Magento Provides three different options to sort the catalog products i.e
name, price, position. For a store with more than 1000 products it is not
possible enter position values in backend for each products. We can replace
this with product ids , so that the frontend will display the most recently
added products.

Step 1: To Achieve this copy the file Toolbar.php from app/code/core/Mage/Catalog

/Block/Product/List/Toolbar.php. Create a Directory Structure in local and paste the Toolbar.php
as shown below
app/code/local/Mage/Catalog/Block/Product/List/Toolbar.php

Magento allows us to create custom form in admin panel by creating our own custom module. We can create almost any field in the admin form by creating a class that extends the base class Mage_Adminhtml_Block_Widget_Form. The _prepareForm method allows to define our form elements.
Sometimes we may need to upload a file in the adminform, the default file field doesn’t provide the image preview when we upload an image file. For this purpose we need to use image field type as shown in the below snippet

This simple helper will help you to display html code of your product options. It works with simple, virtual and configurable products. I believe you can use the same approach for other product types as well.

Getting HTML code for options of configurable products its little different from simple and virtual (well they are more or less same).

Update: for all types in configurable product.
With simple products we have a very “clean approach”.

First we are setting a block for product options, then we add item renderers (template and type) to product options block. And the last step is to take the product, create iteration over options and display it with our product options block.

We are seeing here some nice loose coupling. Nice separation of code.

Murphy says: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. When it happens to your store it’s best to get the information about it ASAP and present the error in the most humane possible way. Let’s do it!

Since ever Magento presented it’s errors on the front-end for everyone to see and it was good for the developers but once the site has gone live that couldn’t be an option anymore. In Magento 1.4 those errors are now hidden and all your customer could get about the actual error was the “error number”.