In simpler terms Bespoke Magento Solution or Bespoke Magento Development means custom made solutions, services tailor made specifically for a Magento Store based on specific business requirements. Bespoke Magento development is typically done for a store that has a noticable traffic and sales. It could be layout (theme) specific changes for the existing Magento store or feature level (Magento Extensions) to enhance features specifically suited for a Magento Store. When looking for Bespoke Magento development, Magento store owners keep a check list of enhancements, changes for their existing Magento store.

A majority of Magento stores are selling different products but carrying out operations based on Magento defaults, but what if you have a requirement which is not possible with default Magento core. The required functionality is not met by the default Magento core which is a  generalized set of features to cater regular store operations. In such scenario, Magento store owners look for Bespoke Magento development or services to match with their business needs.

I was asked by Packt Publishing to review a new book entitled Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook. I was excited for the opportunity to review a recent development book, hoping I might get some new fresh perspectives.

Before I get into the details, I highly recommend avoiding this book. Unless you want a reference of how NOT to develop properly with Magento, do not buy it. Save your money and time and just spend a few hours looking through Magento’s core modules and learn by example. That to me has been the best reference in learning how to develop with Magento.

Recently one of our clients noticed some buggy behavior around its tier pricing. Clients demands were such that he needed an extra bit more functionality on top of the existing tier pricing feature, which is understandable. To comply to the request we went trough the discussion of either building such features ourself or reusing one of the existing extensions free/commercial.

Finally we decided to go with the existing extension. I will not name the specific extension we used, as I do not wish to trash other people work.

Few weeks after the site went live and numerous successful orders were made, client noticed this buggy behavior that miscalculates the final tier price on the Bundle product type. This is a big issue when you look at it, cause it reflects on the sale process and imposes loss for the client.

Hello inchoo readers. As we are nearing the Christmas time, I felt I could write down some free code and share with you. Yesterday I got all excited seeing Magento 1.4 beta1 available for download. As you can guess, it did not took me long to download and install it. One of the most interesting features, for me, are the widgets.

Personally I see the widgets plus WYSIWYG implementation as a great boost to user (site owner) friendly admin section. It can be a real mess having your client call {{block type=”myextension/myclass” … bla bla bla… }} code each time he wishes to show some custom coded block on certain pages or so. Magento widgets handle this quite nicely, all you have to do is point and click .

Also, keep in mind that widget functionality is available not only on the CMS pages but on static blocks, product descriptions, category descriptions etc. This is extremely useful and usage scenario is breathtaking. One can build all sort of features based on the purpose of the widget.

Below you will see few screenshots of my widget implementation, how it looks in admin section and in frontend.