IE Tester is a relatively new tool to run multiple versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer for testing purposes. IETester includes all versions from Internet Explorer 5.5 to the latest version IE8. This application saves the bother which comes with trying to install (and run) multiple versions of Microsoft’s odd browser on your PC. Of course, it really goes without saying, if you are an end-user and still browsing with IE6 it’s  really time to upgrade, you’re the cause of all this bother.

Instillation

IETester can be downloaded freely from the MyDebugBar.com here. The current version is still the alpha release. Sorry Mac/Linux/Win9X-users it’s currently only available on Windows 7, Vista and XP.

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The first thing you will have to do is set-up the Tax Zones. In this case we’re setting up a website which will operate in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. This means we need to two Tax Zones each with it’s own rate of VAT.

Tax Zones and Rates

Login to Magento to to Sales > Tax > Manage Tax Zones & Rates. You may which to delete the default zones which are already there. Click on Add new tax zone Enter an identifier for your tax rate, select the relevant country from the drop down. Enter the rate in the bottom box, for example “17.5″ for current UK vat or “21.00″ for the Irish Republic.

You will need to repeat this step for all of the tax zones you are registered to operate in. Depending on your country you may need to set tax in relation to individual provinces or states, or simply use a star “*” to apply to all in your chosen country.

Tax Rules

The next step is to set-up a rule to apply the tax rates you have set-up in the previous step. Click on Sales > Tax > Manage Tax Rules. Again, you can delete the existing rules or replace them with your new ones. Click on Add new tax rule. Give your rule a name, choose the customer group, choose what you want to apply the tax to. Then you will have to select the rule you want to apply and click on Save rule.

Additional set-up

By default your tax rules will be applied according to the customers shipping address. You may also want to clarify how tax is calculated in relation to product promotions and how tax is applied to shipping. These settings can be applied by going to System > Configuration >  Tax.

That’s it.

Important! Please note VAT rates were correct at time of publishing. For the latest please visit the United Kingdom’s HM Revenue & Customs or the Republic of Ireland’s Office of the Revenue Commissioner.

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• 8 February 2010 -- Tutorial: Set-up Configurable Products in Magento (6)
• 3 January 2010 -- Tutorial: Set-up Simple Products in Magento (3)
• 27 December 2009 -- Tutorial: Set-up Categories in Magento (2)
• 17 January 2010 -- Magento E-Commerce (1)

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for Windows.

When you require a quick retouch Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro can be overkill. Paint.NET is the answer. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface, supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. Paint.NET is backed-up by an active community which provides help, tutorials, and a growing range of plugins.

The latest versions (since 3.5) have really addresses many performance quibbles and offers some interface tweaks for the Aero-theme users, but fans of the “dancing ants” may not like the gray-overlay changes made to the selection tools. Paint.NET is far more advanced than Microsoft Paint, and given its free price, it’s a great solution for those requiring simple image editing software.

Download & Install

You can get the free download from download.com – Paint.NET 3.5.4 but you’ll also need Microsoft’s .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installed on your machine.

Photoshop PSD Plugin

As the name suggests the Photoshop PSD plugin allow gives Paint.NET the ability to open any .psd file. Saving isn’t quite so simple, for that you’re best to stick with the native .pdn format. Lee Matthews has more – click here.

No Windows, No Problem

If you’re not a windows user and want to jump on the Paint.NET bandwagon there’s the Pinta Project. Written in C# Pinta uses GTK+ toolkit, Cairo library and some code from the original Paint.NET.

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Magento’s configurable products allow you to give users options when ordering products. This could be a product like a t-shirt which is essencially one product but can be bought in different sizes or colours.

Configurable products in Magento appear on the front-end as drop down boxes on the product pages. They are required fields and the user must select one of the options in each of the drop-down boxes before the product can be added to the cart.

Configurable products are managed via one central ‘configurable product’ and lots of associated ’simple products’. Each of the simple products are created dynamically from the information you add to the main ‘configurable product’.

Set-up your Attributes

First thing you need to do is set-up attributes for the configurable products, like colour, size, etc. Login to magento and navigate to ‘Catalog’ > ‘Attributes’ > ‘Manage Attributes’. Click on the + Add New Attribute button in the top left of the screen.

Fill in the properties with the following settings…

• Scope = Global
• Catalog Input Type = Dropdown
• Use to Create Configurable Product = Yes

Add your attribute to a set

Navigate to ‘Catalog’ > ‘Attributes’ > ‘Manage Attribute Sets’. You can just use the Default attribute set, or create a new one based on the default. Choose the set you want to use and click on it. Drag your new attribute into the set (listed in Unassigned Attributes).

Create the Super Product

Next step is to create your configurable, or base, product. You will need to go to ‘Catalog’ > ‘Manage Products’  and click on + Add New Product. Choose your attribute set, and set the product type ‘Configurable Product’, click continue. Next you need to choose which configurable attributes you want to use to create the configurable product. You can choose as many as you want, but to make life easier for your customer you may want to limit yourself to two or three at most. Click continue.

On the next screen you need to add in the basics for the product; name, descriptions, SKU, status, price, tax, images and categories. Click on the Sage And Continue Edit button at the top of the page.

Create Associated Products

Next you will need to find the Associated Products tab, usually at the very bottom of the list on the product page. To create your configurable options you need to create Associated Products. These share the common details above, but can have different prices and most importantly you can manage the stock independently. Using the Quick Simple Product Creation box set the status, visibility, select the option(s), any additional price can be added to the option(s) and enter the quantity available. Click on Quick Create button. Each of the associated products created will appear in the list at the bottom of the page.

