trace(Number("075"));
// ActionScript 3.0 75
// ActionScript 2.0 61

try it for yourself!

and then add this code somewhere to strip off those zeros

var movieLenStr:String = '0075';
trace(movieLenStr + ' does NOT equal ' + Number(movieLenStr));
while(movieLenStr.charAt(0) == '0') {
     movieLenStr = movieLenStr.substr(1);
}
trace(movieLenStr + ' does equal ' + Number(movieLenStr));

So just to finish the thought – the problem is that in AS2 it’s interpreting that leading zero as an octal number and therefore converts it differently. In AS3 it just ignores the zero. It’s all spelled out in the livedocs:

In ActionScript 3.0, the Number() function no longer supports octal, or base 8, numbers. If you supply a string with a leading zero to the ActionScript 2.0 Number()function, the number is interpreted as an octal number, and converted to its decimal equivalent. This is not true with the Number() function in ActionScript 3.0, which instead ignores the leading zero. For example, the following code generates different output when compiled using different versions of ActionScript

from this entry: http://www.adobe.com/livedocs/flash/9.0/main/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=LiveDocs_Parts&file=00000048.html

Please Note: This article was written using Magento Version 1.4.1.1. This article may not work on older versions.
Basic Installation:

• Download Magento from the website (http://www.magentocommerce.com/download).
• Extract Magento using the appropriate utility.
• Proceed to install using the Installation GUI.

After going through the installation screens you should have a fully functional Magento e commerce site.  We wanted a Multi-Website Installation so we have a few more things to cover.

Multi-Website Install: Additional Tasks:

• For each website you plan on having you need to create it in Magento.
• Log In to the admin panel. Go To System > Manage Stores. This brings you to the Manage Stores Page. Here you need to add a new Website, Store, and Store View. Be sure to correctly relate each Website/Store/Store View. We will use the information entered here in the next step.
• Now you need to set things up with the web server to notify Magento what site needs to be rendered. This is a decent tutorial on how to configure things Tutorial. I ended up having to add the settings in my .htaccess file.
• Now you can create a root category for each website. You will need to set each root category to each websites Store. Do this in System > Manage Stores.
• Now when you are doing things in the admin, remember, on most configuration/edit screens , there is a Scope switcher (switches between Sites). This will affect how the config setting are applied to the sites.


$fooTable = new DbTable_Foo();
$select = $fooTable ->select(Zend_Db_Table::SELECT_WITH_FROM_PART);

$select->setIntegrityCheck(false) //Set integrity check is what did the trick for me.
->join('foo', 'bar.id = foo.id')
->where('foo.id = '.id);
$fooRowset = $this->getDbTable()->fetchAll($select);


Delete the following file in the Zend Studio workspace:

Zend/workspaces/<your workspace name>/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/org.eclipse.dltk.ui.prefs

Here is how I decided to go about it.

• Backup the database!!
• Clear all cache and disable caching
• Move code into a SVN Branch (assuming you use source controll, if you don’t you should!)
• Remove Old Core Magento Code (just leave community and local modules, keep my theme folder)
• Download Full Release from Magento’s Website(don’t use the downloader, use the full release!)
• Extract the New Release into the SVN Branch that was created earlier
• If your template was a sub-template of anther theme then you need to merge them together to use in 1.4. This is due to the fact that 1.4 changed a bunch of classes and layouts. Or you could start from a fresh theme and re code it.
• Change the theme to a default theme until you are sure that the update went ok.

Errors and Bugs I came across:

• When Trying to run indexing I got the following error, “can’t initialize indexer process”. This was because I was missing some database tables that failed to install during the upgrade. I installed and ran the database repair tool.
• Had to disable WYSIWYG so that page templates did not get messed up.
• The file “catalog/product/list/toolbar.phtml” changed quite a bit, so if you modified this file grab the new one then start from there. Also the file “page/html/pager.phtml” needs to be update the the 1.4 version if you modified this file.
• When editing or adding products the Category Tree was only showing the Default or Root Category.
  To Fix this I just created a new subcategory of the root catalog and move all the categories into this new category then move them back to there original position. This must rebuild what ever was messed up in the database.

