We can make it easier by adding +1 and -1 links to change the quantity of each item. We will do this with some very simple JavaScript which takes the current value and adjusts it. Once this has been done, we submit the form through JavaScript to reduce customer effort.

In my implementation I have used images for the links, but obviously you could use text, e.g (↑ ↓). The following two code snippets should surround the input quantity box on the shopping cart/basket page:

<input name="cart[<?php echo $_item->getId() ?>][qty]" value="<?php echo $this->getQty() ?>" size="4" title="<?php echo $this->__('Qty') ?>" class="input-text qty" maxlength="12" id="cart[<?php echo $_item->getId() ?>][qty]"/>

This can be found in app/design/frontend/[interface_name]/[theme_name]/template/checkout/cart/item/default.phtml

Increase by one:

<a onclick="changeItemQuantity( <?php echo $_item->getId() ?>, 1 ); return false;" href="#"><img alt="add-arw" src="<?php echo $this->getSkinUrl('images/add-arw.png') ?>"></a>

Decrease by one:

<a onclick="changeItemQuantity( <?php echo $_item->getId() ?>, -1 ); return false;" href="#"><img alt="add-arw" src="<?php echo $this->getSkinUrl('images/add-arw.png') ?>"></a>

Now the JavaScript function. We do not want it duplicated for every item so you can either put it in your theme’s JavaScript file or just below the table in the parent template – app/design/frontend/[interface_name]/[theme_name]/template/checkout/cart.phtml

After the quantity is changed, we submit the cart form so that the totals are kept up to date. When decreasing quantity, Magento removes the item after form submission if the quantity is 0.

function changeItemQuantity( id , num ) {
    var qty_id = "cart[" + id + "][qty]";
    var currentVal = parseInt( $(qty_id).value );
    if ( currentVal != NaN )
    {
        $(qty_id).value = currentVal + num;
        $("products-table-basket").submit();
    }
}

There, a tiny bit of JavaScript which will help to ease the customer’s journey to purchasing from your Magento Store!

This only works for Git, Mercurial and Bazaar, but there are third party integrations for CVS and SVN. See google hosted project for more information on this.

Nick and I recently worked on an emergency project for a client to convert a Photoshop design into a Magento theme in 2 days. I thought I’d use this as an example of what it can do. Although it is a rather short project to be creating visualisations with, I still found it pretty cool.

Now all I can think about is how awesome it would be to see the Magento team create a similar visualisation for the core code.

Setting up on Mac

I run MacPorts so to install Gource was nice and easy:

sudo port sync
sudo port install gource

Then, I moved into the folder with my git repository and ran:

gource --disable-progress --stop-at-end --output-ppm-stream - | ffmpeg -y -fpre /path/to/libx264-default.ffpreset -b 3000K -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i - -vcodec libx264 gource.mp4

If you make any of your own videos with Gource, post links in the comments for us all to see!

This was exactly the request I recently got from a client. Although I would not recommend it if you have too many products as it will result in a lot of non-requested scrolling for the visitor!

After checking the Magento Admin, I found that there was not an option to do this. You can set the default items per page, but it has to be a numeric value.

So, I went into the Magento code and decided to modify the block in order to get the desired result. If you would like to follow suit, first copy app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Block/Product/List/Toolbar.php to the app/code/local/ directory ready to make changes. This is best practice when making any changes to Magento core code. This way, when you do an upgrade, your changes will not be overwritten.

Inside this file, the function that we are interested in is getLimit() beginning around line 723.

$limit = $this->getRequest()->getParam($this->getLimitVarName());
if ($limit && isset($limits[$limit])) {
    if ($limit == $defaultLimit) {
        Mage::getSingleton('catalog/session')->unsLimitPage();
    } else {
        $this->_memorizeParam('limit_page', $limit);
    }   
} else {
    $limit = Mage::getSingleton('catalog/session')->getLimitPage();
}

This else on the outer if statement needs to be changed to a string rather than a number. So for example:

} else {
    $limit = 'all';
}

And voilá, now all of your product listing pages will display all items by default.

