Edmonds Commerce are currently recruiting for a highly talented and creative web design professional to join our team.

You will be working with our core clients on a variety of design tasks including mailshots, banners and other related tasks. You will also be involved in creating brand new designs for clients looking to rebrand their existing sites or set up a whole new site.

We are based in Shipley which is very easy to get to from both Leeds and Bradford areas. It is also easy enough to get to from surrounding areas such as Huddersfield, Wakefield and Keighley thanks to having a well connected train station and easy road links. You can read more about our location here.

If you would like to join the team as a web designer please fill out the contact form below.

Mobile internet usage is perhaps one of the defining revolutions of this decade.

People love how quick and easy it is to quickly look up something on their mobile that they carry around 24/7.

Signs of mobile usage are now all around us. People scroll through websites on tablets, smartphones, notebooks and other web-enabled mobile devices to pass their time.

According to the BBC, almost 50% of people have used the internet whilst away from their computer in a survey last year. In fact that article was published in 2011 so the reality now is probably much higher.

Have a look at these statistics which clearly show how mobile use is climbing year on year and now well over 10% of total usage:

So if you are wanting to increase access to your site this is definitely something to consider!

Developing World

Mobile use is truly becoming a global phenomenon. Whilst China and India have the majority of mobile connections, the use of mobile phones by developing nations is also under a period of rapid growth.

Many people in the developing world are unable to buy or charge a computer but they can afford to use internet on their phone; they often lack a wired internet infrastructure, however the mobile technology is much easier to implement.

Mcommerce

As people have more access to sites on their phones, it is not surprising that they want to buy the things that they see on their phones.

According to a report by SAS and Verdict Consulting survey m-Commerce “is growing fast and will become an integral part of shopping for all ages –
retailers need mobile capability to engage with shoppers as well as sell to them.”

App

Building Apps is quite a bespoke task which means you can modify your app to your specific modifications.

However designing the app means that you need to create it individually for each type of device, so this can become expensive as you will need at the least both an iOS (iPhone etc) app and also an Android app. You might also want a Windows Phone app giving you a total of three separate apps that need to be coded.

The popularity of mobile Apps has not gone unnoticed by Magento themselves as they have launched their own Magento mobile integration.

If you would like to find out more about Magento mobile app capability here is the link to their website.

Mobile Version of your Website

Rather than opting for an app, we always recommend that instead you focus on having a mobile friendly web site.

There are two ways to optimise your site for mobile devices: these are responsive themes and mobile versions. They have positive points and drawbacks and it really depends on what you are looking for.

We offer both types of mobile optimisation so whatever option you decide, we are happy to implement it.

Just in case you are not sure about what the differences between responsive themes and mobile versions is, I shall give some more detail on this below.

Responsive Theme

Responsive themes are basically your current website but with the capability to scale itself to the size of a mobile device. The idea is rather than having one web page you can shape,size and place the elements of your site to fit any size browser.

According to google responsive themes are great for SEOs and for ease of updating the site. This may be because they minimise bounce rate which means it minimises problems of when a visitor presses the back button when the site is unresponsive. This in turn will improve your site ranking. Another SEO benefit is that it directs the user to one URL. It is also easier to update than a mobile version of your site.

Mobile Version

A mobile version is literally a completely different website. This means that you can edit your site to be completely how you want it rather than tweak an existing site. The disadvantages of this is that it can time consuming and expensive.

A mobile version is served up as a completely alternative version of your website if a mobile user agent is detected. For Magento there are some modules that do a nice job of offering a fairly bog standard mobile version which is optimised for slow connections etc. These days with large screen powerful smartphones running on 3G networks, the issues that prompted the mobile version are less of an issue so we tend to lean more towards the responsive strategy these days.

Summary

To summarise it is a great idea to optimise your site with mobile capability so that your customers can properly view your site. Responsive themes are best if you want to have a mobile version of your site that is easier, quicker and cheaper to update, while mobile versions are better if your aims are to have a bespoke mobile version of your site that you would not need to update regularly.

