Think Different

I ndia has potential to emerge as the global competency centre for cloud services, says Microsoft. India , with its powerful ecosystem of over 1300 independent software vendors (ISVs), 1.4 million developers and more than 11000 system integrators (SIs and custom software development organizations), is ideal to tap this growing opportunity. As a result, an additional 300,000 jobs related to cloud services are estimated to be created in India over the next 5 years. A study by global consultants, Zinnov estimates the global cloud computing market to be over $70 billion by 2015. Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft Corporation said, "India will not only see a surge in consumption of cloud services, driving growth in domestic IT usage, but companies all over the world will look to India to support their transition to cloud computing." Microsoft's cloud infrastructure supports over one billion customers and 20 million businesses globally. Leaders from the industry and academia a...

It has emerged that the IP addresses used in helping to distinguish one computer from another are expected to run out in approximately 500 days. The unique numbers, which are known as Internet protocol addresses, help identify the world's networked devices. An IP address uses four numbers from 0 to 255 to distinguish one computer from another. As an example, computers around the world can recognise the IP address 203.26.51.71 as a server for fairfax.com.au, which publishes this newspaper online. There are more than four billion combinations. But the proliferation of networked devices means soon that will no longer be enough. In a way, IP addresses are like phone numbers, which need to be entered correctly if a right connection is to be made. So the ability to uniquely identify everything in the computer world is essential. IP addresses are like phone numbers in another way, too. Just as Australia [ Images ] had to move from seven-digit phone numbers to eight digits in the early 199...

To add customiged fields for shop customer.. First We can make a module to extend the functionality of the customer module already in magento. First adding the module xml file to the app/etc/modules/ directory. You need to decide on a module name. In this example we will use the Sarvottom scope, and call the module 'NewCustomer'. Therefore we need to create a file named Sarvottom_NewCustomer.xml and add the following content: <code> <config> <modules> <Sarvottom_NewCustomer> <active>true</active> <codePool>local</codePool> </Sarvottom_NewCustomer> </modules> </config> </code> Second to add the above file means that Magento is now aware of a new custom module been added as local module. Now, we need to create the module itself, which must be located in the app/code/local/Sarvottom/NewCustomer directory. Inside this directory, create an etc directory...

Magento has always been flying forward with code optimization and adding new features. Recently I’ve been tasked with upgrading one of our websites from 1.2 to 1.3.2 Seems like alot has changed since that time, no core changes are now required, you can overwrite code functionality with your own controllers, and etc.. Awesome! So lets move forward. How would you disable shipping and payment steps for you Magento installation and apply changes in such manner that you wont have to worry about this when doing the next Magento upgrade? Below is a step by step tutorial “copy paste” pretty much. Now I don’t expect this that this solution will always work with next version of Magento , but unless they deprecate some existing functionality I’m sure you wont need to change anything. NOTE: When doing copy paste make sure you wont end up with weird characters, such as single and double quotes. STEP 1 First step would be to get a Magento extension called “LKC_ModularRouters” (ext. ke...

The client want to have a shop where regular customers to be able to see products with their retail price, while Wholesale partners to see the prices with ? discount. The extra condition: retail and wholesale prices hasn’t mathematical dependency. So, a product could be $100 for retail and $50 for whole sale and another one could be $60 retail and $50 wholesale. And of course retail users should not be able to see wholesale prices at all. Basically, I will explain what I did step-by-step, but in order to understand what I mean, you should be familiar with the basics of Magento. 1. Creating two magento websites, stores and views (Magento meaning of website of course) It’s done from from System->Manage Stores. The result is: Website | Store | View ———————————————— Retail->Retail->Default Wholesale->Wholesale->Default Both sites using the same category/product tree 2. Setting the price scope in System->Configuration->Catalog->Catalog->Price set drop-down to...

Time to move on to some more serious stuff concerning Magento. My last few posts were about understanding a way to use Magento functions. Functions like getModel, getData, getSingleton and so on. Most important it was a way of showing you how to find the available functions ascreend how to extract the data from objects. Not sure if I fully seceded in that but hopefully I helped a bit. Before I start with the explanation on how to actually write a module let’s take a deeper look at the module philosophy. You can look at the module as your application (that’s the way I look at it) within the main application (Magento). Just for the consistency let’s stick to the module terminology. Each module is comprised of various parts working together for the common goal. If your module is named, let’s say, SomeCoolPaymentServiceModule then the common goal of the module parts is to achieve full integration (inner workings) of Magento system with the SomeCoolPaymentService service. So what are the ...

There’s a little confusion among some on how to import products into a Magento ecommerce store . I spent some time today researching and trying to find the best method on doing this. The reason for my research is because there was no simple documentation anywhere that I could find on how to import products. Magento actually has built a pretty robust import/export mechanism into the ecommerce cms that has a ton of flexibility to do many things. I’m not going to cover all of those. This is just for those of you who simply just want to import products into their Magento cart. Step 1 – Add a new product manually add a new product manually to the catalog, assign it to a category, and fill out all fields that will be necessary to your store. The obvious ones are price, description, quantity etc. It’s important that you fill out all fields that you know you are going to need for all the products you import. Step 2 – Export Your Products Now we want to export your product to a .csv file so t...