As the title says, I’m glad to announce my first public Magento extension (not yet added in the Connect repository). During my 3 years experience with Magento, I’ve worked on a lot of custom extensions, improvements & fixes, but most of them were client-specific, plus they weren’t designed to have a backend interface (with a few exceptions). This one, however, is entirely configurable from the Admin and it’s both simple and effective.

What it does

This quick optimizer parses all javascript & css files included on a page and removes all unnecessary characters. The most simple step is to remove spaces, tabs and new lines – but there’s more than just that. Of course, for small files compression is insignificant, but when you work with almost 600KB and around 30 requests, you can save a lot. Here’s a quick math on one of my Magento installs:

Javascript – 26 requests, 479 KB
CSS – 4 requests, 102 KB

With Magento’s default merging enabled:
Javascript – 1 request, 360 KB (not sure why this is smaller then the 26 summed up, but nvm)
CSS – 1 request, 108.2 KB (same for this one too, but again, nvm)

We’ve already saved 28 requests, which means less overhead – quicker download times for user, less stress on the server.

With the Minifier enabled:
Javascript is 255 KB, which means almost 47% compression
CSS is 92 KB, which means almost 10% compression

Advantages

• Faster loading times
• Less stress on the server and on bandwith
• Improving PageSpeed score with 4-8 points
• Checking 4 to-do’s from the Web Performance Best Practices Guide

Disatvantages

• Need to write javascripts very careful, adding a semicolon after almost everything
• Have to rewrite of Mage_Core_Model file
• Have to override two Magento methods
• Additional processing time (insignificant in my opinion)

Credits

This plugin wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for these two outstanding PHP projects:
Joe Scylla’s CssMin
Ryan Grove’s JsMin
Big thanks to both of them.

Download & Install

First, Minifier for Magento (1463 downloads) , then unzip it and copy the app/ folder to your Magento root folder.

Logout from the admin if you’re already logged in, then login. Go to Cache Management, click on the “Flush cache storage” button, then go to Configuration > Developer and enable all the options, as shown in the attached screenshot. Go back to Cache Management and this time click on the “Flush Javascript/CSS cache”.

Go to your store frontend and behold, you’re now using compressed js’s and css’s.

Works on Magento 1.4+

Updated on May 31st, 2012 – all download links in this page refer to the latest version of the plugin. Some explanations on this post might be inaccurate. For the latest details please check new post called Updated version of the Magento CSS & JS Minifier

Cristi Magento CSS, js, Magento, performance

Last week a client who runs his store on Magento Commerce asked me how he could export a list of customers who purchased between certain dates in August. Of course, I first went to the Administration area and tried several approaches (order reports, customer reports, data export). Unfortunately nothing worked, so I had to write a script or a plain SQL and run it from the CLI. I preferred a straight query, rather than a script, and I tried not to use sub-selects. Here’s the adapted part, where I’ve added some variables to keep all the attribute id’s:

SET @etID := (SELECT entity_type_id FROM eav_entity_type WHERE entity_type_code = 'order_address');
SET @atFn := (SELECT attribute_id FROM eav_attribute WHERE attribute_code = 'firstname' AND entity_type_id = @etID);
SET @atLn := (SELECT attribute_id FROM eav_attribute WHERE attribute_code = 'lastname' AND entity_type_id = @etID);
SET @atEmail := (SELECT attribute_id FROM eav_attribute WHERE attribute_code = 'customer_email');

SET @startDate := '2010-08-06 00:00:00';
SET @endDate := '2010-08-13 23:59:59';

SELECT o.increment_id, e.value as email, ln.value as lastname, fn.value as firstname
FROM sales_order o
INNER JOIN sales_order_varchar e ON e.entity_id = o.entity_id AND attribute_id = @atEmail
INNER JOIN sales_order_entity lne ON lne.parent_id = o.entity_id AND lne.entity_type_id = @etID
INNER JOIN sales_order_entity_varchar ln ON ln.entity_id = lne.entity_id AND ln.attribute_id = @atLn
INNER JOIN sales_order_entity_varchar fn ON fn.entity_id = lne.entity_id AND fn.attribute_id = @atFn
WHERE o.created_at BETWEEN @startDate AND @endDate
GROUP BY o.increment_id
ORDER BY o.increment_id DESC;

The only problem is when the Shipping Name is different than the Billing Name – there’s no control over that, as we’re grouping by increment_id. This could easily be fixed in a PHP script, but the approach there should be different (using collections).