Most online merchants who are into multichannel selling (that’s all of you, right?) must have heard of Play.com.

Never quite up there with Amazon and Ebay it was often the one that merchants asked us to integrate with once the two big ones were taken care of. Play was originally a pure online retailer but decided a few years ago to jump on the marketplace bandwagon like market leaders Amazon.

Now it seems Play have been bought out by a Japanese company and thanks to a lucrative VAT loophole being closed (and rightly so) they have now decided to abandon retail sales completely and concentrate purely on their marketplace business.

You can read more about it here:
http://www.mcvuk.com//news/read/play-com-to-shut-down-retail-business/0109042

And it might be worth checking out their current clearance for particularly good offers as well from a punters point of view.

It appears that all the paypoint (formally secpay) modules have vanished from the magento connect site.

This is a pain for a lot of people who have chosen the gateway to service their payments, and leaves two options for most people :-

• * Choose a different provider
• * Get a custom module written

As Magento developers we’re happy to quote for the latter option, but we expect a lot of people will go for the former.

I recently had to develop a bespoke CMS within magento.

One of the requirements was that the system should be very easy to customise, and should use the existing Pages and Static blocks functionality within magento.

I wanted the ability to call a block that I had created from with a static block. Magento allows you to do this using the code below

{{block type='companyname/path_to_block' name='custom.block' template='path/to/template/file.phtml'}}


The issue that I came across if you need to call a method on the block before it is rendered. If I was calling the block using XML I could use the action tag, but that is not avalible here.

However, it is possible to call certain methods using the code above. The magento parser takes each of the pair values and calls a set method on them, so for example template=’path…’ actually calls the setTemplate method on your block.

This means that you can create a set method and trigger it from with in the static block like so


{{block type='companyname/path_to_block' name='custom.block' template='path/to/template/file.phtml' methodName="3"}}


The latest version of Magento has a fairly major issue that mostly affects UK and EU businesses, in the way it calculates taxes.

One of the most obvious situations is if you sell something worth £24.99 (inc. tax) and enter that as the price in Magento. The thread on the Magento forum is here.

On the front end (if you have left the standard price templates alone) you will in 1.6.2+ see a price of £24.98.

This is because Magento first takes off the tax, then adds it back on, unfortunately a rounding error creeps in at one or the other side of the process.

Magento claims this is fixed in 1.7.0.1 but from reports we have seen this is not the case. There are two current fixes but they both have issues.

The first (listed here) is to override the store rounding system and have Magento work to 4 decimal places instead of 2. That’s fine and works but if you have a payment gateway that gets fed the line items (such as Paypal Express Checkout for instance), the total does not match the line items (probably because it is passed a 4dp number and it doesn’t match the totals of the 2dp items).

Another option (as mentioned here) is to assume no rounding where it is not specified rather than assuming rounding. This won’t cause problems with gateways but then you do need to fiddle with your templates to make sure your prices are displayed with tax.

As mentioned, we haven’t actually seen a solution that works across the board and is right with stats, payment gateways, frontend and backend. It’s a major bug and hopefully the next release of Magento will fix this.

This appears to be most prevalent when using the “Prices include tax in backend” setting as the tax calculation only gets done once if you enter pre-tax prices and have the tax only added on. That isn’t to say that it will always calculate the tax correctly that way round either, just that this particular rounding issue is not as visible.

Also, the fixes listed on that thread involve modifying core files – don’t do this! copy the files to /app/code/local/Mage from /app/code/core/Mage and modify them in there.

So, 6am this morning (Wed 29 2012), a bunch of geeks eagerly awaiting the Raspberry Pi have killed the websites of both RS Components and Farnell

Why, you ask? Because the servers were not prepared for the influx of visitors that such an announcement brings. Raspberry Pi themselves (a UK Foundation, like a Charity) were well prepared and are presently serving up a static page.

