It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been working on Magento quite actively last two months. I noticed this negative trend in my blogging; more I know about Magento, the less I write about it. Some things just look so easy now, and they start to feel like something I should not write about. Anyhow…. time to share some wisdom with community
Our current client uses somewhat specific (don’t they all) store set. When I say specific, i don’t imply anything bad about it. One of the stand up features at this clients site is the advanced search functionality. One of the coolest features of the built in advanced search is the possibility to search based on attributes assigned to a product.

To do the search by attributes, your attributes must have that option turned on when created (or later, when editing an attribute). In our case we had a client that wanted something like

To get the total number of products in a category and show it on the product list page, just add these three lines of code.

This has only been tested on Magento 1.5 but should work on previous versions, let me know in the comments if you have any issues.

In template/catalog/product/list.phtml add these two lines of code where you need the count.

Magento comes with a lot of files, utilities and libraries, one of which is window.js. It is a Prototype based library implementing some classes that allow you to add windows to a web page. This can be simple pop-ups and modal windows and dialogs. They can be dragged, minimized, resized and closed. You can open multiple windows if you wanted to. You can load content from a link, an HTML container on the page or via Ajax. This library is seriously versatile. The Magento admin already uses window.js for various pop-up functions such as the widget options and image management. Well if the back end can do it, then the front end can too.

How to use it

The library is located under [magento_root]/js/prototype/window.js. Additionally, window.js comes with a bunch of CSS themes found under: /js/prototype/windows/themes/*. To load the library in the front end we will make or add an entry to our design theme’s local.xml:

By default Magento comes with enabled caching thus avoiding repetition of some of the heaviest operations. However, this is not always enough for Magento to run fast.

Speeding up Magento is not always an easy task and commercial extensions for this purpose are expensive. That’s why we will offer you two easy to follow steps which can significantly increase Magento Performance:

1. Enable the compiler which comes with Magento by default. You can find it in Magento admin panel,  System, Tools, Compilation. Just click on Enable and Run Compilation Process after that.

This option compiles all Magento installation files and creates a single include path. It will speed up pages 25-50% according to the official documentation.

With the release of the Beta1, Preview version of Magento approaching in the next couple of weeks we present a sneak peek of the Magento Admin Panel.

Today we will take a look at creating a new category in the Magento Admin. Click on the picture to bring up a full size version.