October 2009

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.

When creating a set of categories in Magento, the standard method is to add your category tree under the 'Default Category'. All immediate child categories are then used in the top level navigation bar on the frontend. Some store designs work better with a single top level category for displaying products. This cannot be done using the 'Default Category', but there is an alternative.

Fontis is pleased to announce the official launch of the Magento Melbourne Users Group - MagMUG - and the inaugural meeting, taking place in two weeks time. MagMUG is an opportunity for anyone in the Melbourne area working with Magento to engage with others in the community.

Product ratings are an important tool for gaining credibility and driving sales in any online store, and are yet another powerful feature built-in to the Magento core. Ratings can be a valuable criteria to make visible to people browsing the site, so rather than hide them away on product pages only, it can be desirable to display rating summary data elsewhere, or to use the data in developing other custom functionality. Review summaries work a little differently to other product data, so this post will demonstrate how to access them.

For all orders, Magento keeps a Comments History of all activity on that order. This allows an administrator to track changes that have been applied to the order status, as well as to attach comments for internal use or to be sent to the customer. If you are writing a custom extension that modifies orders then it's best to work within this system and to have your code update orders with the results of any processing done on them. This information can be invaluable for debugging and auditing purposes.

Magento allows several different ways to add products to the catalog, including manual editing, upload via spreadsheet and the web services Magento Core API. For developers who want to add products through PHP however, there are a few caveats to be aware of for the product to be displayed on the frontend.

Working with large Magento collections in PHP can often cause problems with memory usage and, to a lesser extent, computational overhead. The common method of loading all objects in the collection quickly becomes problematic as collection size increases. For stores with thousands of products or categories, chances are you'll be running into PHP memory limits more often than not. This post explains how to process collections in a less memory intensive way and should be a starting point for working with any large collection.

The Magento Connect system is a vital part of the Magento ecosystem and has had a lot of success since it launched a bit more than a year ago. As always, there is room for improvement and hence we were very glad to see Varien provide the community with an opportunity to participate in the future direction of the system by running two surveys, one for extension users, and one for extension developers. At the time of writing, we have fourteen community extensions and one commercial application listed on Connect, and the evolution of this service is something we have quite a few thoughts on. We completed the survey and thought we'd share our ideas on how 2.0 can take Connect to even greater heights. Read on for our suggestions from a developer perspective.