Saturday 9 March 2019

Magento 2 New Features

Magento 2 New Features

There are lots of Magento 2 Features improved in latest Version, we have focused our review on what we perceive to be the changes that we think will have the biggest impact on our clients and indeed us as an agency. You can access the full list of new Magento 2 features here

1. User-friendly Application

The most beautiful change is that Magento 2 has improved a brand new admin panel. And, it looks like it! Now consisting of a discreet design, with simplified navigation of tools and a little less orange, it seems like a completely different system.
Although at first for experienced Magento 1 users it may take a little getting used to, it is easier for new team members to learn. Admin can customise the panel so important business information can be quickly accessed. This means each panel can be personalised to each user helping improve the productivity of managing products, orders and customer data.

Admin Security Improvement

One Person can Logged in at a time  in admin user account. Good or bad, we will let you decide. If another user tries to log in  the same admin account, other users will be logged out. It may be a little annoying but this is a helpful security measure. When working on a website, you will know if someone else is trying to access your account through your username and password. For companies prone to being hacked, this is a great way to up the ante on your security.
Our Suggestion to E-commerce industries
“For organizations where it’s necessary for lots of users to access an account, we advise you to create a unique username and password for each administrator. This way everyone who is required, can work in the backend of the store without being logged out by their colleagues every few minutes”.

2. It’s All In The Touch

There are reason behind new interface is to help reduce the time spent managing an online store. With drag-and-drop layout editing, online stores can be beautified in a matter of minutes.

Retailers On The Move – Literally!

It doesn’t stop there. The backend administrative dashboard is responsive and has touch-friendly navigation. That means users can also access their store via a tablet. The menu and links have been designed spread out to allow each button to be clicked on with ease.
For retailers who need to manage orders whilst moving around their office or warehouse, they can be on-the-go and do exactly that. With users having the ability to access their site on portable devices, it means updating the products and monitoring orders can be done at their fingertips. That’s great for the customer whose expectations for up-to-date, high-quality, in-depth product data.

3. Product Section improvement

To maintain  high customer expectations, let’s take a look at the new product section. A client’s core interest is in the product he or she came for. As a result, to match their needs and wants, changes were put in place

What Are The New Features?

  • Product variations can now be managed through wizard or manually or by adding and removing attributes
  • New options for user notifications
  • Users can add product data by mass actions
You now get an expanded set of options for the configuration of each feature. In most cases, it can help to save admin time when editing an online store. Instead of having to individually create simple products to associate to a parent configurable, creating your configurable products has been transformed into a streamlined experience.

4. Streamlined Approach to Common Admin Task

Streamlining many of the common admin tasks has helped to speed up and simplify workflow.

Product and Attribute Configuration

Users can create configurable products all from within the new product page, without having to first make the simple products individually. What’s more, attribute creation has also been integrated into this step to help make workflow more efficient when creating products.
 Catalog > Add product >

Customisable Data Grids

Magento 2 has increased the customisation options for the ‘Sales – Order grid’ page and the ‘Products – Catalog’ grid page. Each small improvement is catered to save time and make working in the admin easier and more personal.
Users are now open to more customisation through the updated use of Filters, Views and Columns. These can be found from the left menu.
Go to  Catalog or to Sales > Orders


Filters

The Magento 2 Filters are great for organising your results on the page, to look at a specific subset of products or orders. This data can be analysed and monitored to keep track of customer behaviour on your store.

Views

To save admin’s time, M2 has incorporated a new ‘Save View As’ feature to the ‘Views’ tab. This means users can save certain Filters and Column settings when looking at specific orders, products and their subsets.
Our Suggestion
“”Title the view something descriptive to help with finding the right viewing option when you log in again.”
When you log in again, you can go right back to that specific setup without wasting time configuring it manually each time you visit your grid.
Under “Default View” – click “Save View As” and give the view a title.

