Recently I downgraded a site from magento EE to CE.

The downgrade went rather smooth, with most work involving templates. 

Recently I started using Vagrant as part of my development environment. Could not be happier, however, one small issue has become very very irretatating.

Letency!

That initial 'hang' is slowing me down

I was tasked with implementing google reCaptcha into a magento site.

I looked at a few of the existing extension, but I was not happy with their implementations, so I decided to roll my own implementation of Google reCaptcha

For those who just want the code, and are not interested in how it was done, go grab the code off github (or install via composer)  - https://github.com/ProxiBlue/recaptcha

This is a blog post ported from www.dedmeet.com (my old blog website, no longer maintained) - I port blogs from there as they are requested.

In this post, I explain how I made it possible for MovieTomb posters to display on the playstation. Note that information may be dated, and is old, but may very well be still valid. 

I now use an android minix box, and Plex, which 'just works'

I was given the task to track page views of all Catalog Product View pages, to a 3rd party providers system.

Since I now like to use Google Tag Manager (GTM), I had to work out a way to generate the required unique identifiers to run tag(s) on the product view pages only.

The issue is that GTM track pages using  URLs, but the URLs for each product page is diferent.
They are <the name of the product>.html, so using the URL rule (or macro in rules) will not work here.
I am simply not going to create a rule for each product page - that would just be completely mad, and I am only slightly mad. 

I was given the task of making a select list (with 300+ entries) searchable.

Since I do not like re-inventing the wheel, I went on a bit of a google to find a solution.

Chosen was the obvious choice (pun intended) - so I set about integrating that into magento. 

Google Tag Manager allows you to easily send all products to an external resource, by using the dataLayer, and a specific tag.

But what if you want to fire a tag only when a specific product, or set of products, have been purchased?

I worked out an easy way to get it done, using macro's and dataLayer.

A recent feature request, for Dynamic Catgeory Products, was to add the ability for textual matches on dates.
The magento store had product attributes, which were text fields, populated with dates in the format of YYYYDDMM

They wanted to dynamically display product, using the textual fields, matching teh dates, taking it from the current date PLUS X days 

This was solved by a new DYNAMIC VARIABLE, using PHP's date functionality 

It is now possible to copy rules between categories.

You can either select a source category, or cut and paste rules form one to the other (or even from one server to another)

Using Exact Target it is very possible to track conversions, using a basic img tag which passes some xml to the tracker.

You can read about how/what is required here: http://help.exacttarget.com/en/documentation/exacttarget/content/conversion_tracking/

Making this work with Google Tag manager is a bit tricky, but very possible

The process can be done in 3 easy steps:

1. Capture the relevant passed params from any cliked url

2. Pass that data to teh datalayer

3. Use the data in GTM