Oct 20 2009

Magento: Phoning home to Big Brother/Varien?

It appears some have claimed there Magento installation has been making calls back to IP’s owned by Varien/Magento, The thread is initially a year old, and more recent discussions have claimed they haven’t found anything of such nature.  I know X-Cart used to use a javascript blank 1×1 gif image to track installations of X-Cart but it was only on the backend/admin side, and not the front end.  Has anyone else run into similar instances?  Also this may not pertain to 3rd party modules installed as that may a whole other can of worms you could be opening up your store up to, most modules are free, but nothing is really free in this world. 8O  Here is the original thread: Magento Phone Home?

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2 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Magento Commerce, Web Development

Oct 15 2009

Magento: Display a product image within Static Pages and Blocks

In this particular instance I needed to add product thumbnails for reference on a front page.

First create a new .phtml file with the following under catalog/product/view/your_new_page.phtml

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<?php
$productId = $this->getProduct_id(); 
$_product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($productId); //load the product
?>
<img src="<? echo Mage::helper('catalog/image')->init($_product, 'thumbnail')->resize(75, 75); ?>" alt="<?php echo $this->htmlEscape($_product['name']); ?>" border="0" width="75" />

Now simply add the following to your CMS Page or Block and adjust the product ID to the product Image you wish to view:

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{{block type="catalog/product_new" product_id="1" template="catalog/product/view/your_new_page.phtml"}}

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3 comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Magento Commerce

Oct 8 2009

Selecting 30 days or older entries using MySQL DateTime field

I’ve been doing quite a bit of Date and Time manipulations lately, and have grown to enjoy MySQL’s DateTime fields just as much as UNIX timestamps. Particularly its built-in functions for selecting any range of fields based on a time frame.

Needing to remove all entries from a table that are older than 30 days, at first I thought I would need to iterate over the very large table (90+k) rows of data and convert each MySQL DateTime field to a UNIX time stamp to do the calculations myself with PHP. However after a bit of research I’ve learned of a few things with MySQL DateTime that make this a lot easier.

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SELECT fields FROM table WHERE DATE_SUB(CURDATE(),INTERVAL 30 DAY) >= timestamp;

The “timestamp” field is the MySQL DateTime field. Using the DATE_SUB, CURDATE and INTERVAL one can easily grab all records that are 30 days old without the headache of converting to UNIX timestamps in PHP and doing the grunt work yourself.

:idea: Also as a side note, if you wish to convert a MySQL DateTime field to a UNIX timestamp you can easily do this by:

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$mysql_timestamp = gmdate("Y-m-d H:i:s",$mysql_timestamp_value);

If anyone has any better more efficient means to accomplish this please feel free to leave a comment. :D

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no comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in MySQL, Web Development

Oct 8 2009

Magento: CMS Blocks in Static Pages

Just to follow up on my post: Magento: CMS Blocks in Templates, here is how you can call a CMS Block within a Static Page:

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{{block type="cms/block" block_id="your_block_id_here" template="cms/content.phtml"}}

Happy Magento’ing! :mrgreen:

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no comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Magento Commerce