Columns

The Columns new drop-down lets you check exactly which columns you’d like to show, with more column options than in Magento1. On the grid view, you can also drag and drop selected columns to rearrange the order of them.
Go to Columns – Click and hold the title area of your column – Drag to reorder it on the page.

Add Product Dropdown

Like Magento 1, on the Product Catalog grid page, there is an “Add Product” button, although Magento 2 now includes a drop-down of options. Users can select the specific product type right from the grid page, and it will take them directly to the product creation page.
How is it Different to Magento 1?
In Magento 1, adding a product took you to a separate page to choose product type and the attribute set. Instead, these steps have been simplified so you can choose the specific product type, without navigating to a new page. Having chosen the required type and attributes, you are taken directly to the product creation page.
The new product drop-down menu includes:
  • Simple Product
  • Configurable Product
  • Grouped Product
  • Virtual Product
  • Bundle Product
  • Downloadable Product
Once a product is created and is live on the site, it becomes available for web visitors to purchase. Which takes us to our next improvement: the checkout.

5. Improved Checkout

On the front-end, the greatest difference you will notice is the flow of checkout – on the native Luma theme. A user experiences less complicated checkout processes thanks to Magento removing certain steps. For example, the system now fills out your credit card type, saving you time having to do so. Also, customer confusion on the “Order Success” page has been resolved. Wait, you didn’t realise there was a problem? Where have you been?!
Having made a purchase, customers were then encouraged to create an account with the store. However, many customers expected to see their order information in their account even though they created it after making a purchase. When they couldn’t, many users were uncertain whether their order worked – wouldn’t we all be!
and many more
You can access a full list of features of Magento here
Or Our experts avalable for your Help.


Friday 3 February 2017

ADDING CUSTOMER GROUPS IN MAGENTO-1

Adding Customer Groups

In this guide  we show you how you can quickly add Customer Groups into your Magento account to make tracking and managing customer data a whole lot easier.
In Magento we can create Customer Groups where we can assign the orders from the different marketplaces so that we can keep eBay orders together and separated from Amazon or Play orders for example.  A note here is if you don’t envisage you ever selling on Amazon or Play, then you have no need to add these additional groups.

How to Add Customer Groups

So in our Magento system we need to go to the menu ‘Customers’ –> ‘Customer Groups’  From this page we can click the ‘Add New Customer Group’ Button in the top right hand corner.  On this page we just need to set the group name and the Tax Class.  So in our example we name the first group ‘eBay’ and leave the tax class set to ‘Retail Customer’  Then we click ‘Save Customer Group’ in the top right hand corner.  We then do the same for Amazon, Play and Rakutan.
Now we have set these up, in the later guides with M2E Pro they will come in to play for managing orders from the different marketplaces.
In the next guide we are going to look at Attribute and Attribute Sets.

How to Add Customer Groups to Magento

If you’re looking at installing M2E Pro on your Magento system, and selling on different marketplaces, adding customer groups is the best way to go about it.
Creating customer groups in your system shall make it easier for you to assign and manage orders from different marketplaces.
This guide will show you step-by-step how to add customer groups for eBay and other marketplaces where you intend to sell on.

Step 1. Go to Customer Groups


Select Customers Group from the Customers drop-down menu.
Click on the Add New Customer Group button at the top right-hand corner.

Step 2. Fill in the Fields in the New Customer Group Section

Type eBay in the Group Name field, set the Tax Class option to Retail Customer, and then click on the Save Customer Group button at the top right of your screen

Step 3. Add Additional Customer Groups

If you intend to sell on other marketplaces besides eBay, click on the Add New Customer Group button again.
Fill in the Group Name field with Amazon, set Tax Class to Retail Customer, then save this data by clicking on the Save Customer Group button in the upper right-hand corner.
Repeat this step to create additional customer groups.

Step 4. View the List of Your Customer Groups

After having added and saved your last customer group, you’ll be taken back to the Customer Groups section 
where you can see your list of customer groups.