Hope this helps anyone, as it did the trick for me.

Solution tested under Magento 1.4.0.1

Cristi Magento, MySQL Magento, sql

After recently upgrading one of my stores running Magento Commerce I found out the the latest version (at this time 1.4.1.0) had a major bug. Don’t want to sound too harsh, but unfortunately Magento’s support was again awful – there have been one thread on the forum and one issue in their bug tracking system for a while now (almost two weeks if not more) and still no update, although as I said the bug has quite an impact – even tweet’ed the problem to @magento and haven’t gotten any reply (again it’s not the first time). Yes, the product is free, yes it’s open source, but I think a bit of transparency and better communication could come to their advantage.

Bug details/behavior

So, updated from 1.4.0.1 to 1.4.1.0, everything looks fine, catalog price rules are being applied in the catalog (categories and product pages), but when adding the product to the cart the quote item price was the regular price not the special one.

Solution/Fix

After a few hours playing with the rules, observer and other core elements I found the problem. A big “thank you” goes to “myself” who posted the second comment for the issue mentioned above. The problem was within the CatalogRule Observer, when fetching the ID of the Customer Group. Here’s how to fix it:

1 – create the following folders in your Magento distro: app/code/local/Mage/CatalogRule/Model
2 – copy app/code/core/Mage/CatalogRule/Model/Observer.php to app/code/local/Mage/CatalogRule/Model
3 – open the new/copied file and go to line 105. Change this code:

        if ($observer->hasCustomerGroupId()) {
            $gId = $observer->getEvent()->getCustomerGroupId();
        } elseif ($product->hasCustomerGroupId()) {
            $gId = $product->hasCustomerGroupId();
        } else {
            $gId = Mage::getSingleton('customer/session')->getCustomerGroupId();
        }

to:

        if ($observer->hasCustomerGroupId()) {
            $gId = $observer->getEvent()->getCustomerGroupId();
        } elseif ($product->hasCustomerGroupId()) {
            $gId = $product->getCustomerGroupId();
        } else {
            $gId = Mage::getSingleton('customer/session')->getCustomerGroupId();
        }

To be more precise, you have to change hasCustomerGroupId to getCustomerGroupId on line 105.

You can now enjoy your store again!

Cristi Magento Magento

I’ve recently installed OneStepCheckout (http://www.onestepcheckout.com/) on a couple of Magento installations. The extension is very nice, really simple to integrate and I expect to see better conversion rates on the checkout process.

One cool thing is that it comes with the option of activating Customer Order Comments – it adds a textarea field on the checkout page, and a box with the customer comments in the admin, when viewing the order.

However, one of my clients requested I added these comments in the invoice PDF’s. So, here’s how to do it:

Step 1
Copy app/code/core/Mage/Sales/Model/Order/Pdf/Invoice.php to app/code/local/Mage/Sales/Model/Order/Pdf/Invoice.php

Step 2
Open the new file and create a new method:

	function insertOscComments(&$page, $order) {
		if( !$order->getOnestepcheckoutCustomercomment() ) { return; }
		$this->y -= 20;
		$page->setFillColor(new Zend_Pdf_Color_Rgb(0.93, 0.92, 0.92));
		$page->setLineColor(new Zend_Pdf_Color_GrayScale(0.5));
		$page->setLineWidth(0.5);
		$page->drawRectangle(25, $this->y, 570, $this->y - 20);
		$page->setFillColor(new Zend_Pdf_Color_Rgb(1, 1, 1));
		$page->drawRectangle(25, $this->y - 20, 570, $this->y - 40);
		
		$page->setFillColor(new Zend_Pdf_Color_RGB(0.1, 0.1, 0.1));
		$page->drawText(Mage::helper('onestepcheckout')->__('Customer Comments'), 35, $this->y - 13, 'UTF-8');
		$page->drawText($order->getOnestepcheckoutCustomercomment(), 33, $this->y - 33, 'UTF-8');
		$this->y -= 50;
	}

Step 3
At the end of method getPdf add a call to the new method you created:

  /* Add totals */
  $this->insertTotals($page, $invoice);

  /* Add OneStepCheckout Customer Comments */
  $this->insertOscComments($page, $order);
}

And that’s all you need.

