Magento Ecommerce Strategy, Design & Development

When ever you have an catalog product attribute and are looking for the options, here is the code sample you need to get the values.

$attribute= Mage::getSingleton('eav/config')->getAttribute('catalog_product', 'created_by');
if ($attribute->usesSource()) {
$options = $attribute->getSource()->getAllOptions(false);
}

I think the title of this says it all. This is how you can add an index and a new column to a table during an upgrade script

$installer= $this;

$installer->startSetup();
$tableName = $installer->getTable('dpc_subscription/event');
$indexName = $installer->getIdxName($tableName, array('is_shipped'));
$installer->getConnection()->addColumn($tableName, 'is_shipped', array(
'type' => Varien_Db_Ddl_Table::TYPE_INTEGER,
'unsigned' => true,
'nullable' => false,
'default' => '0',
'comment' => 'Is shipped'
));
$installer->getConnection()->addIndex($tableName, $indexName, array('is_shipped'));
$installer->endSetup();

Most of the time doing a rewrite of a Block is pretty simple.  However you will run into issues when you want to do something as simple as remove the + from a Bundle product price.  

Most of the time, you can just do a rewrite of the block in XML and its done. However when you try to do this with some blocks, they just dont work!  The reason....some blocks are not called using the factory method.  These blocks are the ones that are extended from, so they are just part of the php code.  The way to get at those is by rewriting the blocks we can do a rewrite ( for example Mage_Bundle_Block_Catalog_Product_View_Type_Bundle_Option_Checkbox ).  Then we can extend our version of Mage_Bundle_Block_Catalog_Product_View_Type_Bundle_Option.

Here is how I achieve this for Bundle Products and the checkbox options for the children products.

Step 1: Create CSR and pass that along to company that is issuing the SSL

Step 2: copy private key to server 

Step 3: move the created SSL files from the company that issued the SSL to the server

Step 4: Create another Load Balancer to handle the SSL request and point to server

$products = Mage::getModel("catalog/product")->getCollection()->addAttributeToSelect('image');
$a = array();
foreach($products as $id => $_product){
$a[(int)$id] = (int)$id;
}
$has_images = Mage::getModel("catalog/product")->getCollection()->addAttributeToSelect('image')->addAttributeTofilter('image', array('notnull' => ''));

foreach($has_images as $id => $_product)
{
$b[(int)$id] = (int)$id;
}

$product_ids_missing_images = array_diff($a, $b);
foreach($product_ids_missing_images as $_id){
echo '<div>'.$_id.'</div>';
}

In case you need to export to a csv all the categories in your site, here is the code.

The csv just has the ID of the category, the Name of the category and the url key

$categories = Mage::getModel("catalog/category")->getCollection()
 ->addAttributeToSelect('name')
 ->addAttributeToSelect('url_key');

fputcsv($file,array('Category ID', 'Name', 'URL Key'));

// id, name, url-key
foreach($categories as $_category)
{
 fputcsv($file,array($_category->getData('entity_id'), $_category->getData('name'), $_category->getData('url_key')));

}
fclose($file);

If you modify an admin form, lets say you add a column to the database for another field.  If you start to test, but the form is not saving the new fields, and it appears that Magneto is ignoring your new columns, well....it is.

Long story short, there is a function called

protected function _prepareDataForTable(Varien_Object $object, $table)