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So eBay has come out of it’s shell and exclaimed that it owns 49% of Varien, having invested $22.5m in the Magento project.

That explains why the Paypal module is so tightly integrated within Magento, and is so much more powerful than anyone else could possibly think of making another payment module. Even Google Checkout’s implementation is nowhere near as powerful. And since Google owns the world (or most of it)..

Update: As of June 6th 2011, eBay now owns 100% of Magento Inc.. They’re talking about integrating it with eBay’s own X.Commerce initiative, which will be revealed to developers in October 2011. What that means for Magento, I’m not too sure. Usually, large take-overs like this involve some kind of product overhaul, or ditching in favour of the taking-over company’s own products. I don’t think this is the end of the line for Magento, but I think in the next 12-18 months, we’ll see a massive change in Magento as a whole product.

This, I find, is a hard one to come across. At least, trying to find a sensible solution that just spits out a numerical value which, more often than not, is all you want. Needing to get the value of an option from a multi-option/dropdown attribute. Try this:

public function getAttributeOptionValue($arg_attribute, $arg_value) {
    $attribute_model        = Mage::getModel('eav/entity_attribute');
    $attribute_options_model= Mage::getModel('eav/entity_attribute_source_table') ;
 
    $attribute_code         = $attribute_model->getIdByCode('catalog_product', $arg_attribute);
    $attribute              = $attribute_model->load($attribute_code);
 
    $attribute_table        = $attribute_options_model->setAttribute($attribute);
    $options                = $attribute_options_model->getAllOptions(false);
 
    foreach($options as $option) {
        if ($option['label'] == $arg_value) {
            return $option['value'];
        }
    }
 
    return false;
}

And use it as such:

$optionValue = $this->getAttributeOptionValue("size", "XL");

where “size” is the attribute name/ID in the database, and “XL” is the exact label belonging to the option you need to get. Likewise, if you need to add a new option to the attribute’s list, use this:

public function addAttributeOption($arg_attribute, $arg_value) {
    $attribute_model        = Mage::getModel('eav/entity_attribute');
    $attribute_options_model= Mage::getModel('eav/entity_attribute_source_table') ;
 
    $attribute_code         = $attribute_model->getIdByCode('catalog_product', $arg_attribute);
    $attribute              = $attribute_model->load($attribute_code);
 
    $attribute_table        = $attribute_options_model->setAttribute($attribute);
    $options                = $attribute_options_model->getAllOptions(false);
 
    $value['option'] = array($arg_value,$arg_value);
    $result = array('value' => $value);
    $attribute->setData('option',$result);
    $attribute->save();
 
    return $this->getAttributeOptionValue($arg_attribute, $arg_value);
}

and use as such:

$optionValue = $this->addAttributeOption("size", "XXL");

again, where “size” is the attribute name/ID, and “XXL” is the label of the new option required. It returns the value of the option it just added incase it’s needed. Bear in mind that this function doesn’t first check to see if the label already exists as an option, so you should probably use $this->getAttributeOption() first and only run $this->addAttributeOption() upon a false return.

It’s probably not the most efficient way of doing it, but if efficiency is what you really need, $options could be cached/saved so that the DB/model is only every queried once across both functions within the same model.

I blogged here regarding a bug in Magento’s core affecting Catalog Price Rules under promotions. This would effect, for instance, wholesale pricing. Well, Magento confirmed on the bug report that this was fixed in their new release, 1.4.2.0-RC1. I’ve tested this on my staging server and confirm that this is the case.

Discount away!

So I wondered if I could go a whole week without finding another bug/flaw/issue in the latest Magento. I was wrong.

We’re trying to send out a newsletter using the built-in feature. I created a template, then went to queue to send it, and I was like; “So, what’s this ‘message’ field?”. I pondered for a bit, typed a message in, thinking it may have just been for some placeholder in the template somewhere, and hit send. When the newsletter turned up, lo-and-behold, there was just my message, without the rest of the template. WTF? Did it again, thinking I’d screwed something up – same result. Hmm..

Bit of Googling at this point revealed this thread on Magento’s forums. “A bug?”, I thought as I read on. “Couldn’t possibly be!”. </sarcasm>

As the code/class that had the flaw only had one function and extended the Adminhtml_Block_Widget_Form class, I decided to just write a quick extension to replace the class that Magento comes with, with this flaw fixed. I attach to this post my quick extension. Just drop this in the Magento webroot and extract. It’ll put the files in the relevant places, and just start working.

Attached file here: BTS NewsletterFix.tar (md5: df19810f175630fd9206d31e3147c3da)

Some people ask me if it’s possible to do what some other sites do, allowing you to check a box next to a product on a listing page, and then add all selected items to the cart in one go. This is possible in Magento, it’s just not built in. There’s a few ways you can do this. You can either make an ajax call using a button against each product, which fires off a GET request to the server to add. This method will most likely return the HTML for the cart, and since we’re not interested in the response, said HTML can be discarded.

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