Sweet-Apple

Creating routes for custom WordPress post types…

Clive Sweeting — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 10:49:59 +0000

When you’re creating a somewhat more complex WordPress website, you might want to create some custom routes for any custom post types that you create. Whether this is to maximise SEO or just make the URLs a bit prettier, it’s pretty simple to do. The function below added to your theme function.php file illustrates the general idea…

function sweetapple_rewrites_init(){

    add_rewrite_rule(
        'houses/([^/]*)/([^/]*)/?',
        'index.php?pagename=houses&house_search_type=$matches[1]&house_search_query=$matches[2]',
        'top');
    //
    add_rewrite_tag('%house_search_type%','([^&]+)');
    add_rewrite_tag('%house_search_query%','([^&]+)');
}
add_action( 'init', 'sweetapple_rewrites_init' );

Looking for an experienced freelance WordPress developer to convert your designs into a custom theme? Need help customising an existing theme, theme framework, or creating a WordPress child-theme? Please give us a call on 01225 309162.

Create custom Catalog navigation menus in Magento…

Clive Sweeting — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 10:31:26 +0000

Out of the box, Magento will happily give you a quite nice navigation menus of your Catalog Categories, including drop-downs for sub-categories.

You also get a number of utility classes added to the individual list items, such as ‘level0 nav-6 level-top’ which enable you to do some tweaking. However the ‘nav-6′ class unfortunately just refers to the position in the menu; so if you rearrange your Catalog categories, the classes changes. This makes it unsuitable for adding Category specific styles to your main navigation. So what can you do if you want to be able to add specific styles to individual Categories?

If you look in the method Mage_Catalog_Block_Navigation::_renderCategoryMenuItemHtml() you’ll find the code that actually renders the menu item. You’ll also find an array called $classes defined. The code below will add cat-13 to the menu item representing the Category with an ID of 13. Obviously I don’t advocate editing the core file, so make your own /local or override it in your own module…

$classes[] = "cat-" . $category->getEntityId();

You could easily extend this methodology to enable the Store Admin to add custom classes or css to the navigation menu by adding a custom field in the Category Admin interface. But for now your front-end developer can now easily target individual list items as they see fit…

Looking for a freelance Magento developer? Give Sweet-Apple a buzz on 01225 309162 -we’d love to help you get your e-commerce website started…

New website completed for Devizes based bathroom designers

Clive Sweeting — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:27:44 +0000

We recently been working with Aqualis Bathrooms Ltd. Based in Devizes, Wiltshire, but working all along the M4 corridor, London and beyond, they specialise in the design and installation of luxury bathrooms, wetrooms and stone floors. Like many companies, they’ve organically grown over the years and now find that their word-of-mouth reputation for excellence has spread beyond their traditional core of home-owning customers, through to architects and property developers.

We provided copywriting, design and development services. WordPress was used as the CMS, which enabled us to quickly add media galleries, refresh content quickly and easily, plus provide the client with a platform to let them rapidly add search engine friendly content when needed.

Quickly create colour themes for Products, Categories and CMS pages in Magento…

Clive Sweeting — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:45:07 +0000

It doesn’t seem to matter whether we’re working as a freelance web developer for companies in Bath, Bristol, Wiltshire or Timbuktu, at some point they will give us a design that has colour variations across groups of pages. Some pages will use purple to highlight text, other will be in orange, others will use a different font, variable width columns, the list goes on. So how can you deal with this without having utterly impenetrable CSS files?

In Magento* it’s easy enough! Simple add a snippet to the Layout Update XML.


     purple

Essentially it just calls the method Mage_Page_Block_Html::addBodyClass() and slaps the className onto the tag, letting you then create css selectors like .purple .someotherselector.

If you’re feeling really clever you could probably programmatically add a class derived from the value of a Product attribute, but that will have to wait for another day…

Looking for a friendly freelance Magento developer? Need some help getting your designs turned into working websites, cost effectively? Why not give us a call on 01225 309162 – we’d be delighted to help…

*I know, I know, not often you hear “Magento” and “easy” in the same sentance.

Quickly find the id of all Magento categories..

