RedLightBlinking.com | Magento, Mobile, eCommerce Design & Development

#preimagine – A Community Sponsored Tweetup

Kimberely — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 17:57:19 +0000

Red Light Blinking will be joining other Magento Community members to sponsor a Pool Party prior to the Magento Imagine conference.

Join us Sunday April 7th 2-5pm to mingle with other community members that you know from Twitter before the conference gets busy. RSVP at http://preimagine2013.eventbrite.com/.

In addition to sponsoring the event is organized by @magentogirl with @sherrierohde.

Untapping the Potentional of your Magento Store

Kimberely — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 03:18:07 +0000

A presentation with tips and training on how to utilize the full potential of Magento’s Rich Merchandising features to optimize sales and conversion rates.

View the full screen version here.

This is the first of many in this series! Check back for more to come.

Case Study: A custom solution for event ticketing on Magento

kimberely — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 21:37:40 +0000

We recently launched a custom Magento Ticketing site for City Winery, a unique space that has music events nightly and makes and sells wine.

City Winery needed a website that could sell Tickets to their shows as well as wine and merchandise. We worked with City Winery to build a custom Ticketing Module for Magento to allow users to select their seats for events (like ticketmaster). Users are able to select a show and see a map with available seats to select:

We created a custom Seat Map object and admin tool to create a seat map with seat blocks and the ability place the seats on the map. The admin drags the seat dot to the location on the map and the system stores the x,y coordinates to rebuild the map with the seats! The user then creates an event (a configurable product) associates it with a map, and the system generates tickets (simple products) based off the map.

We didn’t stop there, as Events are special products there was a great need to know what orders are for that Event. Also, since City Winery is a ticket less venue they need a list to check in their guests. We created an iPad web application that shows a list of orders for that event with the ability to check in the guests.

Check out the City Winery website to see it in action!

The Magento Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) Process

Kimberely — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 19:25:38 +0000

Introduced in Enterprise 1.11, the RMA process is suppose to make it easy for customers to request to return their purchase. However, little is known about this process and how it works.

We are here to layout the process for you and have a suite a screenshots to share.

In My Account, a registered user can view their past Orders and click Return (on complete orders only) to initatiate the process.
The user then gets a New Return Form and selects item(s) to return. They have to enter Resolution, Item Condition, Reason to Return, Other, etc…
The RMA gets submitted and is ‘Pending’.
Admin users can now manage the RMA request in the admin under Sales-> RMA -> Manage RMA.
The admin can then Authorize the RMA
Admin users can configure which shipping methods are available for RMA and can create/print the shipping label. Note you can only execute this if you have a valid UPS account setup in System->Configuration->Shipping.
The customer will get an email notification and can then go back to My Accounts->My Returns and print the shipping label. To view a shipping label: Click the Print Shipping Label button to download and view the PDF file for the shipping label.

The user then ships the item back to the store. When the item is received the admin user will need to create a credit memo to refund the order or give store credit.

Use Magento Flash Sales to Boost Your Mobile Sales

Kimberely — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 19:35:01 +0000

We will show you how to use Magento Enteprise Category Events to create Flash Sales for your Mobile Site to keep your customers interested and boost sales. Daily Deals or other timed sales are great for mobile websites to keep users checking on what is the latest sale and tracking items down to the last second.

To Create a Magento Flash Sale for Daily Deals on your RED Mobile Responsive Theme:

1. Goto Catalog->Manage Categories
2. Select a new Category or Create a new Category with the name “Daily Deals” and upload an image for it (make sure the category is under the Default Category)
3. Click Add Event
4. Select Start and End times and click the checkbox to show the ticker on the Category and Product pages.

You will now see the Category Listed on the home page.

Clicking on the Deal Deals Category you will now see the ticker for the sale time.

And also on the product pages.

Now watch your mobile traffic and sales grow! Don’t have a mobile optimized theme for your Magento store? Get our RED Mobile Responsive Theme here!

How to view or test Magento Mobile sites from your desktop

kimberely — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 20:15:06 +0000

Magento makes it easy to use a design exception to use a mobile optimized theme for mobile devices (by user agent), however this means Magento websites do not have to set up a m.yourdomain.com site for their mobile site. So how can we see Magento Mobile sites from our desktops? You can do this by using Safari and telling it to change your user agent to iPhone.

1. You might have to turn on the Develop menu. Goto Safari->Preferences -> Click on Advanced Tab

Make sure Show Develop menu in menu bar is checked on the bottom

2. Now when viewing a Magento website you can goto Develop->User Agent -> Safari iOs – iPhone.

The website will now think your desktop browser is an iPhone and show you the mobile theme. You can also resize your browser to the smallest width to mimic mobile device sizes.

If you also need to learn how to add a design exception for your Magento Mobile theme, you can find that here.

Setup your Magento Mobile theme using Multiple Websites

kimberely — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 18:34:34 +0000

You can easily add a exception in System->Configuration->Design to send iPhone and Android user agents to your mobile site – but what if you want to have the mobile site at a subdomain like m.redlightblinking.com? For this case you will have to setup multiple websites in Magento.

