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Our congratulations to everyone at Big Brown Box, who were the winners of the inaugural Best Site Design award last week at the Online Retailer Industry Awards 2010. The awards were extremely competitive and drawn from over 170 nominated online businesses around Australia; the Best Site Design category in particular boasted some of the most innovative online retailers in the Australian market.

Banners are a relatively new CMS feature of Magento Enterprise Edition that allow administrators to create, organise and display promotional content. In the past, this requirement was often addressed by manually creating static blocks and customising a site's layout. By using banners and the banner rotator widget, you can now create content and then control exactly how and where it is shown on your site in a much easier way.

The default Magento onepage checkout includes six steps for the customer to complete. However, sometimes you may have a requirement to create an extra checkout step. An example of this might be an option for your customer to choose a free gift as part of their order, or an extra step to collect special delivery instructions. Using delivery instructions as an example, we'll demonstrate how this can be achieved.

Earlier versions of Magento were susceptible to a form of session fixation vulnerability, which can have quite serious consequences even without anyone trying to exploit it maliciously. Visitors may unwittingly follow a link to a Magento site, and be logged in as another user without performing any actions. This results in multiple visitors sharing a session and causes confusion as they add and remove things from the same cart, and potentially even allows them to view another customer's details and place orders under their account. Luckily the issue has a simple fix in version 1.4 and later, but in this post we'll also detail a precaution that can be taken to guard against this in earlier versions.

The Magento order process completes with an order success page confirming that the order has been received and displaying the order number. This poses a problem for orders with non-instantaneous payment methods (like Check/Money Order) since the necessary payment details are then only available to customers during the payment step before the order is placed and customers need to know to note these down. Ideally you want any necessary payment information to be shown to the customer once they have finished placing the order. This post shows how to customise the order success page based on the selected payment type to show payment details for non-instantaneous payment methods, ensuring that customers properly complete the full order process.

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.