URLs in Magento

2 simple rules to keep in mind when insert a link or an image in a Magento:
- getBaseUrl()
-getSkinUrl()



Next, when you create a link it's easy just to say:
.... href="http://www.blogger.com/customer/account"
instead you should use: ... href="<?php $this->getBaseUrl(); ?>customer/account" ...

For images:
img src="/skin/frontend/default/SKIN_NAME/images/rss.png"
instead you should use: img src="<?php $this->getSkinUrl('images/rss.png');?>" ...

osCommerce - default language issues

Recently an online shop using osCommerce 2.2 faced a problem:
Default language displayed was english even though in setup I used Romanian...

It seems that osCommerce checks browser language and displays that as default language. On way to solve this is:

if (isset($HTTP_GET_VARS['language']) && tep_not_null($HTTP_GET_VARS['language'])) {
      $lng->set_language($HTTP_GET_VARS['language']);
    } else {
      $lng->get_browser_language();
    }

Comment the line of code

//$lng->get_browser_language();

And you should have this solved.

Gettin' back

It's been a while since I've written at least weekly on this, but I am getting back.

Mainly because I have to write more on my Romanian blog.
Anyway, I'm getting back on writing on this blog, so there will be 3 main categories with information I like to share:

Web Development
General information, mostly PHP, web frameworks like CakePHP and Zend Framework, issues I face, tutorials  

eCommerce
Technical articles about platforms like osCommerce,  Magento, Prestashop.

ERP Consultancy
Lately I've been involved in some projects regarding the process of choosing and ERP, implementing an ERP system, business analysis and so on. So I will share this with you.

I will also post personal stuff, so please bear me.
Any feedback is welcome.

Magento 1.2 Alpha is available on SVN

Magento just published on twitter and their blog the Magento 1.2 alpha availability on SVN. List of changes in Magento 1.2 is also available. Fixed stuff regarding i18n and layout, calculations, taxes and so on... Also ZF is upgraded to 1.7.2... A new feature is: downloadable products (a sneak peak was published a few days ago on Magento's blog: Sneak Peek: Downloadable Products in Magento 1.2); another feature is the fulltext search... Being an alpha version we will see more changes in the near future... I eagerly expect fixes in documentation, wiki urls and so on, because it looks totally unprofessional to see recommended articles on Wiki linked to pages that do not exist (eg: lightbox integration article - now is features but the page is empty in wiki), incomplete documentation and so on... Happy Holidays!

Magento introduction

I followed Magento progress from the beginning. I decided to write a series of tutorials referring for the first chapter to importing and connecting Magento to other systems... Magento API allows interaction through SOAP and XML RPC protocols. Most entities covered, so you can use the API to import/export Customers, Products, Invoices and so on... If you have an ERP system already with your products defined there and you want to expose some of them to web and sell them online (e-commerce website), well, that's what you need. Magento API is permission based, so you need to define users and roles... Also keys for accessing the web service. The authentication part looks like this:

$proxy = new SoapClient('http://mymagento.localhost/api/soap/?wsdl');
$sessionId = $proxy->login('api-user', 'your-api-key-here');

First we talk about this autentication part and then we shall import and export some products, customers maybe interaction with an open source CRM like vTiger and Sugar CRM.