How to Create Multiple Websites in Magento for the Desktop Site and Mobile Site

1. Create a subdomain ‘mobile’ for your site, ex: mobile.redlightblinking.com
For my host I can easily do this through my control panel -> subdomains -> add subdomain.
Make sure that the website root directory for the subdomain is the same location where you have magento root directory ex: public_html/magento

2. Setup multiple websites in Magento
1. In the admin goto System->Manage Stores
2. Click Create Website and enter a name and code, such as ‘Mobile’ and ‘mobile’
3. Click Create Store and enter a name for the sotre, such ss ‘Mobile Store’ and select your root category. Note you could set up your categories differently for your Mobile store or use the same as your desktop site.
4. Click create Store View and Select the Website and Store you just created.

You should now have setup a new website like this:
[screenshot]

3. Change the domain for your new website in System->Configuration goto the Web tab. In the upper left select your mobile website in “Current Configuration Scope:”. Under Unsecure and Secure change the Base Url to ‘m.yourdomain.com’.

[screenshot]

4. Add this to your .htaccess file in your root directory
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^m.redlightblinking.com RewriteRule ^ - [E=MAGE_RUN_CODE:mobile] RewriteRule ^ - [E=MAGE_RUN_TYPE:website]

Where m.redlightblinking.com is your new

5. Set the mobile theme to be used for the mobile website

http://m.redlightblinking.com will be the mobile site and

http://magento.redlightblinking.com will be the desktop site

You will need a script that detects mobile users and redirects them to http://m.redlightblinking.com

How to Disable OneStepCheckout for Magento Mobile Themes

kimberely — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 18:32:25 +0000

OneStepCheckout is a great extension for your desktop site, but it’s not compatible with our mobile theme and not a good user experience fro mobile either. To disable it just for the mobile theme, add this to your .htaccess file in your website root directory: RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(iPhone|iPod|BlackBerry|Palm|Googlebot-Mobile|Mobile|mobile|mobi|Windows Mobile|Safari Mobile|Android|Opera Mini).*$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(onestepcheckout/?)?$ /checkout/onepage/ [...]

Magento Debugging – how to debug template paths, logging and display errors

kimberely — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:28:31 +0000

Developing in Magento without these debugging tips can be challenging! Here is how you can debug magento:

Turn on Template Path Hints
Turn on error/system logging
Turn on SQL logging
Display PHP errors

Turn on Template Path Hints

Would you like to see the path of the file that is producing the HTML for each block on the page?

1. Log into the admin

2. Goto -> System ->Configuration, and on the bottom of the list select “Developer”

3. click on Debug – you will only see “Profiler”. Here is the trick – you have to switch the “Current Configuration Scope:” [in the upper left] to a website instead of default. Select “Main Website”.

4. Now you will see the selection for Template Path Hints – check yes. This will display the path of the template for each block of the page so you can find stuff! You can also choose to “Add Block Names to Hints” to see the corresponding model class for the block.

Turn on error/system logging

1. In the admin Goto -> System ->Configuration, and on the bottom of the list select “Developer”

2. Select the Log Settings tab and put Enabled = Yes

3. *to avoid any permissions issues, create folder/file

/var/log/system.log

Turn on SQL logging

To enable SQL Debugging find the file

/lib/Varien/Db/Adapter/Pdo/Mysql.php

change line 45
protected $_debug = false;

to
protected $_debug = true;

It will then generate the file var/debug/sql.txt.

*If you have any issues create this file manually first…

Display PHP errors

Frustrated you can’t see your PHP errors? This is how you turn them on – for development use only, don’t do this on a production site!

In Index.php change

Mage::setIsDeveloperMode(true);

ini_set(‘display_errors’, 1);

Plundor: person, place or thing?

kimberely — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:51:05 +0000

Plundor.com is a website that sales Magento Extension Bundles to the public. The current bundle contains 6 commercial Magento extensions that separately will cost you a total of $1.272,50. Bundled together by Plundor with a huge discount of 86%, this bundle is now available for a very limited time for only $178.50! Shop now, the bundle sale ends January 6th.

The Bundle:
Automatic Sale Category – Meabee – £ 49.99 ($ 77.50)
Want to provide your users with a nice overview of all items in your shop that are on sale? Use this extention to do so, complete with product filtering and layered navigation.

Better Store Search – Sweettooth – $ 249.-
Manually Specify Weightings and use complete word processing to get more accurate (automated and controlled) search results so your users find what they need.

CheckItOut – Ecomdev – $ 349.-
Get your vistors through that checkout process as quickly as possible! Use this extension to create a short one-step-checkout process with a lot of configuration options.

Knowledge Base – Aheadworks – $ 199.-
Don’t have a FAQ section or need to upgrade it? This section takes care of regular user questions getting information to the customer more quickly and having less customer requests by e-mail. Also a great way to build valuable content for your SEO rankings.

Red Mobile Theme – RedLightBlinking $ 299.-
How many customers visit your website with their mobile device? Don’t lose sales on those customers and get them their own special theme adapted for mobile devices. Easily customizable with your own logos and colors.

Task Manager – Nimerce – $ 99.-
Do you have multiple employees work in the Magento backend? Get them one central place to create and manage tasks and streamline your shop management flow.
Start today:
Amped about these 6 apps and the huge 86% discount? The official sale starts today and will be available for limited time only!

http://www.plundor.com/