One thing to be careful of is when editing the product at a later date make sure you only edit the Super Product (the one with type: configurable product)

That’s it.

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• 3 January 2010 -- Tutorial: Set-up Simple Products in Magento (3)
• 4 March 2010 -- Tutorial: Manage Magento Tax Zones and Rules (0)
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• 17 January 2010 -- Magento E-Commerce (1)

Magento is a relatively new e-commerce platform with an impressive set of out-of-the-box features.

The software itself it built using the PHP Zend Framework and designed primarily to run on an Apache server with MySQL. The most amazing feature is the community edition, a free to use, open source version. The paid-for (enterprise) edition includes an even more impressive feature set and support. Some of the basic features include:

• run one  install with multiple currencies and shops
• offer as many payment and shipping methods you require
• more promotion options than you can shake a tree at including discount codes
• enhance sales add related products
• hundreds of add-ons for additional functionality
• ship orders to multiple addresess
• compare products

Magento offers a quick and safe way to put your products online, reach far beyond your traditional customer base and into new markets. Get in touch for more information.

• Web Design for Businesses
• Magento Northern Ireland

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• 8 February 2010 -- Tutorial: Set-up Configurable Products in Magento (6)
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• 27 December 2009 -- Tutorial: Set-up Categories in Magento (2)
• 5 October 2009 -- PHP’s SimpleXML (0)

Expression Web 3 is the latest version of Microsoft’s web development application.

Writing code in Expression Web 3 is a pleasure weather it’s XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP or any of the other built in web development languages. Intelligence effectively checks your code on the fly like a spell checker (which is also included)  underlining code or sections which have been entered incorrectly. You can also save a list of commonly used snippets which can be inserted by perssing CTRL+Enter, or if you’re looking for PHP/CSS press CTRL+L for all the various functions and properties.

And don’t worry about the rendering engine, it doesn’t use Trident. The smart people in the Expression Web development team have used a completely different, and standard complient. But just to be safe the SuperPreview is included to allow you to check rendering on IE6, IE7, IE8 and Firefox. The application looks good, is really easy to use, even if like me you get rid of most of the toolbars. The application loads much faster you’d expect from a Microsoft Application.

Like many other people have said, even if Adobe DreamWeaver didn’t cost like a million pounds, Expression Web (£6o-£70) is most certainly the one for me.

PS if you’re looking for a replacement for Microsoft Frontpage, you might be better looking at Office SharePoint Designer. It retains more of the more popular FrontPage features like  as pre-built web components, database, marquee, hit counter, navigation bars, insert maps etc.

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Products are an essential element to every Magento website, this post is a basic overview of the steps required to create a simple product in Magento.

First thing’s first, log-in to Magento, and go to ‘Catelog’ > ‘Manage Products’ and click on the ‘Create New Product’ link in the top left of the page. In a standard install you should select the default attribute set and the product type should be ’simple product’. Click continue.

Next step is to add in your product’s details. You will have to add all the require fields which can be found in the General, Prices and Inventory tabs down the left-hand-side. Required fields are marked with a red asterisk (*).

Product Images

More than likley you will want to add some images to your products, which can be done very easily by clicking on the Images tab to the left of the sccreen. Click on ‘Browse Files…’ and locate the files on your computer you want to upload. Once you have located them click on the ‘Upload Files’ button. Then, once your image(s) has uploaded  make sure you that you set active using the radio buttons (as above).

Finally, you will need to add the product to the categories you created in the last post — Tutorial: Set-up Categories in Magento. Simply click the Categories tab and check the categories you want to add the product too.

That’s it.

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Categories are one of the more basic features of Magento. They provide a easy to use navigation and categorisation system for customers.

First, login to your Magento back-end and navigate to ‘Catalog’ > ‘Manage Categories’ (second option). Enter the name of the cateory into the first box. The second option is a drop-down called “Is Active”, basically this allows you to show or hide the category on the front-end. Set “Is Active” to “Yes” if you want it to appear on the front-end.

The URL key is what appears in the www.yourstore.com/category-name bit of the web adddress, where “category-name” is what you put in the URL key. Keep it simple, preferably lower case, use hyphens, letters and nothing else for best results.

You can also add a description, image, Page Title and Meta data. The description and image can be used to give a bit more information about the products in a category, these will appear at the top of the category page. The Meta data can be used to help with search engine optimisation.

Click on the ‘Save Category’ option on the top left of the screen. This will save your category information. Next, take a look at the left hand side, you should make sure that your cageory is inside the “Default Category”, in order for it to appear in your websites navigation.

That’’s it. The next step is to add your products to Magento…

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• 17 January 2010 -- Magento E-Commerce (1)

1

<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk">BBC Online</a>

BBC Online

The hash # symbol can be used to jump to any element with an ID attribute. The link below will jump to to the top of the current page, which has an attribute id=”header”.

1

<a href="#header">Jump to Page Header</a>

Jump to Page Header

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Previously DOM and DOM XML were used by PHP developers to parse XML. DOM and DOM XML requires tens of commands to do what what SimpleXML can do in a couple of lines. Furthermore, unlike DOM and DOM XML, SimpleXML creates a PHP onject which requires many fewer commands to access, read and write to the XML document structure.

The SimpleXML document needs to be created before and, if manipulated, re-created before it can be parsed using PHP. An XML document can be created from scratch using a simple PHP string..

$string = "";
$xmObject = simplexml_load_string($string);

Alternatively, a pre-created XML document can be used to create an object from file…

$xmlObject = simplexml_load_file('test.xml');

Once the script has made its additions/changes to the object, it can be exported back as XML using the following command…

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlObject);

That’s pretty much it.

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