WebCatch Digital

Monthly archives for February, 2010

Magento Q&A: Hide the price for a free product

Feb26
2010 3 Comments Written by Jakub

Difficulty: Easy

Modification: Template File

Q:

I’m new to magento, and I would like to know if there is a way to hide the price of a product when it is 0?

I have a few free virtual product, and they have 0 as price. so the customer can order them for free. But I would like to hide the 0.

A:

That is fairly easy to do. You will need to modify the template file /app/design/forntend/default/your_skin/template/catalog/product/view.phtml.

In there you need to look for the piece of code responsible for displaying the price and surround it with additional code:

<?php if($_product->price==0): ?>

<?php echo 'FREE'; ?>
<?php else: ?>
<!-- code that is currently displaying the price in your template -->
<?php endif; ?>
Posted in Ecommerce, Magento, Q&A, Web Design - Tagged , , , ,

Microsoft forced to offer web browser choice by EU law

Feb23
2010 Leave a Comment Written by admin

Figures suggest that over half the world’s internet users have IE, which started a legal battle between Microsoft and the European commission back in January 2009.

The European rules that Microsoft’s grip on the browser market was unfair, and more choice should be provided to the end user. This in turn has forced Microsoft to an update which is currently being tested at the moment in Belgium, France and the UK. The software update choice will arrive automatically for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 customers, according to a blog post by Dave Heiner, Microsoft’s vice president and deputy general counsel.

Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera are the alternative browsers that people will be offered, or the user can select to stick with the browser they currently use. Once the update is released it will be interesting whether we see a major shift in the follow browser usage stats.

2009

IE8

IE7

IE6

Firefox

Chrome

Safari

Opera
December 13.5% 12.8% 10.9% 46.4% 9.8% 3.6% 2.3%

I’m not sure if the majority of people will stick or change, I personally hope it manages to reduce the 10.9% still using IE6 making it very difficult for web designers all over the world to do their work and push the web forward.

Posted in Technology - Tagged

Prepare your magento site for upgrade

Feb18
2010 4 Comments Written by Jakub

You might have heard that there is a new version of magento out there. Magento Community Edition 1.4 has just been declared stable by its creators – Varien. If you want to upgrade you must bear in mind that by doing so you will overwrite all the modifications in your core files. Normally this should not be a problem, as there shouldn’t be any core modifications. However, it is not uncommon that magento developers and designers do some quick changes in the core and then forget to move them to the local code pool or local template. The only way to make sure that your site will not loose the extra functionality or some custom styling is to track all the changes that have been applied to your core files and either move them to the local code/design files before upgrading or reapply them after the upgrade (though we would really recommend that you keep your core files free from any modifications). Now to the most important part: How to do this?

In order to find the core changes you would need to download a clean copy of magento. Be sure to download exactly the same version that you are currently running (you can check your current version in the admin panel’s footer). After download you need to extract the ‘app’ folder and place it somewhere in your filesystem. For the purpose of this example, lets assume that you put the original app file in the magento root folder and rename it to app.org.

Now you will need to make use of the linux console. The tool you will use is diff. It is a standard program for comparing files that should be present in all linux distributions. The only parameter that would need to be added is -r which switches the tool to recursive mode. The final command looks as follows for:

diff -r magento_root/app/code/core magento_root/app.org/code/core > ~/core_code_modifications.txt

diff -r magento_root/app/design/frontend/default/default/ magento_root/app.org/design/frontend/default/default/ > ~/core_design_modifications.txt

After executing those two commands you will have two files created in your home directory:

  • core_code_modifications.txt, which will list all the modifications in your core code files
  • core_design_modifications.txt, which will list all the modifications in your default template

With that knowledge your job of upgrading magento will be much simpler. Again, after you have successfully upgraded your magento store to version 1.4, do take some extra time and move the changes to the local code pool and/or your custom template. This will save you a lot of time and trouble in future upgrades and will also ensure that your store is easier to maintain by your developers and designers.

Posted in Development, Ecommerce, Magento, Web Design - Tagged , , ,

The perfect page rank

Feb15
2010 Leave a Comment Written by admin

I know we shouldn’t get too obsessed with page rank but I always like to keep a look out for websites that get a perfect 10 page rank, this changes each quarter and we should be due for an update very soon,  below is a list of all the sites that have a pr 10.

Title

PR

GBLs ( Google’s Fake representation refer webmaster tools for )

YBLs

URL

Google Search

10

132,000

1,041,958,589

http://www.google.com

World Wide Web Consortium

10

33,000

66,868,007

http://www.w3.org/

US Goverment website

10

29,800

5,507,662

http://www.usa.gov/

Adobe – Adobe Reader Download

10

 366,000

1,426,347

http://get.adobe.com/reader/

National Portal of India

10

2,270

250,770

http://india.gov.in/

United States Department of Health and Human Services

10

34,400

2,528,270

http://www.hhs.gov/ and http://www.dhhs.gov both redirects to same URL.

Europeana

10

5,030

458,308

http://www.europeana.eu/portal/

CNN

10

46,100

23,149,725

http://www.cnn.com/

Miibeian

10

31,200

824,087,644

http://www.miibeian.gov.cn/

Social Bookmarking Sharing Button Widget

10

151,000

340,345,651

http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php

ScienceDirect

10

8,200

1,539,714

http://www.sciencedirect.com/

I will post the result of the next update. It will be interesting with the ever-changing parameters that Google puts in our way to see if this list increases or shrinks.

Posted in SEO, Uncategorized - Tagged

Google phases out support for IE6

Feb05
2010 4 Comments Written by admin

Over the last few years more and more new browsers have been emerging with better capabilities and faster browsing, however statistics show that people are still not updating from IE6. As a browser that doesn’t support key web standards it is essentially holding back the Internet, with designers and developers forced to implement ‘hacks’ and ‘workarounds’ to make websites cross browser compatible.

However with the latest security threat identified as a weakness in the Microsoft browser it’s no wonder larger companies are now backing the campaigns to phase out IE6. IE6 No More and Bring Down IE6 are just two of the campaigns set up to encourage Internet users to upgrade their browsers and there are many great ones to choose from.

So do you bit and download a new browser or update your existing one today:

Firefox

Firefox

Chrome

Chrome

IE8

IE8

Safari

Safari

Opera

Opera
Posted in Technology - Tagged ,