Clive Sweeting — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 11:45:53 +0000

When developing a Magento powered e-commerce, you will almost inevitably have to import product data from a spreadsheet provided by your customer. And you almost certainly will need to convert the text based Categories they’ve used in the spreadsheet into the entity_id Magento uses for categories. So first of all create all your required product categories. Then what? Yes, you can click into every category in the Magento admin and patiently write down every ID, but that’s boring right? So what to do?

Create a new .php file somewhere in the root folder and drop the following code in.

define('MAGENTO', realpath(dirname(__FILE__)));
require_once MAGENTO . '/app/Mage.php';
umask(0);
Mage::app()->setCurrentStore(Mage_Core_Model_App::ADMIN_STORE_ID);
$model = Mage::getModel('catalog/category');
$categories = $model->getCollection();
$categories->addAttributeToSelect('name');
foreach ($categories as $category) {
    print $category->getEntityId() . " " . $category->getName() . PHP_EOL;
}

Cheap replacement for a Mac Superdrive

Clive Sweeting — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 15:38:00 +0000

If you find that your Mac’s Superdrive has stopped working, or you’ve replaced your internal Superdrive to fit a solid-state hard drive and need a cheap way to get a working CD and DVD reader or recorder, your options are a bit limited.

However I’ve found these Samsung External USB DVD-Writers to be reliable, inexpensive and work with OS X 10.5, 10.6 and 10.7.

P.S. The only trouble you’ll have is getting it to work with Apple’s DVD Player application. However this hint worked for me beautifully.

Cheap Dell P and U series monitors as good as Apple Cinema displays

Clive Sweeting — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 07:38:15 +0000

Whilst I’d love to be able to afford one of Apple’s 27″ Cinema Displays, the truth is they’re hugely expensive in comparison to a 22, 23 or 24″ quality display from Dell or Samsung. About 6 months ago I bought a Dell P2311H 23″ monitor and am ecstatic with it. LED backlit, tilt, swivel, rotate and crucially for me a height adjustable stand, it was brilliant value.

As of this moment there are some cracking deals at Amazon. Dell have two ranges that I recommend to my customers – the Dell Professional P monitors and Dell Ultrasharp U series. The main difference is the U series use an IPS panel, which offers slightly wider viewing angles. To be honest the difference isn’t that great, but if you can get a U series display for slightly more I would spend the extra money.

P.S. If you really want to splash out the Dell U2711 Ultrasharp 27″ Monitor is just as good as the Apple display, although obviously slightly less ‘sexy.’

How can I buy Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac cheap?

Clive Sweeting — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 07:23:20 +0000

One of the questions I get asked a lot is “what’s the cheapest way to get Microsoft Office for Mac?” Whether you’re a Windows Switcher, a student or home user, chances are that at some point you’ll have to work on a Microsoft Word, Excel or Powerpoint document, and to do this you need Office for Mac (or iWork).

The short answer is if you’re a student or using it for non-business purposes get Microsoft Office Home and Student Edition. You can buy it with licences for one or three computers and it’ll cost around £70-85. Note that this version does not include Outlook, so if you need to connect to a Microsoft Exchange Server for email/contacts/calendar you need to buy a different licence.

If you intend to use Office for Mac for your business, or need Outlook to connect to a Microsoft Exchange Server, you’ll need to buy Microsoft Office Home and Business Edition. Again there are single or multiple licence versions available starting from around £165. Outlook 2011 for Mac is really really good. If you’ve suffered using Entourage with Exchange in the past you’ll absolutely love it.

The last option is to buy Apple’s iWork software instead. iWork lets you import and export Word, Excel and Powerpoint files and does a pretty good job. But make absolutely no mistake. It’s not Office. It looks nothing like it. If you need complete Mac/Windows transparency, don’t make the mistake of buying iWork. However if you need to open or create the occasional Work, Excel or Powerpoint compatible file it does a decent job.

Pages, the “Word Processing” part of iWork actually makes a pretty acceptable Desktop Publishing program and is much easier to use than Word in my opinion, but Numbers is frankly a poor “Spreadsheet” substitute for Excel. Keynote is absolutely brilliant, blowing Powerpoint completely away for creating beautiful Presentations.

