For the shopmyzfa.com website, they needed to display their newest products on their own page. To do this I created a new CMS page entitled, go figure, “New Arrivals”. Using the ‘custom design’ options that Magento affords for each CMS page I added a block to pull all the products that are marked as ‘new’. To mark a product as new one must have set a date for the “Set Product as New from Date” and “Set Product as New to Date” options in the “General” product information page in the admin. Failure to mark these will keep the block from displaying anything at all.

I’ve seen this request on a lot of forums so it would seem to be a fairly common request. Modern eCommerce users typically look for some type of cart notification in the top-right corner. Rather than fight that training, most would seek to encourage it as it, 1) Makes usability that much better and 2) They don’t want to lose clientele just for ‘thinking outside of the box’ design-wise.

Magento is all about taking notes and standing on the shoulders of others. I frequently reuse code that others provide to make development a little faster and smoother. I hope to help out others as they learn by sharing my learning experiences. In this case, a current client needed two search bars on any given page.

When using your Magento store, you may find that an ugly dynamic URL appears with an ending like ‘SID=randomchar’. This is the session ID and is not only aesthetically unpleasant, it could discount your SEO.

One of the drawbacks of Magento is currently its speed if default configuration is used. There are certain ways of making it run faster. The best one is to enable GZip compression by changing .htaccess file a little.