Denis Margetic

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.

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.

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.

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.

Recently, I wrote a blog post about preventing PO box customer addresses being registered at checkout. Following on from that post, I was asked a rather sensible question: "is it possible to disallow PO boxes for shipping, but allow them for billing?" The answer is yes, but it does require a few more modifications to Magento.

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.

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.

While getting started with Magento some time ago, I thought it would be a good idea to write a post that started at the beginning: how to install it. Reading through the Magento forums, I get the impression that Magento users have extremely varied levels of web development and systems administration experience. That raises the question of the amount of detail to include in a post aimed at Magento newcomers, since experienced web developers will need only the important steps, whilst those new to web development will prefer more info. Here's our take on an install guide that will hopefully prove useful for both audiences.

It's often undesirable to mail items to customers who provide post office boxes or locked bags for their delivery address when placing an order on a Magento site. Most commonly this is a requirement for fraud prevention or shipping reasons. Unfortunately, simply stating that PO boxes cannot be accepted somewhere on the site is often not enough to stop some customers from still placing an order with one. Rather then be left with orders that either require a followup or can't be fulfilled, an easy solution is to add validation code to prevent PO boxes and/or locked bags from being entered in the first place.