Magento Tutorials

Most people - myself included - thought combining the Javascript in your site into one single file was a good thing. We explore the logic behind this and reveal and ugly truth.

Learn how to force the Magento shopping cart - or any Magento page - to use SSL. This can improve customer confidence and conversion rates and is so simple to achieve that you should be doing it!

Everyone knows how to load a product by an ID, but this isn't always enough to access the product you're after. Fortunately, Magento provides several simple mechanisms to quickly retrieve product and category data based on attributes such as name, URL or any other attribute you're using. This article illustrates how to do this efficiently so you can get the data you want quickly and easily.

Every Magento developer has seen the 'Magento Exception Printing is Disabled by Default for Security Reasons' message and by now, most know how to configure Magento to show the error message. There are options available though that allow you to keep the security of the new system without having to discard all errors.

There are many ways to display your category/subcategory navigation listings in Magento eCommerce, however some are better than others. This article details how to access your category and subcategory information without making all those expensive database category model load queries.

To develop a truly custom Magento eCommerce website, you will more than likely have to customise the Magento Administration section. Using the Magento event system, we will develop a custom Magento module that injects custom tabs into the product edit page. We will also learn how to save any data that is set there. Although this tutorial is written for the Magento Product page, the same techniques apply to the whole of the backend and therefore can be expanded on to add tabs to the Magento order page or the Magento customer page.

There are many ways to access country information in Magento. Unfortunately, most developers use a long drawn out way when they can accomplish it in 1 line of code! In this article you will learn how to easily access an array containing country names and country codes. Using this array I will show you how to create a drop down (select box) quickly and easily in the both the Magento front end and the Magento Admin area.

Magento's use of data models provide a great way to access and modify data but sometimes, you can't beat a direct SQL query! Magento provides several ways to access the database directly and it is important to understand each way and know which one to choose. In this article learn to how to correctly query the Magento database directly.

Creating custom themes in Magento 1.4 is a massive part of Magento development and a necessary skill for any one serious about developing Magento based websites. In this article, I will aim to explain the new structural changes to custom themes, how to structure your theme folders as well as showing you how to create your own custom Magento theme for Magento 1.4.

Display categories and subcategories is a fundamental part of any eCommerce system and is often one of the first things a developer will try to accomplish. In Magento there are several very useful functions that will make handling categories much easier. In this article find out how to: a) display your top level categories b) display your top level categories and their subcategories c) display your top level categories and the current category's subcategories only