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A commonly used Magento feature is the ability to place customers into different customer groups. These customer groups can then be used in a number of ways, such as tiered pricing where each customer group may have different pricing applied. By default, Magento does not include a means of automatically sorting customers into different groups when the customer account is created; instead they must be assigned manually. This post follows on from our creating custom customer attributes post and shows how to automate customers being assigned to groups based upon information they have provided when signing up, whether from a custom or default customer attribute.

Magento provides a handy web services API for integration with other software systems, and it can be extended if you need it to do something that it doesn't do by default. However, incorrectly overriding core Magento code can cause incompatibilities when applying upgrades. The following is an example of how to extend the API in a way that attempts to avoid introducing problems with future releases.

Magento and the Zend Framework that it is built upon offer a complete abstraction of data access, which allows you to get on with the creation of higher-level logic without worrying about database access. However, sometimes you just want to be able to run a few key SQL queries directly and bypass the abstraction. This post details the most direct method of doing so in Magento.

One of Magento's strengths is that it caters for the creation of an unlimited number of custom attributes that can be added to products to store structured product data, and these attributes can be further grouped into attribute sets. While the Magento backend provides a user friendly interface to managing attributes, this article shows how to make the most of the additional information provided by custom product attributes on the frontend.

In this post I would like to discuss two common "gotchas" which often arise when implementing a new theme in Magento that might save others some time. The first outlines a situation where page titles will stop working, and the second issue can cause the checkout progress to stop updating. Here's how to avoid these pitfalls.

To celebrate Australia Day, we're pleased to announce the release of version 2.0 of the Fontis Australia Extension for Magento. This is a major update to the extension, and includes new functionality to support the flexible generation of data feeds for three comparison shopping sites (Getprice, MyShopping and ShopBot) for member merchants.

If you are a developer or designer working on Magento websites then you will likely have a need to use JavaScript to enhance its functionality and improve the customer experience by introducing dynamic interactive elements. Using an existing JavaScript library simplifies this process and can improve productivity. This post demonstrates the process of integrating the popular jQuery library into your Magento website. Magento already includes the Prototype JavaScript library, but integrating jQuery alongside Prototype allows you to have the best of both worlds.

Running Magento stores in Australia differs very little from any other country, but there are a few things that you need to do for compliance with ATO requirements and to ensure that Magento calculates taxes correctly. The following is an outline of the necessary configuration and settings you may need to consider when setting up Magento for an Australian store.

Spam is a painful fact of life for anyone using the Internet. One of the most popular ways to limit exposure to spam is with CAPTCHA software, which attempt to filter out computerised form submissions. Earlier this year we released the Fontis reCAPTCHA extension that integrates the reCAPTCHA service into Magento sites and protects the contacts, customer signup and send to friend forms. We received plenty of great feedback and feature requests and we are happy to formally announce the release of Fontis reCAPTCHA 2.0 and provide some information about what changed and why.

Product options add an extra level of flexibility for customisation of Magento products, and are particularly useful when configurable products aren't appropriate. Setting custom product options in bulk, such as via an import script, is not currently possible with the Magento DataFlow system, and would be time consuming to do manually. We can create a script in PHP directly that solves this problem, and allows enough flexibility to use for any number of different data sources.