that sits on a database layer. Doctrine 2 will even be the first ORM with seamless integration between the Zend Framework (and Symfony). He briefly touches on what some sample code might look like and the command to build out your model classes from predefined YAML files.

After evaluating possible solutions I decided to stay with Doctrine for a long time. I don’t know any other solution coming, I definitely don’t want (mainly because I don’t have time) to invest on creating my own library and Doctrine is simply awesome when you get used to it. After all this time I can say that it was a right call – Doctrine is on a way to being officially supported in Zend Framework

He then goes on to talk about the benefits of Doctrine and why it can save time. Well worth a read and following the rest of the series.

• Zend Framework and Doctrine [First Part]
• Zend Framework and Doctrine [Second Part]

One important interaction indicator on the web is the mouse cursor. The default cursor arrow changes into a pointing hand when you hover over links for example, which indicates they are indeed links and can be clicked on. It also changes into other things to differentiate context, for example it can change into a text input cursor when hovering over text fields to indicate you can type there.

When styling your website with CSS, in some cases you may lose the correct cursor type for certain elements. It’s important to retain this indicator as it will inform the user about how the item they’re hovering over can be used (see affordances). The solution is easy: if the cursor type is wrong, specify it using the CSS “cursor” property.

Continue reading more comments and examples on the the original post on from Usability Post

Learn how to Create a Retro Animated Flip-Down Clock is a tutorial published by Nettus. They are showing how they create an animated flip down clock inspired by the 70’s. Using the Mootools framework, we are trying to replicate the flip action of the pads and make it as lifelike as possible. With it’s retro styling, it could be a really neat thing to add to your website.

The technique that they suggest is interesting and I see this tutorial applied on a maintenance page, something like “Back online in …. “. Pretty cool

Social media has become an integral part of modern society. There are general social networks with user bases larger than the population of most countries. There are niche sites for virtually every special interest out there. There are sites to share photos, videos, status updates, sites for meeting new people and sites to connect with old friends. It seems there are social solutions to just about every need.

Webdesignerdepot has reviewed the history and evolution of social media from its humble beginnings to the present day. Their conclusion is that Social media has come a long way since the days of BBSs and IRC chats and media continues to evolve on a daily basis. With major social networks and social media sites making changes and improvements on an almost daily basis, it’s sure to keep evolving in coming years.

Read more

Flex 3.0 CSS Properties List

The guys from teehanlax+lax have designed a iPhone application that introduces a new optional home screen. A screen that doesn’t require you to scan for red dots with numbers inside of them. Instead it would display information and notifications of things that are new and relevant to you.

I think their propose is quite interesting and awesome and Apple might implement it.

View here other screenshots.

Blank extension for building “System > Configuration” area of Magento admin interface.

You can download ActiveCodeline_CoolDash from Inhoo.net blog, there you can find also the original module announcement.

The order has a method setShippingAmount and a method getShippingAmount and I tried to use them. I adjust the total shipping amount by increading with my module handling fee.

$shipping_amount = $order->getShippingAmount();
$order->setShippingAmount( $shipping_amount + $mine_handling_amount );

The way that I did it was to create a method updateShippingAmount and add it as observe for checkout_type_onepage_save_order event in the module/etc/config.xml file:

public function updateShippingAmount( $observer )
{
   $MyPaymentMethod = Mage::getSingleton('namespace/mypaymentmethod');

   $order = $observer->getEvent()->getOrder();
   $payment = $order->getPayment()->getData();

   if( $payment['method'] == $MyPaymentMethod->getCode() )
   {
       $shipping_amount =  $order->getShippingAmount();
       $order->setShippingAmount( $shipping_amount + $MyPaymentMethod->getPostHandlingCost() );
   }
}

There may be a few other ways to do it, but this is my way of doing it and wanted to share with other Magento developer. If you know other way to do it please write it below.

Snippi is the community driven Magento code snippet sharing site. Site was started by Branko Ajzele, author of ActiveCodeline.com. Is is not another code sharing site is all about Magento code snippets. If you are a Magento developer this is a place where you can find your answers.

Check out http://snippi.net/

This is the best, simple and flexible jQuery Week Calendar. It is built on top of jquery and jquery ui and is inspired by other online weekly calendars such as Google Calendar.

Calendar events can be supplied as an array, url or function returning json. They can be dragged, dropped and resized. Lots of callbacks for customizing the way events are rendered plus callbacks for drag, drop, resize, mouseover, click etc. The jquery-week-calendar plugin is also highly configurable, enabling variable timeslots, readonly calendars, display of partial days, custom date formatting, direct manipulation of individual events for create, update, delete of events and much more.

This is one of the best jQuery plugins. If you need week calendar in your application I suggest to give it a try.

Origami is the Japanese art of folding paper, but the goal is to use small folds and creases to bring about delicate and intricate objects.

Origami Web 2.0 Logos

Paddy Donnelly has turned the Web 2.0 Apps/Sites Logos into origami style. You can download them here.

Tutorial

If you want to learn to make a simple origami logo you can start with Zen Elements tutorial: Create an Origami Logo

Nettuts released a basic Magento video tutorial last week.

Hundreds of ecommerce systems exist, but very few can match the power of Magento. In this screencast, I’ll demonstrate how to download and install Magento to a local host, configure some of the site options, and create simple and configurable products and categories for our test e-commerce site.

If you are curious about Magento and want a basic “how-to” intro, then this is for you:

If you need help on how to install or customize a Magento shop, please contact me.

Apache’s mod_deflate module provides the DEFLATE output filter that allows output from your server to be compressed before being sent to the client over the network.

There are two ways of enabling gzip compression:

1. Using Apache’s mod_deflate
2. Using PHP’s built-in functions

Encoding the output and setting the appropriate headers manually makes the code more portable. Keep in mind that there are hundreds of Linux distributions, each slightly different to significantly different. To allow portability the application should not make assumptions about the OS or config involved.

Using Apache

1. Enable mod_deflate

Debian/Ubuntu:

$ a2enmod deflate
$ /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

2. Configure mode_deflate

$ nano /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/deflate.conf

#
# mod_deflate configuration
#
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

 DeflateCompressionLevel 9

 BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
 BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
 BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

 DeflateFilterNote Input instream
 DeflateFilterNote Output outstream
 DeflateFilterNote Ratio ratio
</IfModule>

Using PHP

Create a gzip compressed string in your bootstrap file:

try {
    $frontController = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
    if (@strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip') !== false) {
        ob_start();
        $frontController->dispatch();
        $output = gzencode(ob_get_contents(), 9);
        ob_end_clean();
        header('Content-Encoding: gzip');
        echo $output;
    } else {
        $frontController->dispatch();
    }
} catch (Exeption $e) {
    if (Zend_Registry::isRegistered('Zend_Log')) {
        Zend_Registry::get('Zend_Log')->err($e->getMessage());
    }
    $message = $e->getMessage() . "\n\n" . $e->getTraceAsString();
    /* trigger event */
}

Reference

Use mod_deflate to compress Web content delivered by Apache