Cristi Magento Magento, onestepcheckout, PHP

Finally, a new post, and at last it is about Mangeto Commerce (http://www.magentocommerce.com/). In my first Magento how-to you’ll learn how to retrieve all product reviews and show them on a single page, together with the average rating. For this, I assume you have already created a new module and are able to view the page. You’ll only need to manipulate a block and a template.

First, let’s retrieve the reviews collection (this method will go into the block):

	function getReviews() {
		$reviews = Mage::getModel('review/review')->getResourceCollection();
		$reviews->addStoreFilter( Mage::app()->getStore()->getId() )
						->addStatusFilter( Mage_Review_Model_Review::STATUS_APPROVED )
						->setDateOrder()
						->addRateVotes()
						->load();        
		
		return $reviews;
	}

We’re using Mage_Review_Model_Mysql4_Review_Collection, which is a resource model. First setup the collection, filtering by store – we only want to retrieve the product reviews in the current store -, by status – show only approved reviews -, and ordering by date in reverse order, then load the collection.

addRateVotes() helps loading all the ratings/votes for that review. We’re gonna use this collection to compute the average rating.

Next, let’s move on to the template for a second. We’re gonna call the getReviews() method, then iterate through all the reviews. For each review you would probably want to display the title, nickname, date and details, but also the product associated and the user rating. For the first four, things are pretty easy, all you have to do is call getTitle(), getNickname(), getDetail(), getCreatedAt() on each review object.

To display the product name & link, we need to retrieve the product associated with each review – unfortunately I wasn’t able to find a way to join the product tables inside the query for retrieving all the reviews. So, we need to create a helper method inside our block, called getProduct(). We’re gonna use a storage/registry variable called _loadedProducts, so that we avoid loading the same product multiple times.

	function getProduct( Mage_Review_Model_Review $review ) {
		if( !isset($this->_loadedProducts[ $review->getEntityPkValue() ]) ) {
			$this->_loadedProducts[$review->getEntityPkValue()] = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load( $review->getEntityPkValue() );
		}
		
		return $this->_loadedProducts[ $review->getEntityPkValue() ];
	}

And inside the template:

<?php $_prod = $this->getProduct( $review ); ?>
<a href="<?php echo $_prod->getProductUrl(); ?>"><?php echo $_prod->getName(); ?></a>

One last thing, if you intend to display the average rating of each review, add another helper method inside the block:

	function getAverageRating( Mage_Review_Model_Review $review ) {
		$avg = 0;
		if( count($review->getRatingVotes()) ) {
			$ratings = array();
			foreach( $review->getRatingVotes() as $rating ) {
				$ratings[] = $rating->getPercent();
			}
			$avg = array_sum($ratings)/count($ratings);
		}
		
		return $avg;
	}

And then call it in the template (in this example we’re using Magento’s default styling):

<div class="rating-box">
	<div class="rating" style="width: <?php echo ceil($this->getAverageRating( $review )); ?>%;"></div>
</div>

That is all! You now have a page where all product reviews can be display.
Things to consider: pagination and cache!

Update: Seems that Magento comes prepared for reviews on products, categories and customers. We only need to load product reviews, so it would be wise to filter by entity. Unfortunately, the current version of Magento doesn’t allow filtering for a certain entity, only by entity and entity PK (which is the product ID in this case). Of course, we could write a decorator and write a method to just add a filter for entity_code = 'product', but the quickest (and dirtiest) way of doing it is by adding a check inside the template foreach loop (or adding a helper method in the block):

if( $review->getEntityId() == 1 ) { continue; }
//1 is the id of the 'product' entity - if you write a method, use a class constant

Note: This has only been tested on Magento 1.3.x – 1.5.x.

Cristi Magento Magento, PHP