Anyone who has dabbled in making multiple stores in Magento has eventually wanted to change the way the Magento store switcher (also referred to as the Magento store selector) works. By default Magento provides a store switcher in the form of a select menu. The store switcher is located in the footer of the site by default.  This post will cover how to move the store switcher (store selector) from the footer to the header.

Moving the Magento Store Switcher to the Header

First off, you will want to locate your “page.xml” file. This is located in the ‘app/design/frontend/base/default/layout’ directory. (Note: If you are using your own template your path may be different.) Open it with your favorite text editor and find the line of code below.

In our last post we discussed how to move the Magento Store Switcher/Selector from the footer to the header. Now that you have moved the store switcher to the header you will probably want to change it’s appearance. For example – you might want an unordered list of links instead of a select drop down. Then, you could style the store selector with some CSS. You can do this by modifying the “stores.phtml” page.

First locate the “stores.phtml” page and open it with your favorite editor. You can find it in the ‘app/design/frontend/base/default/template/page/switch’ directory. (Note: If you are using your own template your path may be different.)

Just recently we ran into an issue where we wanted to display all new products added to a specific category in our Magento site, with pagination. To make things more complicated, we wanted to display this by using a CMS page. The default functionality that Magento provides for new products just didn’t cut it in our case. We had to come up with something different and I am documenting it here for everyone’s benefit. This method will allow you to add new products to a Magento CMS page and pull up new products for any category you choose, or for the entire site. Whether you want to add new products to your CMS page by category or for the entire site, it’s up to you.

Adding New Products with Built in Magento Tools

First, let’s set the record straight. It is possible to display a list of new products in Magento using a default block. You can do this without any coding changes or modifications to Magento itself. This code will allow you to bring up a list of new products on one of your CMS pages. It is also possible to use this to bring new products up within a template file or on your homepage, though we are not covering that here.

There is an easy way to improve the SEO of your Magento store by removing the .html extension from the url

Example:

We have a category called Shoes

http://mydomain.com/default/shoes.html

And we want to have an URL like this:

http://mydomain.com/default/shoes

Now go to your Admin Panel. System -> Configuration. Then go to Catalog and expand the Search Engine Optimization tab.

Remove the “.html” text from both the input fields. Product URL Suffix and Category URL Suffix.

Finally the page will look like this screenshot: