Removing the modules from home page in Magento

There is a huge demand to customize only the home page sidebar leaving the other pages which are the category pages or the product pages. One of my clients asked for the same solution need to be done. After going through the other magento blogs and other data like magento forums, I came to the best solution (what I thought) to customize the left sidebar or right sidebar.
On the CMS pages go to your home page. Move to your design tab.
Then whichever sidebar you are using (left or right) just include the following lines:-

Lets take example of removing the compare products option from the home page only. Just write the following code into the design section of CMS home page.





-->
Similarly for other modules. You need to use the block name which you can easily find on layout file and place that like this:-

I used magento ver 1.5.0.1 for this debugging. Hope it helps. Happy ecommerce.

Including static block in phtml file

During all my time of magento development and answering the forum posts, the trick which can be very useful during development is that how to include the static block in your phtml file. Having that can be very handy and useful as static block provides the cms page where the user can enter anything without writing the codes even including the widget. So heres the code that can be used to call the static block in the any desired phtml file.
getLayout()->createBlock('cms/block')->setBlockId('your_block_identifier')->toHtml() ?>
Hope this helps. Enjoy magento.

Introduction to Magento

INTRODUCTION

Own a store and want an online version of it. magento provides the right platform you want.On March 31, 2008 Magento was launched to make it easier for online merchants and webmasters to build manageable online stores. Magento eCommerce Platforms provide the scalability, flexibility and features for business growth. Magento is a feature-rich eCommerce platform built on open-source technology that provides online merchants with unprecedented flexibility and control over the look, content and functionality of their eCommerce store. Magento’s intuitive administration interface features provides the merchants to setup the store with just few clicks . Magento comes with admin panel with very useful tools through which the owner moderates everything from orders to the product available to the customers.

FEATURES

Lets have a look at some very useful magento features available through magento admin panel:-

Catalog Management:-

Magento comes with an easy to use catalog management with owners capable of managing the products, their prices, tax Rates per location, customer group, product type and many more.Batch Import and Export of catalog is also available with magento which allow the owners to upload the product information through the csv file. All the catalog related features are available under catalog option on magento admin panel.

Google base integration:- Google Base integration is available as an out-of-the-box feature. Magento made adding products to Google Base (Google Product Search) a pretty simple process that can be done using Magento’s admin interface. This feature easily makes the products to come on google searches.

Site Management:-

Magento's usable interface allows for efficient management of your online channel. Manage multiple stores from one administration panel, including the ability to manage localized international versions of your sites. The owner having two online store one for men and women can manage both the sites through the same admin panel. Furthermore magento supports multiple currencies, fully 100% customizable design using templates, google Website Optimizer Integration and many more amazing features. These are all features can be management through the Sytem tab on admin panel.

Very easy Checkout:-

“One Page Checkout” simplifies the checkout process of your Magento store. Checking out is often the most complicated part of placing an order online, and many users end up abandoning their order. One Page Checkout greatly simplifies this process, leading to an increase in sales. Allow customers to ship items to multiple addresses, input gift messages and more, all in a secure (guest/registered) checkout process make magento more handy and easy to use for customers.

Paymnent Gateway:-

Magento is integrated with a variety of major payment gateways out of the box, as well as alternative payment methods from PayPal, Amazon and Google. Customers can also pay via check/money order, or purchase order and additional payment extensions are available through Magento Connect (Magento e-place for extensions and extra features).

Search Engine Optimization:-

Magento is 100% search engine friendly. One of the most important reason which makes magento top the ecommerce cms is its search engine optimization techniques. Built from the ground up to support SEO, Magento auto-generates SEF URL's, even down to the links in the

Layered Navigation, sitemaps for search engine submission as well as for display on site, and a

popular search terms page.

Order Management:-

View orders, create invoice/receipt and shipment records for Sales Orders and issue Credit Memos (refunds) for customers. Magento also provides the owner to analysis the orders as magento shows the timeline and the amount of the orders placed through graphs. Rss feeds, Email notification of the orders placed makes magento a treat for the store owners.

These all features and many more available features is what makes magento the best ecommerce cms available .Thats not it, magento comes with a marketplace for the distribution of community and commercial Magento products and services through Magento Connect. Many useful themes , extensions and support are provided there. Installation of all these extensions is a child play on magento platform.

A look at the Magento CMS structure:-

Magento implements MVC (Model-View-Controller) model. Magento is well engineered, but it was engineered to be a shopping cart solution that other programmers can build modules on top of. It is based on Zend framework, and the whole thing is very Java OOP-like. The data model is based on the Entity-attribute-value model that stores data objects in tree structures, thus allowing a change to a data structure without changing the database definition.working with Magento requires a lot of learning and re-learning. Magento CMS structure has drawn criticisms from purists.

Thoughts on Development:-

Well what i can say from my development is that magento structure is a complicated one to work on. Magento uses config files consisting of XML to decide what it needs to do. In order to get it to run your own stuff as opposed to core functionality you need the correct xml.Unfortunately there is no guide on how to build you XML; you need to look at examples and do some serious testing. To complicate things the content of these files is largely case-sensitive.However if you master these you can override any part of the basic functionality which makes for a very powerful system.. Magento official documentation is lacking and outdated but there

are many external tutorials which can be relied upon. Magento in its latest versions changed its directory structure. So shifting gears to the updated version from the previous versions can take time. Theming is made easy by its some very good development features (one such is template path hints). Developing an extension for the community needs a very good understanding of its MVC structure but developing a commercial extensions can be a much profitable task as the

magento extensions are over rated.

Last Words:-

What is amazing about Magento platform is in less than one year it has rocketed to the top of Google search volume trends. Today the project is supported by Varien, an Open Source eCommerce software development and consulting firm who started the project, and an ever-growing community of over lakh users and developers.

Magento was awarded “Best New Open Source Project” by the 2008 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards. In August, Magento was awarded “Best of Open Source Enterprise Applications” by the 2008 InfoWorld.com BOSSIE Awards. Forrester Research, the leading technology and market research firm, named Magento as an “Emerging Player To Watch” in its Forrester Wave™: B2C eCommerce Platforms Report, Q1 2009. The growth has just been incredible!.

Personally, I have been using this platform for a little over 8 months now . The feature-set is

truly an amazing combination of technology. I wish there were more documentation, but it’s still pretty early for all that and I know the community is actively working on this with the wiki,screencasts, phpdocs, Webinars etc. A amazing future awaits magento that’s for sure.

Magento Twitter Extensions

Top Magento Twitter Extensions :

Magento no doubt is feature-rich, professional open-source eCommerce solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store and twitter is best micro-blogging service .There are dozens of twitter extensions available but some of them are really awesome as listed below

Latestweets: This Awesome module display your(s) latest tweets on Magento .You can display any twitter-user tweets on your Magento site by simple adding the twitter user-name.

• It supports - Single + Multiuser tweets display.
• Compatible with all the latest web browser's Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer-7,8 .
• Its very easy to configure and handy to use .
• Mouse Driven Scroller.

Tweetboard:Tweetboard is a fun and engaging micro-forum type application for your website. It pulls your Twitter stream in near real-time (max 1 min delay), reformatting tweets into threaded conversations with unlimited nesting. Conversations that spun off the original conversation are also threaded in-line, giving your site visitors full perspective of what's being discussed.

Share Tweet: “Share Tweet” is a widget that enables visitors to your website tweet about the site directly in a box displayed in the corner of the website, with a link to the site already embedded in the input field.

The widget is a unique opportunity for e commerce site owners because it makes it easy for users to share your site with friends while still giving them the opportunity to type out something cool for themselves and thus avoiding auto-tweets.

Twitter Followers: Here is a Magento Twitter extension that you can embed anywhere to display pictures of your Twitter followers.

You can show to your customers how famous you or your organisation is in the industry and hence can attract to your customers. Highly configurable. This comes as an advantage to your organisation at a very nominal fee.

Follow Me: Harness the power of Twitter to drive traffic to your site and promote your site with Follow Me. This Twitter Followme module was inspired by the similar concept

Great opportunity for e-commerce site owners to populate their sites as their quality of the products and site will lead the users to tweet about their site on the biggest social networking site and hence attracting many users to their site at a very low price.

These are some awesome twitter extensions that adds value to the store.

Spoj Sizecon Solution in Python

Recently while taking a break from my examination preparation i took a look at SIZECON question of spoj . My solution was of 93 characters in C++ which was not at all good. As i was learning Python I tried it and got solution of 50 characters. Here's my solution (the best in python is of 30 characters).

v=input()
s=0
while v>0:
i=input()
if i>0:s+=i
v-=1
print s

Whitespaces..

While programming in c++ the standard i/o object cin ignores the whitespaces.

You can use std::noskipws to disable the whitespace skipping that std::cin does by default:

#include 
#include 

int main() {
  char c;
  std::cin >> std::noskipws;
  while (std::cin >> c) {
    if (c == ' ')
      std::cout << "A space!" << std::endl;
  }
  return 0;
}

programming languages

I will give some language reviews for some popular languages out there. It should be noted that these are not actually programming languages. Some are scripting and some are called Markup languages. Also to be noted this is not a full review of these languages. You should do more research on a language that might interest you in order to find out more.