My first issue was, How do I get the new node id that was created by drupal_execute(). Well It was easier than I thought. I did a little goggling and found people saying that you should use db_last_id(), well that did not work for me. Instead I used the “$form_state” variable that I passed into the drupal_execute function. I noticed that after running drupal_execute() I could use $form_state['nid'] to retrieve the nodes id. Wow wasn’t that easy.

The nodes I was creating were using cck fields. I noticed that only the first node’s cck fields were created correctly. All subsequent nodes were created with cck fields containing just 1 character(I believe this only happened on select fields). To fix this issue I had to use the node id that I retireved and set the cck fields again. Then do a node_save(). Now all my fields are correct and I can go Fishing.:)

Hope this saves you hours of searching.

In a nutshell the way Wordpress is set up in previous versions is like this: at the very basic you have Posts, and Pages. These are your (very) basic content types, Posts are items in your blog, and Pages are basic static-type pages.  In previous versions, if you want to have a custom sections or want to hack Wordpress to be more like a content management system, you would have to create a special category (or tag) in your blog, and pull in that category (or tag) on the front end (in a template file) to show the custom content. One of the main issues are that the blog is for blog posts and if you are putting everything into your blog, you have to filter the blogs display so it doesn’t show your custom content in the blog.

Now with version 3 and Custom Post Types you can create and new “Post Type” for this custom content, and even have a separate area in the admin for the content type. Let’s say for example you want to have a “Portfolio” feature that displays your portfolio, but you don’t want that content in the blog. You will be able to create a “Portfolio” custom post type and this area will now show up as a collapsible section like your Pages, and Posts do in the admin.

This feature is great for clients who need a straight forward  management system for their content they update. If you want to add addition info to go along with your custom post type you can create a series of Taxonomies which were introduced in version 2.3. For example: Let’s say your Portfolio “post” needs associated fields with it like Client, Project Type, and Industry, instead of using the custom fields feature (which is sure to confuse most clients), you can use the taxonomies and pull that data in. Taxonomies are a lot like categories are in the blog, except they can be used as categories for your custom post type. Now in the admin panel when creating a new “Portfolio” post, you will have taxonomies displaying like categories do, and can select/create the appropriate related info to go along with your Portfolio post.

The custom posts require you to add some code into your site, but a cool plug-in called Custom Post Type UI lets you create your custom post types and custom taxonomies in the back-end. Check out their video on the plug-in page which explains custom posts in greater detail using the example of “Movies” as a custom post type.

• Once you get Aptana Installed you will need to open the Aptana Web perspective (Window -> Open Perspective-> Other -> Aptana Web).
• Once you have the perspective open you should see a tab called File, if you don’t see this tab you can open it by going to Window -> Show View -> File.
• In the File tab there should be an item called FTP, if you right click on it you will be presented with ftp options to create a Ftp Site.

My challage was to have a block created by a View, pull the top 3 news nodes (basically like a blog) and display it on the homepage side-bar. Well that is not difficult, I even created a template for the block. Well now we wanted to show additional data for the first item in the view and not for the rest.

Question: Well, there is not a loop or counter to check for in the template file so how was I to get this done?
Answer: Using a Views Attachment Display.

Drupal Views have a display type called attachment. It is exactly as its name sounds,  a view that attaches to another. You can set it to display the additional data that you would like to display for the first item(or how ever many you want) then tell the Attachment Display to display before/after another View. Just change the offset of the main view to compensate for the items brought in by the Attachment.

Hope this helps others.

Here’s a more thorough write up and Magento’s official announcement. I was really impressed to see that the word “Magento” is now searched more than “eCommerce” which is a little mind-blowing by itself and interesting to compare the search trail for the old dog oscommerce. Hmm – maybe that includes a lot of people searching for magento the color?