Getting product information in to the correct spreadsheet format is time consuming enough. Then, you come to import and find you have completed a column wrong, or forgotten to put the leading slash in front of the image file names and find you need to run the import profile all over again!

In the downtime on Friday while 270 products were being imported with the help of a useful module, I edited this xkcd comic.

Let a nerd have his fun….

Out of the box, Magento does not support the importing of:

• Multiple/Gallery Images
• Configurable Products
• Bundle Products
• Related Products
• Cross-sells
• Up-sells
• Custom Options

This is severely limiting. This would put many people off Magento if they thought they would have to go through manually populating their catalogue through the administration interface.

Luckily, this is where the community comes in to save the day. I do love open-source.

This module from Scott Bolasevich, while not blessed with a short name… Custom Bulk Product Import + Export with Tier Pricing / Product Custom Options / Configurable Products / Bundle Products / Grouped Products / Downloadable, it is exactly what I’ve wanted. It covers all of the shortfalls that I mentioned above.

Installing the module wasn’t too testing as it comes with sufficient documentation, including samples. There’s some local Mage code to put in the right directory. Then you create a couple of Advanced Profiles in Magento Admin, one for importing and the other for exporting. This is simply a case of copy and pasting some XML in to place.

When using it, I found the best way to import products, as always, was to do one product fully in Magento Admin, then export all products through the new advanced profile. This will give you a standard to work against when adding the rest of your catalogue to the spreadsheet.

How does it deal with the extra input?

For multiple images, it adds an extra column “Gallery”, where you can put up to three images separated by commas. The limitation here is that you are required to import all images in one go. If you need to add one further image, you’ll have to reimport all images again from the media/import directory. Slight annoyance, but not something that’s too much hassle. From discussion with Scott, it seems this is more of a Magento limitation at the moment rather than the module.

When it comes to custom options, I again recommending setting these up for at least one product manually first as the formatting is slightly more complex. I’ll give you an example for setting up colours as custom options on your products:

The header row has:

Color:drop_down:1:0

This represents the title, input type, boolean value of whether it is required and another for sort order with other custom options.

One of my products then has:

Green:fixed:0.0000:sku:1|Yellow:fixed:0.0000:sku:2

Each option is divided by a vertical line. The configuration for each option is then partitioned with a colon. These match up with the configuration for an option if you were doing it manually. So here we have the name, price type, price, sku and sort order.

Specifying bundle products works in a similar manner to custom options.

For related and cross-sell products, there’s an extra column where you list the SKU of the related products.

Wonderful, 7 Days a Week Support

What’s also really nice about this module is the great support. I emailed Scott pre and post sales and his response time was excellent and was very helpful.

Conclusion

The module is priced at $99.99 which I believe is good value for money. It quickly pays for itself with the time you save populating the catalogue. Of course, the more products you have, the more you’ll realise a product such as this is going to be essential!

Go get it

There are a couple of things that you should check:

1. /media/import – ensure that all images that you wanted to import have been placed in this folder of the Magento installation on your server.
2. Leading slash – every image file name in the spreadsheet that you are going to import requires a leading forward slash, e.g. /my_thumbnail_image.png

Once they have been imported you will then be able to delete them from the media/import folder.

However, when it comes to actually enabling this setting they decided to call it something different in the administration interface to confuse us. We’re not going to let a little obfuscation deny us some of the beauty of Magento though, oh no!

You can pick and choose for each category whether you’d like to enable the layered navigation. Under the Display Settings tab for a category, change the Is Anchor setting to Yes. That category will now have filter functionality.

Unfortunately, when I came to reimport the spreadsheet, it did the first few lines successfully and then failed. It failed on the first line of my newly added products complaining about undefined SKU. After double checking that column did in fact have content in it, I realised my error.

Save as UTF-8

I had been editing the spreadsheet in Neo/Open Office and when I had saved as a Text csv file, it had not saved in UTF-8 format. This was breaking the import process.

So make sure when bulk importing Magento products that you’re saving in the right format. To change this in Open Office:

When you are on the save screen, tick the “Edit filter settings” box and then once you click save you will be given the option of choosing the encoding format.

Best of luck with the rest of the product import!