This is not a full list of languages! I tried to include many of the major languages but there are just so many that the list would just become to large and start to confuse beginners. For a larger list of languages check out the following links.

http://www.scriptol.com/programming/choose.php
or as much as I hate wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_list_of_programming_languages



* HTML
Type: Markup Language
Geared for: web development
Difficulty: Very Easy
Compatibility: Works with any browser, and OS compatibility is not a worry when doing web design
Documentation: Lots of great on-line tutorials. I see no need to buy a book when there are so many free on-line tutorials.
Links: www.w3schools.com
Side notes: All you need is notepad and a web browser.

* CSS
Type: Cascading Style Sheets
Geared for: Web Development
Difficulty: Easy
Compatibility: Works with most modern browsers
Documentation: Lots of great on-line tutorials. You might find buying a book helpful.
Links: www.w3schools.com
Side notes: All you need is notepad and a web browser.

JavaScript
Type: Interpreted / Scripting
Geared for: Web Development
Difficulty: Easy - Mild
Compatibility: Works with most modern browsers
Documentation: Great on-line tutorials, but you may find a book helpful.
Links: www.w3schools.com
Side notes: This gives web designers a scripting language to use with in there web pages. Can create pop up boxes and validate html forms.

PHP
Type: Scripting
Geared for: Web Development
Difficulty: Mild
Compatibility: Code is ran on server so browsers have nothing to do with this language.
Documentation: Good on-line tutorials, may want a book for more complete learning process.
Links: www.w3schools.com
Side notes: Great for accessing databases. Because code is executed on the server the user can not view the source code, this adds a level of protection and security.

ASP
Type: Scripting
Geared for: Web Development
Difficulty: Mild
Compatibility: Code is ran on server so browsers have nothing to do with this language.
Documentation: Good on-line tutorials, may want a book for more complete learning process.
Links: www.w3schools.com
Side notes: Microsoft technology. A powerful tool for creating dynamic and interactive web pages. Code is executed on the server, so the user can not view the source code, this adds a level of protection and security.


Computer Applications

* Python
Type: Interpreted - Scripting
level: Very High
Geared for: Everything
Difficulty: Easy
Compatibility: Cross-platform
Documentation: Great Documentation, many books, and on-line tutorials.
Links: www.python.org
Side notes: easy to learn, and very powerful. You can do just about anything with this language. Great for beginners.

Perl
Type: Interpreted
level: High
Geared for: General Purpose, Text Processing, CGI scripts, Automating Tasks
Difficulty: Mild
Compatibility: Cross-platform
Documentation: Many books, and on-line tutorials.
Links: http://www.perl.com/

Ruby
Type: Interpreted
level: High
Geared for: General Purpose, Web Scripting
Difficulty: Mild
Compatibility: Cross-platform
Documentation: Normal
Links: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

Side notes: The goal was to program in human style rather than adapting its mind to the computer structure.
VB / VB.net
Type: Compiled
level: High
Geared for: Windows applications
Difficulty: Easy
Compatibility: Windows
Documentation: Well supported by Microsoft and many books.
Links: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/default.aspx
Side notes: Not a great language, but easy to use and whip up a quick app. Not well respected by other programmers. Dot net is compiled differently. Research the dot net platform for more information.

* C / C++
Type: Compiled
level: Middle
Geared for: Everything
Difficulty: Mild - Hard
Compatibility: Cross Platform
Documentation: Tons!! Books, on-line, people, just tons!
Links: http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/
http://www.cprogramming.com/
Side notes: Well respected language. Take the time to understand this language, it will pay off. There is a reason it is the industry standard.

* C#
Type: Compiled
level: High
Geared for: General, The Dot Net Platform
Difficulty: Mild
Compatibility: Native to Windows, Cross Platform
Documentation: No lack of books or developers to speak with.
Links: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/aa336809.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/express/vcsharp/
http://mono-project.com/Main_Page
Side notes: Not directly compiled to machine code. The mono project is working on making the language cross platform but does not have all features of the Microsoft dot net platform.

Java
Type: Compiled
level: High
Geared for: Everything and portability
Difficulty: Mild - Hard
Compatibility: Cross platform
Documentation: Well documented
Links: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/
Side notes: I have heard good and bad things about this language. Not a choice I would pick for a beginner.

** Assembly
Type: Compiled
level: Low
Geared for: Special niches when needed
Difficulty: Very Hard
Compatibility: Each processor architecture has Its own version.
Documentation: Normal
Links: http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/
Side notes: Has a big purpose in the programming of embedded systems (you name it, anything from washing machines to tv's). If you learn assembly for one architecture, than it isn't too difficult to code on different ones. You just have to learn a new instruction set.

Remember to have fun and learn all you can!