Making ‘Telephone’ field not required on magento

September 16, 2010 | Coding | Comments (1)

The onepage checkout on Magento Commerce cms is really complicated but from a user interface perspective it’s as simple as one would make it with ajax loading and navigational breadcrumb que for the user.

There are however too many unnecessary input fields in the billing and shipping sections; including second address lines, fax number and telephone number. The worst part is the fact that required fields increase the ‘Checkout abandonment’ in your application.

Here are the instructions to remove the required from any field; I will use the ‘telephone’ field as an example.

For both the shipping and billing section open up the file to edit the css reference as well as the required asterisks.

Read the rest of this entry »

BLEN.FAM.HAPPY HOUR

August 5, 2010 | Blog | Comments (0)

Last Thursday on July 29th, the Blen Corp Family hosted our first Happy Hour/Mixer of the year. We invited our friends, colleagues and most importantly our clients for a drink and boy did we have a good time. Here are some pics from our fun filled evening!

Thank you to all who attended and thanks to our new friends who came in an effort to get to know us, we look forward to a long lasting friendship. To see more pics from the Happy Hour please visit our Facebook Fan Page at www.facebook.com/blencorp

3 Ways to use ‘Static Block’ on Magento

July 23, 2010 | Coding | Comments (0)

One drawback to using the Magento Commerce CMS is that there are too many ways to do simple things, with no guidance as to what the best approach is?

First let’s create a static block

  • Go to CMS>Static Blocks, and click Add New Block
  • Fill out ‘Block Title;’ the title should describe the black
  • Fill out ‘Identifier;’ identifier should be url like, lowercase and no spacesi.e. your_block
  • Status, disables and enables your static block, I just leave it on enabled.

Now to add it via XML

XML

Find your catalog.xml location in app > design > frontend > default > theme > layout folder. And paste the below code.


<block name="your_block_id" >
<action method="setBlockId"><block_id>your_block </block_id></action>
</block>

Replace the your_block with the identifier of the static block you created earlier. Read the rest of this entry »

Running Magento on Wamp Error CURL or MCRPYT

April 16, 2010 | Coding | Comments (1)

There are various PHP configuration issues I encountered when I tried to install Magento locally on a WAMP server. Mostly I got an error saying "PHP Extension "curl" must be loaded" in the installation page.

Not knowing what CURL is I went digging. The below 3 steps fixed it.

  • Edit the apache/conf/httpd.conf file: Uncomment or remove # in front of
    •  #LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
  • Edit the apache/bin/php.ini file: Uncomment or remove ; in front of
    • ;extension=php_mcrypt.dll

    and Read the rest of this entry »

How to add Social links on Magento Product Page?

March 27, 2010 | Blog, Coding | Comments (3)


I was have a lot of trouble building social link to the product page of a Magento website. I searched and found nothing except on extension that doesn’t work at all.

The instructions seem straight forward but it didn’t work for me. Sure I could use one of those Social Networking Bookmarking tools that work with JavaScript like Share this and Add this; but it doesn’t give you flexibility to customize and change.

So I hard coded it to work with my theme. Here are the code:

Facebook

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=<?php echo $_product->getProductUrl() ?>&t=Check+this+out" target="_blank" title="Share this on Facebook" target="_blank"><img src="<?php echo $this->getSkinUrl('') ?>/images/icons/YOUR ICON HERE" alt="Share on Facebook" class="noborder"/></a>

Delicious

	<a href="http://delicious.com/save" onclick="window.open('http://delicious.com/save?v=5&noui&jump=close&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title), 'delicious','toolbar=no,width=550,height=550'); return false;"><img class=noborder" src="<?php echo $this->getSkinUrl('') ?>/images/icons/YOUR ICON HERE" alt="Delicious" /> </a>

Google Buzz

			<a href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=<?php echo $_product->getProductUrl() ?>&title=<?php echo $this->htmlEscape($_product->getName()) ?>&srcURL=YOUR URL&srcTitle=YOUR SITE NAME" target="_blank" rel="nofollow external" title="Google Buzz This"><img class="noborder" src="<?php echo $this->getSkinUrl('') ?>/images/icons/YOUR ICON HERE" alt="Google Buzz This!" /></a><!--more-->

Twitter

		<a title="Send this page on Twitter!" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Check out the <?php echo $this->htmlEscape($_product->getName()) ?> at <?php echo $_product->getProductUrl() ?> @YOURTWITTERACCOUNT" target="_blank"><img class="noborder" src="<?php echo $this->getSkinUrl('') ?>/images/icons/YOUR ICON HERE" alt="Follow bernos on Twitter"/></a>

To use this simple open the 

[/php]view.phtml[php]

located the app/design/default/THEME/Template/product/of your magneto installation. Note that the location of the view.phtml may differ in some instances if your theme is using the template files in the base. Paste the above code with few updates like the your twitter account and the file name of your icons. And it should display in your product pages.