Posts in 'Magento Development'

We've got some great news to share here at Classy Llama: Five of our developers took the Magento Certified Developer exam yesterday, and all five passed with flying colors. This brings our total count of Magento Certified Developers to nine, with seven having the distinction of the Plus certification.  This means that we have more Certified Developers than any company in the world.  We also have the privilege of being a member of the Developer Certification Board. What does this mean for the future at Classy Llama? It means we'll continue to be able to find and create dependable solutions to any need you have for your Magento eCommerce store and you'll be able to count on the solutions we provide to work as expected, without hiccups. We want to congratulate Chris, Dave, Jonathan,...

This post outlines some of our thoughts about the state of the Magento module community, and an idea for how Magento can improve the quality of that community. This post outlines some of our thoughts about the state of the Magento module community, and an idea for how Magento can improve the quality of that community. Here at Classy Llama Studios we create our own Magento modules every day and have high standards for any module that we write.  These standards include having properly commented code, adhering to Zend programming standards, and having both the code and functionality of the module reviewed before it is released.  Magento is great because, instead of having to write every module that we use, there are numerous other quality development companies whose modules we can draw from...

The latest batch of Wiz updates includes some useful stuff for developers as well as some administrative features. Included in this bundle of Wizzy goodness is the ability to output any table output in csv, pipe, or tab delimited output. This makes it very easy to utilize Wiz with other commands (or potentially feed information from Wiz back into itself!) Here is a complete list of the changes in 0.9.5: The internal configuration system was rewritten to look more like Magento's own configuration system -- using XML files. This isn't really used heavily yet, but we've got some stuff coming in the next few months that will take full advantage of this. You can now toggle the following "developer" flags from the CLI: Allow Symlinks (For templates, 1.5.1.0+) Logging JS Merging CSS Merging...

As many of you know, Magento recently announced their Magento Developer Certification program.  As one of the few partners who have been involved with Magento since it's inception, we're especially excited to see this long-awaited program finally being launched. Due to our depth of knowledge and experience with the Magento platform, Magento invited us to be a part of the Magento Certification Advisory Board. We've been involved in the process of writing questions for the certification for the past couple of months.  I want to extend congratulations to one of our Lead Developer's, David Alger, for representing Classy Llama on the Advisory Board.  His contribution to the development of the certification has been substantial - he even won the award for completing the most number of...

If you ever need custom layout handles in your local.xml, it's fairly simple. In this example the observer method will make a new handle for for categories that have children or not, but you can just modify the method to make whatever handles you desire. (I realized after creating this there's already a handle for anchored categories with no subcategories, catalog_category_layered_nochildren) First add this to your config.xml in yourcustommodule: <config> <frontend> <events> <controller_action_layout_load_before> <observers> <yourcustomtheme_observer> <class>yourcustomtheme/observer</class> <method>addHandles</method...

Do you have a site with product images of varying proportions. It can be annoying when Magento gives you that white border to make your product image square. Here's how customize what color that background is: just add backgroundcolor('000', '000', '000') before the resize() method <code> &lt;img src="&lt;?php echo $this->helper('catalog/image')->init($this->getProduct(), 'thumbnail',<br/> $_image->getFile())->backgroundcolor('000', '000', '000')->resize(100); ?>" ... /> </code> Better yet, get rid of the background using keepFrame(false): &lt;img src="&lt;?php echo $this->helper('catalog/image')->init($this->getProduct(), 'thumbnail',<br/> $_image->getFile())->keepFrame(false)->resize(100...

There is a lot of functionality in Magento that is hard to get to or tedious to work with.  There are so many tasks that developers, designers, and administrators do on a daily basis that require time-consuming trips to the Magento backend.  If you happen to want to do more than one of those operations, you end up having do each of those tasks one after the other... if only there was a better way! It is my pleasure to announce Wiz: a command-line interface tool for working with Magento installations.  It was built to make your work (and subsequently your life) much easier! Wiz has a whole bunch of great features, but here are some you're sure to like: Create an admin user (tested in CE & PE) Toggle template hints Enable/disable module names Enable/disable module output...

I just finished giving a presentation at Magento Imagine conference.  I'm posting the link to the Powerpoint and the video I embedded in my presentation: Powerpoint presentation: http://bit.ly/fqwvlD Eclipse/PDT Debugging walkthrough video: http://bit.ly/fEQ0Ma http://bit.ly/fqwvlD Cheers!

I wanted to do a check on a configurable product to see if it had a specific attribute. But not just any attribute, a global attribute used to create associated products within the configurable product - a "Super Product Attribute". So here ya go: $_product = $this->getProduct(); $_attributes = $_product->getTypeInstance(true)->getConfigurableAttributes($_product); foreach($_attributes as $_attribute){ var_dump($_attribute->debug()); } A little bonus: The "->debug()" method returns the set of values you can use the get magic method on. For example: array 'product_super_attribute_id' => string '263' (length=3) 'product_id' => string '27' (length=2) 'attribute_id' => string '...

I just arrived back in the US after a long weekend at the Magento Developer's Paradise. We (David Alger and myself) had a great time at the event (see photos of event below). There were a number of different types of attendees: Magento Professional & Enterprise development companies, extension development companies (like Webshopapps.com and Sweet Tooth), freelance developers, and Magento team members. We had opportunity to meet with a number of the european partners (Netresearch,Icommerce,Inchoo, et al) and other developers to share ideas on how to successfully build Magento projects. #magedev was the official hash for all Twitter posts from the conference. View tweets with that hash here. Yoav Kutner kicked off the conference with a keynote Sunday morning. Here are some bullet...