I would like to note this is just a starting point and there are a lot of points to cover, some that won’t make it into this post and multiple posts will follow. If you have something to add please fell free to leave a comment.

For the Print Designer Creating the Design and HTML

1. Don’t Export HTML from Photoshop
   I have seen this time and time again, and with the “occasional” exception of HTML emails, this is not what you should do. There are multiple issues with this method of creating web pages. First: The search engines (and site visitors) only see big pictures held in place by a convoluted set of tables. The web’s purpose is to present multiple types of content on a page like images, body text, headlines, lists, video, flash, and all kinds of media. when Photoshop creates html it sticks all of your design’s text into images which essentially hides the content from the search engines. Also by using tables to hold the page together it obstructs the mark up and makes it harder for search engines to find any text on your pages (if there is any). Some may say “We’ll just add alt tags with the content”. Alt tags are for image descriptions not body copy or any kind of content. This still hurts you page rank. if you have not learned enough to code up your own page yet, build your site in Dreamweaver’s design mode. This will get you started to bridge the gap and eventually be able to code your own html, and css.
2. Tables are Tables, not Div’s
   Tables used as structural elements on the web page had there day when CSS was far from being implemented. However CSS is here and it empowers the designer to new levels. Where do you use tables? When the deign has a data table of course. One thing that really helps to code up pure css designs are CSS frameworks like 960 and Blueprint. They have PSD and IA templates to help design as well as HTML generators to make your life easier.
   
3. I Don’t Know How To Code HTML and CSS
   It is time to learn, the future is the web, heck the present is the web! It is really not that hard once you get going, there are a million places to learn on the net. Here are a couple of them:
   • http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/011/firstcss
   • http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/
   • http://css-tricks.com/what-beautiful-html-code-looks-like/
   • If you want to pay to learn: Lynda.com
   • http://csshtmltutorial.com/
   • http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/develop-css/from-mess-to-css

THE QUICK ANSWER: Put your resets at the very beginning of your html-elements.css file

We at Sharpdot recently completed a large series of websites using Drupal. After months of designing comps, coding them up, adding all of the special functionality, we discovered some style issues (and it wasn’t just IE problems this time!) After quite some time of trying to figure out what was going on, we discovered it was that the Zen theme does not add reset styles to there theme!

Unfortunately there has been an argument to not add reset styles in the Drupal Zen theme. This is quite concerning, mainly because our mission as a web shop is to code our sites up to be pixel perfect to the PSD’s and comps of the project. The arguments I have seen against resets are that they want the ability to style things quickly without being hampered by having to restyle all of the typographical elements and just let the browser do the work with it’s defaults. Well this can create many problems especially between  Windows and Mac platforms and the differences in the way they render their text. Our standard operating procedure is to have resets at the beginning of all styles them restore defaults to the page elements. This approach normally works great, however we are dealing with Drupal here, and Zen’s sub-theme approach.

So where do you start? Well my first thoughts were to add a new resets.css file to the theme and include it using the .info file in the sub-theme like you are supposed to do for JavaScripts and IE hack stylesheets. Well after doing this the styles kept on being added after other elements I was trying to reset first in the stylesheet order. After more research and trial and error, I found that reset styles are supposed to go into your html-elements.css file at the beginning of the code. For some reason this is the way the Zen Drupal theme people made it work. I am sure there is some argument out there for it, but there you go it’s Drupal, where nothing is that simple, but it can do just about anything.

One thing we have built here at Sharpdot is a library of starting themes, boilerplate’s and functionality which we can use to streamline our development as well as keep a consistency on all projects. One of the next things I have on my list is to make a Drupal Zen theme boilerplate with our edits available (with CSS resets!), check back for that.

These are the accompaning files: (Please reference this file if you have any quetion about the code examples below. The WYSIWYG editor was messing things up. mainly “&’s” and “empty()’s” )
1. Full Code Example

First we are going to have to modify the the adapter used to save/update products during the import process. The file used is located here: “/app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Model/Convert/Adapter/Product.php“. Since we are going to be modifying this file we should extend it so we don’t change any core files. There are plenty of articles that detail how to extend/customize Magento files so I will not go into it.

