Magento Features You Should be Using

Magento has been specifically designed to offer ecommerce solutions, and this platform is scalable and diversified. Magento comes with a well defined and detailed user manual, most of which you may not even have gone through while learning to use Magento.

There are several features that you can use, without having technical knowledge. Here are a list of such features with instructions on how to use them during your Magento Store development process.

Customize Catalog Page Design

When you design a catalog page, you keep options and information about the product above the call to action. Many of you might want to tweak this default approach and keep product options and call to action above the product information. Is this possible? What’s the tweak?

Go to Magento Admin>Product Edit>Design

You will see an option display product options in. The default value of this product is "Block after info column" wherein the call to action is set after all product information is specified. The second option is "Product Info Column" wherein the call to action and attribute options are placed before the product information.

This is just one example of customizing the catalog page design.

Go to system>configuration from main menu

Here you will be able to customize the catalog section for frontend. With a huge number of settings available on this page, you can easily customize the details within the category pages. You can specify the number of products that should appear on a single page. Each product/category page in the design tab allows customizations using which you can change the default theme or perform the different tweaks as and how it is required

You also have a custom layout update field which uses XML syntax to create customizations. If you know a bit of XML this could be a fun way to customize for you.

Customize the Standard Text

When it comes to translation, you always regard it in the context of a site with multiple languages. While this is indeed true, you can use the inline translation offered by Magento to customize the language of your site as against the default language offered by Magento.

Let’s say your shopping cart should be called "Shopping Bag" instead of the regular "Shopping Cart". With the translate inline, you can easily perform translations without changing the core files. With this function, you first convert your site into a point and click interface, enable the text you want to change and perform the changes in there.

You will need to create a file called translate.csv

"My Cart (%s item)","My Shopping Bag (%s item)"

"My Cart (%s items)","My Shopping Bag (%s items)"

In the above syntax, you will see that each line contains two different pieces of text: one the "to be" translated text and the other the translated version of the text

Once you have the two in hand, you can easily FTP the csv file to app/design/frontend/{package}/{theme}/locale/{locale} on your Magento website.

Once you have performed the FTP, you should ideally clear the cache.

You should be aware of the number of text that can be passed through the inline translate to perform the translation. For example, the translate function will be performed if the to be translated and the translated version of the text are in sync. To know the exact string of text that you can use to translate, you will need to visit app/locale/{locale}where Magento has created an exhaustive set of primed translation files.

Tweak the Outgoing Emails

Most of you don’t invest the same amount of effort in designing your email as you would in designing your store. When designing Emails, a little knowledge of HTML would definitely help you. You can also use the Email templates in the platform to help you with customization.

Go to System>Transactional Emails>Add new template

You will be able to choose the template of your choice from the drop down list provided on this page. The subject and major contents within the Email will appear as soon as the template is loaded in.

Example template for "New Order for Guest" would preload the variable "{{var.order.increment_id}}" which gives the order number in the output

This token or variable should be left within the template so that you just need to change the content within the template. But, in case you wish to modify the tokens, you can, but you will need a bit of HTML knowledge of code in tokens of your own.

You will find ready to use templates in most cases; but in case you don’t you can always tweak in the available templates. Do a bit of research to get ready to use templates and carry on with customizations.

Don’t ignore Email design as it is an important part of your branding and should be given as much importance as your store design.

Deepa is a technical writer with Semaphore Software.