Magento – only show categories containing products in main navigation

Clive Sweeting — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 15:49:46 +0000

I was speaking to a client in Bristol who needed a freelance Magento developer to make some changes to their site. Top of the list was to modify the main navigation so that a category would only show if it contained active products, or sub categories with active products.

To cut a very long story short, if you override or subclass Mage_Catalog_Block_Navigation you can do this fairly quickly. Add the method _hasProducts as shown below, then you need to call this inside the renderCategoriesMenuHtml() and _renderCategoryMenuItemHtml() methods…

/**
* Check if a product has an active products
* @param int $category_id
* @return boolean
*/
private function _hasProducts( $category_id )
{
$products = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load($category_id)
->getProductCollection()
->addAttributeToSelect('entity_id')
->addAttributeToFilter('status', 1)
->addAttributeToFilter('visibility', 4);
/* @var $products Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Eav_Mysql4_Product_Collection */
return ( $products->count() > 0 )  ? true : false;
}

Then modify the 2 methods below…

protected function _renderCategoryMenuItemHtml()
{
//snip a whole load of code until you reach the first foreach loop
foreach ($children as $child) {
if ( $child->getIsActive() ) {
if( $child->hasChildren() ) {
$activeChildren[] = $child;
}else{
if( $this->_hasProducts( $child->entity_id ) ) {
$activeChildren[] = $child;
}
}
}
//don't change the rest of the method...
}

public function renderCategoriesMenuHtml()
{
//snip a whole load of code until you reach the first foreach loop
foreach ($this->getStoreCategories() as $child) {
/* @var $child Varien_Data_Tree_Node */
if ( $child->getIsActive() ) {
if( $child->hasChildren() ) {
$activeCategories[] = $child;
}else{
if( $this->_hasProducts( $child->entity_id ) ) {
$activeCategories[] = $child;
}
}
}
}
//don't change the rest of the method...

}

Looking for a Magento developer to help you get your ecommerce website moving? Sweet-Apple is based near Bath and builds and supports cost effective Magento ecommerce websites. Give us a call on 01225 309162 – we’d love to help.

Wait before upgrading to Lion OS X 10.7!

Clive Sweeting — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 11:07:18 +0000

I’ve just been speaking to a client in Marshfield who’s just bought a new iMac from the AppleStore in Bath. The sales person was enthusiastically telling them how they could get their free upgrade to Lion when it comes out in July. I’m here to tell you that any responsible person providing Mac support should be telling you quite clearly DO NOT upgrade to Lion for at least 3 months after July 2011, possibly more. Why?

Lion will have compatibility bugs…

Every time Apple release a major OS update, inevitably some programs will have problems working with it. If you use nothing but Apple provided software, you might find that you have no issues at all – but for the majority of that people that just isn’t true. They’ve got old versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, MYOB, Appleworks, Word, etc. that they still use for their day to day work and rely on.

Lion drops support for old PPC software

10.7 Lion is a massive change. It finally ditches all support for software written to run on the old PowerPC G4 and G5 processor families that you may remember from days of yore (well ok, 5 years ago). Apple created a technology called Rosetta that enabled new Intel powered Macs to run software that was written to run only on PPC machines. Since OS X 10.4, Rosetta has done a stirling job, letting your shiny new Intel Mac run your old software. Sure, they didn’t run as lightning quick as software optimised for Intel chips, but it got the job done. But no longer…

Before you even dream of upgrading to Lion, make sure you check each and every program that you use on a day to day basis is “Intel Native”. The easiest way to do this is to open System Profiler and click into the Software->Applications section. Wait for a few moments whilst the list gets populated. Then click on the “Kind” column. All the programs that are “PowerPC” will NOT work in Lion and you’ll need to find replacements or get upgrades.

Even if you find that there’s nothing that business critical, I still wouldn’t upgrade to Lion for at least 3 months, if not 6. Let the “early adopters” gnash their teeth with frustration – despite what the computer industry would like you to believe, it’s much more expensive and painful on the “bleeding edge” of technology.

Looking for unbiased, down to earth and sensible Mac support? Give Sweet-Apple a call on 01225 309162. We’re here to save your hair, sanity and wallet from making expensive Mac mistakes…