Magento

How to set up a Magento 2 store for Australia

This is a follow up to our 2009 post, How to set up a Magento store for Australia. There are a few important things that need to be configured 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 2 for an Australian store. Locale Settings The first step is setting all necessary system configuration settings for Australia: Read more →

Magento’s Product Attributes Index Explained

The Product Attributes index is an important part of Magento's category filtering system. This post provides an overview of what it is and how it works. Layered navigation and the Product Attributes index Magento's layered navigation allows customers to filter categories by whatever attributes you've set up. Customers can filter down to red t-shirts that come in size L, or only phones with more than 16GB of storage that fit into their budget. Read more →

Anchor categories and position sorting explained

The Is Anchor category setting and category product positions do not play well when combined together. You might think that marrying two simple category settings would result in a simple solution, but think twice before you do so or you might get a headache of Magento proportion! In this post we will attempt to demystify how Is Anchor works and how you can best make use of it. How does category positioning work? Read more →

Using AWS DynamoDB for Magento session storage

DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service provided by Amazon, offering features like easy scalability, high availability and data durability. These properties make it well suited to being used as a Magento session storage engine. The AWS PHP SDK already includes a PHP session handler, so in theory it should be a simple matter of including the SDK and configuring Magento to use it. In practice, it wasn't quite this straightforward. Read more →

CLI image resize memory limit errors

Magento will automatically resize product images based on dimensions specified in templates so that customers aren't downloading large source images when all they need is a small thumbnail. However, we've discovered an issue with recent versions of Magento which will sometimes cause a "Memory Limit has been reached" error when attempting to resize images through a PHP command line script. This issue was introduced in Magento CE 1.8.0.0 and EE 1. Read more →

Adding the WYSIWYG editor to an extension

While developing the new Fontis Blog extension, we wanted to allow use of the same WYSIWYG editor tools that users have when creating Magento CMS pages or static blocks. Doing so is not very difficult, requiring only a few changes to add the Magento WYSIWYG to your own extensions. The first step is tell Magento that it can load the TinyMCE WYSIWYG JavaScript file. This should be done in the layout, in the handle used for your page, like so: <reference name=" Read more →

M2M Sync compatibility with MYOB 2011/2012 and 2013

While MYOB continues to extend its products into the cloud, it has created some confusion surrounding our M2M Sync software and support for the latest releases of the MYOB product line. In summary, M2M Sync is compatible with the AccountRight version 19 products, which are still supported by MYOB at this time. It is not compatible with the AccountRight 2011/2012 or 2013 products. However, please note that any current AccountRight subscription also includes access to the compatible version 19 software, so this may be installed instead for use with M2M Sync. Read more →

Move Magento Private Files Outside the Docroot

This week saw the inaugural Click Frenzy sale generate a huge amount of interest in Australian eCommerce, and we are proud to have been the developer responsible for delivering the website for the event based on a Magento platform. The site stood up well after a challenging start on Tuesday evening, but there was a configuration issue with the webserver environment at one point which left a number of private application files exposed for some time. Read more →

RMA Feature Overview

Since version 1.11, Magento Enterprise Edition releases have included a RMA feature to help manage this process. The system supports tracking requests from when they are first created by a customer, all the way through to resolution. This post will look at how to set up and administer RMA requests from the admin panel, and will also detail a few shortcomings that will hopefully be improved in future releases. Read more →

CMS Page Version Control

When editing a CMS page in Magento Enterprise Edition's admin panel, it's easy enough to make a mistake and accidentally remove a section of text or accidentally modify markup which may be a crucial part of the page's layout. While you may have back-ups to handle a situation like this, it can still be a time consuming process to retrieve and then restore the original content. However, using Magento's built-in version control system, you can conveniently restore your page to how it was at any time in the past, and also switch between different versions of a page with ease. Read more →