This guide has just taught you how to add customer groups to your Magento system.
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Tuesday 10 January 2017

Magento Theme development guide part 2(Magento Themeing)

First up, we need to understand the Magento Hierarchy and where our theme falls into place. There are hundreds of folders and thousands of files, far too many to list, I will only be focusing on the ones we need to work with.
  • app/design/frontend/base/default/
  • app/design/frontend/default/default/
  • app/design/frontend/<package_name>/<theme_name>/
  • skin/frontend/base/default/
  • skin/frontend/default/default/
  • skin/frontend/<package_name>/<theme_name>/

Magento, at its core, has two folders app and skin which correspond with each other. The app directory contains files that control how the page templates are rendered, the structure. The skin directory contains files that control the appearance of the website such as CSS, JavaScript, and images.
Within a sub-folder of app and skin are where our packages and themes can be found, a typical install of Magento comes with two packages base and default.
So, before we go any further it's important we understand what packages and themes are. If we get this right everything else will fall into place nicely.
package is a collection of related themes, there's no limitation on how many packages we can have and we must have at least one package present. Magento comes with a special package, if you will, called base. It's a repository for making Magento core files available to the front end. You must never edit the base package files, do so at your own risk - more on this later!
theme on the other hand is a direct sub-folder of a package which contains the files that make up your store, again there's no limitation on how many themes we can have within a package. A theme can only belong to one package and by convention each package must contain a theme named "default" which is the main theme for that package.
The base package only contains one theme named default. It comes bundled with every Magento install and contains the front end files that make our store run. There's a couple of rules we must accept with the base package.
The first rule being as I mentioned earlier is not to edit these files, this means both in app/design/frontend/base/ and skin/frontend/base/  they should only be used for reference. Files that need to be edited should be copied from base to your package/theme. There are a couple of reasons for this which I will explain.
These files are what make Magento core files in app/code/core/ available to the front end. We simply shouldn't be editing core files, this theory doesn't just apply on Magento but also applies on other platforms including WordPress. 
The second one being that when you upgrade Magento it will likely overwrite the base package files. So all your hard work and edits to getting your website looking tip top will all be gone. Unless you took a backup you've pretty much had it! 
The second rule is the files in the base package are part of the fall back system, which I will explain next. In short, Magento will fall back on the core files found in base after it utilizes your package and theme. When it falls back it should be to the original intact file not an edited version.
The third rule is do not create any themes inside of the base package.
In summary, only use base for reference and if you need to edit a file copy it over to your own package/theme. If you do ever need to edit base do so at your own risk and keep track of your changes as you may need to manually restore them after upgrades, otherwise leave it well alone!
The default package again comes bundled with every Magento install but this time has multiple themes assigned to it. As of community edition 1.8.1.0 it has four different themes of which are:
  • default
  • blank
  • iphone
  • modern
Just like the base package the exact same rules apply here. The themes in the default package are in essence purely for demonstration purposes only. Ideal for demo stores or if you want to showcase what Magento is capable of to your clients, its a quick setup.
Magento relies on a fallback logic to make themes easier to maintain and more upgrade friendly. It allows us to edit and maintain only the files we need within our theme. If we don't need to edit the file we don't need it in our theme, the file will be picked up from elsewhere. To explain this in detail we need a real life example.
Say we have our own website which is setup to use our own package and theme like so:
  • app/design/frontend/our_package/our_theme/
  • skin/frontend/our_package/our_theme/

Our website requests a template file named 1column.phtml and a CSS file named styles.css but Magento is unable to locate these files within our theme. Magento fallback logic will now search the next theme in the hierarchy for the files and continue searching until it locates the requested files.
The following order demonstrates the fallback logic Magento goes through when looking for our files:
  • app/design/frontend/our_package/our_theme/template/page/1column.phtml
  • app/design/frontend/our_package/default/template/page/1column.phtml
  • app/design/frontend/base/default/template/page/1column.phtml
  •  
  • skin/frontend/our_package/our_theme/css/styles.css
  • skin/frontend/our_package/default/css/style
  • skin/frontend/base/default/css/styles.css