So, if you’re running an eCommerce site, like Magento or osCommerce, and are warned by one of your suppliers, or your manufacturing department that you’re launching a new product, be prepared. Raspberry Pi certainly were and provided their suppliers with the information that they would be getting a huge amount of traffic, unfortunately those suppliers didn’t listen hard enough.

This is to all intents a DDoS attack, but not an intentional attack. Well done for keeping everyone updated via twitter though @raspberrypi, we know it isn’t your fault.

These two Magento functions looks more like there is no obvious difference between them, but there is.

addAttributeToFilter(‘some_attribute1′,’attribute_value’) filters a Magento entity collection (e.g Products, categories) by only selecting entities that has ‘some_attribute’ equal to ‘attribute_value’ while

addAttributeToSelect(‘some_attribute2′) tells Magento to return add ‘some_attributes’ to the set of properties that would be returned for a collection of entities.

A combination of these two functions could be likened to

SELECT 'some_attribute2' FROM Table WHERE 'some_attribute1'='attribute_value'

If you are thinking of adding a confirmation of e-mail address to the front-end registration pages of your store e.g the Checkout billing page or the customer account registration, the little snippets below could be of use to you

For the Checkout billing page
1. Locate the magento checkout billing page (billing.phtml) which can be found in app/design/frontend/default/ /template/checkout/onepage
2. Add code 1 below where situable;
Code 1

<div class="field">
<label for="billing:confirm_email" class="required"><em>*</em><?php echo $this->__('Confirm Email Address') ?></label>
<div class="input-box">
<input type="text" name="billing[confirm_email]" title="<?php echo $this->__('Confirm Email') ?>" id="billing:confirm_email" class="input-text required-entry validate-cemail" />
</div>

For the validation of this email confirmation field with the actual email field
3. Locate the Javascript file which Magento uses for validation (validation.js) in /js/prototype
4. Add code 3 where suitable e.g immediately after this line(code 2) in validation.js
Code 2

return !(pass.length < 7);
    }],

Code 3

['validate-cemail', 'Please make sure your emails match.', function(v) {
var conf = $$('.validate-cemail')[0];
var pass = false;
if ($('email')) {
pass = $('email');
}
var emailElements = $$('.validate-email');
for (var i = 0; i < emailElements.size(); i++) {
var emailElement = emailElements[i];
if (emailElement.up('form').id == conf.up('form').id) {
pass = emailElement;
}
}
if ($$('.validate-admin-email').size()) {
pass = $$('.validate-admin-email')[0];
}
return (pass.value == conf.value);
}],

Then that should just do exactly what you want.

For the Customer Account Registration page

1. Locate the magento account register page ,register.phtml in
app/design/frontend/ /default/template/persistent/customer/form/
2. Include code 4 where suitable
Code 4

<div class="field">
<label for="confirm_email" class="required"><em>*</em><?php echo $this->__('Confirm Email Address') ?></label>
<div class="input-box">
<input type="text" name="confirm_email" title="<?php echo $this->__('Confirm Email') ?>" id="confirm_email" class="input-text required-entry validate-cemail" />
</div>
</div>

After this, you should have another field on your registration page which can be subjected to any styling you need to do, most importantly when styling do not change the tag id’s and class names, in a situation where you need to change them, you must also change the javascript selectors accordingly.

I hope this works for you.

Thanks to the acquisition of Magento by eBay, one of the major extension developers, Ess, now has an agreement with eBay/Magento to provide their integration extension free.

Here’s their site and here’s the extension on Magento Connect

It’s also worth knowing that the extension is avaiable on Magento Go, so if you’re looking for hosted-only, management-free eCommerce with integration with eBay, that might be an option. Remember that Magento Go is not extendable by third parties though as it is a locked-down solution.

Anyway, some of the features of the extension are :-

- Stock Level Synchronisation between eBay and Magento Stores
- Create eBay listing templates which can create eBay listings direct from your Magento products
- Multiple eBay accounts per store
- Automatically leave feedback
- eBay transaction and order import