Magento Help – osCommerce Help

We’ve been playing around a lot with our Magento commerce websites over the course of a year or so. Which products on which website, categories, trying to avoid duplicate content, playing around with Google AdSense, etc.
Recently, we decided to change our power tools website, from a Magento commerce site to a Google AdSense site. We still had a couple thousand products from the power tools site in the Magento database. We decided we wanted to move all the power tools to a different Magento commerce site, so we had to come up with a solution for moving  or copying all those products to the other website without eating up tons of time and resources. Turns out, it’s actually pretty easy.

1. Log in to your Magento Admin
2. Go to Catalog>Manage Categories
3. Have your default view active instead of just store view.
4. Drag the categories you want from one store to the other store view where you want to move them. (This is assuming you want to move the products from one store in Magento, not just copy them from one store to the other.)
5. Go to Catalog>Manage Products
6. Do a search so that you will come up with the products you want to copy or move.
7. Click the Select Visible link. (We do this to be safe at first. You can change the number of products that are visible with your view per page toggle.)
8. On the Actions drop down menu, select Update Attributes and click Submit.
9. This opens another page.
10. Select Websites from the left column.
11. Now, check the checkboxes for the site you want the products on and check the sites you want the products removed from.
12. Click Save.
13. You have now moved all of those products or copied those products, depending on your selection from one Magento site to the other Magento commerce site.
14. Make sure you refresh Catalog Rewrites and Layered Navigation Indices in System -> Cache Management

That’s it! Within minutes you have moved products from one Magento eccommerce store to another Magento store.

Here was another tough item to track down in Magento. When you go to “One Page Checkout” in Magento, it really takes 6 steps to checkout, kind of a pain. We’re looking for a free solution to make it a true one page checkout process. In the meantime, we figured if we made the steps more clear, it might make checking out easier and therefore convert to more sales.

One of the ways to make checkout more clear in Magento is to use different wording on the checkout page. For instance, “Billing Information” may not be clear to people that they need to add the actual credit card bill mailing address. So to make it clear, we added to that line, so now it reads “Billing Information (If using credit card, make sure you use the billing address for that card)”. Problem is, where the heck is that line?

We wasted about an hour looking for it and finally found it in app/locale/en_US of all places. Find the line that reads “Billing Information”,”Billing Information” and change it to read “Billing Information”,”Billing Information ( If using credit card to pay, make sure you use the billing address for that card on this page)”

Typical Magento to make things hard to find, but there you go. That’s how to change headings on checkout page in Magento.

When you start working with Magneto, you may find it confusing as to the directory structure. In this article I hope to help shed a little light on some of the key directories in Magento and what they do so that maybe when you’re working in Magento, things will make a little more sense.

Here are a few things you need to know the location of at some point when developing with Magento and the directories that they are stored in.

1. The templates file

/app/design/ is the core storage folder for template files. With it breaking down into adminhtml/ for administration templates, frontend/ for frontend templates and install/ for installation templates.

Within these you’ll find your default template set aptly named default. In your template set folder are your individual theme folders that come with Magento.

layout, locale and template are the core directories that contain the files that make up your themes.

2. The skin files (resources, components, resources)

In /skin/ you’ll find your CSS, images, Flash, JavaScript and any other resource files that relate specifically to templates in the system. You will also find the adminhtml, frontend and install directories distinction here.

3. Language files and e-mail templates

/app/locale/ is your core directory. With sub-directories for each language set installed for the store. You will find .csv files for each of the modules installed on the system relating to their translations. You’ll find the Magento e-mail templates in /template/email/ within your language directory in /app/locale/.

4. Core configuration

/app/etc/ contains all configuration files for Magento. From the local.xml file which contains your database configuration, amongst other things. To your modules/ folder which contains the declaration of modules in the system.

5. Local, core and community modules

All modules for functionality are stored in /app/code/ and are broken down into the following folders:

• community – for modules installed via Magento Connect.
• core – for modules that come with Magento by default.
• local – usually for locally developed modules

6. Media files

All images uploaded to the system as well as the images resized dynamically by the system are stored in media/.

When importing media files via system profiles (Magento’s name for batch processing), /media/import/ will be your folder to place the images for the products.

7. The var directory

The var directory is used for several functions in the system:

• Backups are exported to backups/ by the built in system backup tool.
• The system cache is stored in both cache/ and session/ folders.
• Data import for default system data import profiles is set to import/.
• Data export for default system data export profiles is set to export/.

Hopefully this has given you a good indication as to the important directories in Magento’s file structure.