First lets tackle adding multiple gallery images. These are images that appear on the products detail page below the main image. We will be making all our edits in the Product.php file mentioned in the previous paragraph. Find the SaveRow method. In this method find the code where Magento saves the products images(should be similar to the following code and around line 630).
[sourcecode language='php']
$imageData = array();
foreach ($this->_imageFields as $field) {
if (!empty($importData[$field]) && $importData[$field] != ‘no_selection’) {
if (!isset($imageData[$importData[$field]])) {
$imageData[$importData[$field]] = array();
}
$imageData[$importData[$field]][] = $field;
}
}

foreach ($imageData as $file => $fields) {
try {
$product->addImageToMediaGallery(Mage::getBaseDir(‘media’) . DS . ‘import’ . $file, $fields);
}
catch (Exception $e) {}
}
[/sourcecode]

First thing we will do is change the addImageToMediaGallery so that when it saves the image it is not excluded(saves you from having to re-edit the products after import to make the images appear.).
[sourcecode language='php']

foreach ($imageData as $file => $fields) {
try {
// changed to not mark imported images as ‘excluded’ – see http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/6971/P15/ and http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/40007/
//$product->addImageToMediaGallery(Mage::getBaseDir(‘media’) . DS . ‘import’ . $file, $fields);
$product->addImageToMediaGallery(Mage::getBaseDir(‘media’) . DS . ‘import’ . $file, $fields, false, false);
}
catch (Exception $e) {}
}
[/sourcecode]

Now we can add the code to import multiple gallery images. Just below the code above add this new code:
[sourcecode language='php']
//Now add each gallery image.
if (!empty($importData['gallimg'])) {
//$importData['gallimg'] should be a list of images to import seperated by “;”
$images = explode(“;”, $importData['gallimg']);
foreach($images as $image){
//Don’t add field for gallimg’s
try {
//made second param null so it is not added as the main image, small or thumb. just added to the gallery
$product->addImageToMediaGallery(Mage::getBaseDir(‘media’) . DS . ‘import’ . trim($image), NULL, false, false);
}
catch (Exception $e) {}

}
}
[/sourcecode]
In order to use this new code you need to add a new column to your import spreadsheet. Label the column “gallimg”. This needs to be a list of the images you want to import separated by a “;”.
Now that was not too hard was it?

Now we can address removing images during the import/update process. In order to remove all the images you will need to continue modifying the saveRow method. Add the following code just above the code we previously edited.

[sourcecode language='php']
//MRD added to remove all images for product before uploading new images
if(isset($importData['remove_all_images']) && $importData['remove_all_images']==”yes” ){
//check if gallery attribute exists then remove all images if it exists
//Get products gallery attribute
$attributes = $product->getTypeInstance()->getSetAttributes();
if (isset($attributes['media_gallery'])) {
$gallery = $attributes['media_gallery'];
//Get the images
$galleryData = $product->getMediaGallery();
foreach($galleryData['images'] as $image){
//If image exists
if ($gallery->getBackend()->getImage($product, $image['file'])) {
$gallery->getBackend()->removeImage($product, $image['file']);
}
}
}
#$gallery->clearMediaAttribute($product, array(‘image’,’small_image’,'thumbnail’));
}
//END Remove Images
[/sourcecode]

To utilize the code we just created you will need to add the “remove_all_images” column to your spreadsheet and set the value to “yes”.

This was written using Magento version 1.2.1 so your files could be slightly different, but should still work if you follow the instruction. If you have any problems please leave a productive comment and I will see how I can help.

Here is a link to the modules page: Delivery Date Plugin

To Add to email templates: (provided by Magento user: mrgniarf)
You can modify yourtheme/yourdesign/template/email/order/items.phtml and before :

[sourcecode language='php']

[/sourcecode]

Add:

[sourcecode language='php']

[/sourcecode]