July 2009

Online retailing is a rapidly growing market and it is becoming an increasing necessity for anyone in retail in the 21st century to establish an online presence. Recognising this, National Media, a specialist B2B media and marketing company, are holding the inaugural Online Retailer Expo & Conference, which will focus on the state of eCommerce in Australia. It will also be a chance for retailers and vendors to make connections, share knowledge and ideas, and explore new business opportunities.

Fontis is pleased to announce that we will be exhibiting at this event, which will take place at the Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre on August 18th and 19th 2009. If you're interested in Magento or any of the other services and solutions we provide, drop by our booth and say hello. We'll have Magento demonstrations and materials available throughout the exhibition, and would be happy to chat about how we can help you grow your business online.

Sometimes to make advances in software one must break backwards compatibility. Nowadays, Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) is a dinosaur of a browser. It's slow, non-standards compliant, lacks features and is a pain to develop for. As web developers, time constraints and other considerations frequently mean it's just not worth putting in the extra development effort to support it. In those cases, we will want to detect those visitors using IE6 as their browser so that we might explain that it is not supported and offer an alternative. Detecting the browser being used is known as "browser sniffing", and there are a number of methods that can be used.

Static blocks in Magento are a useful way of making elements of your site easily configurable by administrators. If you have sidebar blocks, headers or other elements that can change from time to time, using a static block can be easier in the long run than hard-coding them.

Magento is a web-based application, and therefore Magento development is thankfully not limited to any particular platform or operating system. As a Mac user I prefer to do my Magento development on my Mac. In setting up my development environment, I discovered that there are very few useful resources out there for other developers looking to do the same. So hopefully this post will serve as a start for others looking to do the same.

Diagnostic print_r statements and logging might be quick and easy tools for investigating what Magento is doing, but a full debugger offers a lot more power and flexibility. This post demonstrates how to set up the xdebug debugger for use with the vim editor.

There is little doubt that product reviews are popular with online shoppers, and are playing an increasingly important role in purchasers' buying decisions. Magento includes a solid feature set for implementing product reviews and can show them on various pages that include product listings. You may find that you want to customise the way these reviews are displayed, but the best way to do this may not be immediately obvious.

Occasionally I've needed to take a closer look at exactly which block, layout or config file is being loaded by Magento. In this post I will demonstrate a "brute force" approach to checking exactly what is being processed.