With this fallback logic in place it means we can have a clean code base by keeping our themes to the bare minimum. Only copy the files from base that we need to make modifications to otherwise leave the files out of our theme. If our website requests the file and we don't have it in our theme it will be located by going through the above logic.
Note: If after Magento has been through the fallback logic and the file still cannot be found it will either throw a rendering error if it's in the app directory or if its in the skin directory it will likely throw a 404 file not found.
Right, enough talk let's get down to setting it up. 
First up we will create our very our package/theme setup. We'll start by creating the following folders:
  • app/design/frontend/jasonalvis/default/
  • skin/frontend/jasonalvis/default/

Now we have a package called jasonalvis and a theme called default, feel free to rename your package to suit your needs. We will keep the theme name as default as each package should always have a default theme, remembering also that default is automatically part of the fallback logic.
All that's left to do now is to enable the package via the Magento admin area. Once logged in head over to system > configuration. From here click on design from the left hand menu and then enter your package name in the Current Package Name field.
While we are here notice below there is a themes section. This is where we would enter our theme name, but because we're just using default we don't need to type anything in here as Magento automatically seeks out this name. 
For demonstration purposes say we had for example a theme we wanted to use during a sale we would create the theme like so:
  • app/design/frontend/jasonalvis/sale/
  • skin/frontend/jasonalvis/sale/

So now you know how to setup your package/theme but whats best for which scenario?
Well there are countless scenarios out there and I'm sure each and every one of you have a different one. It also gets a bit more complicated when you have a Magento installation with a multi-store setup. As a general rule the themes the package contains should be similar, otherwise they should be split out into packages.
The default theme should be the site hub and the additional themes should simply be adjustments to the hub. If your drastically changing every aspect of the site in a theme it probably warrants it to be in a separate package entirely.
Note: When creating additional themes within our package we don't have to create it in both the app and skin directories, only create the theme where it's relevant. Take for example our sale theme, it's only going to be styling changes, different color scheme etc the actual templating files are not being changed. Therefore only create the theme in the skin directory and edit the relevant files as required.
With that said, let's call it a day. You should now have a solid understanding on the Magento hierarchy which you'll need to put into use through the rest of the series. As always any questions leave a message in the comments below.

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Thursday 17 November 2016

Magento Theme Development Guide Part 1(Magento Theming)

 Note : Before reach this article please read my previous article

 Magento Directory Structure


Magento Theme Development Guide :- 

Magento theme development is very importanat part of magento project development. If you want to implement your own custom design for your store you have to   knowledge about magento theme development if you are not able to implement your own design please read this series of articles..

  Before working on magento coding part disable your magento cache from admin panel.

  1.  Login to dashboard
  2. Go to configuration (System->Cache Management)
  3. Select  All
  4. From Right Side (Select Disable from right side dropdown option)






Magento Directory where your theme located :-

  • When you open your Magento root folder, you’ll see a list of folders under there. Out of these folders, the folders in which we’ll be editing files are just the app folder and the skin folder.
  •  Templating files in the app/design/frontend/<designPackageName>/<<themeName> /directory are organized into the following subdirectories
                  Layout—Contains the basic XML files that define block structure for different pages as                       well as control meta information and page encoding.
                 Template—Contains the PHTML files that contain xHTML markups and any necessary                      PHP to create logic for visual presentation. Some templates are page templates and some                      are block templates.

                 Locale—Contains simple CSV text documents organized on a per language basis                                containing translation strings (as name-value pairs) for all text produced by Magento (e.g.,                  for interface elements and messages, not products and categories)
  • Skin files in the skin/frontend/<designPackageName>/<<themeName> / directory are organized into the following subdirectories:
            CSS—Contains the CSS files used to control visual styling of the website

            Images—Contains all images used by the theme

            JS—Contains theme-specific JavaScript routines and callable functions. (Most JavaScript                   libraries, which might be shared across themes) are placed in the js/ directory at the Magento               root

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continued next tutorial......