Dear my friends, last post I wrote about “How to create a multiple language website in Magento”, now I’ll continue with a related topic “How to create language packages for an extension in Magento”.
In this topic, I’ll use our FAQ extension as a real example.
The main idea behind this article is something I previously wrote, making your extensions more distributable, less error prone, less depended, less intrusive. Such extensions are then more “safer” to be fetched and installed via Magento Connect. When I say safer I am thinking in terms of your extension not breaking someone live store, etc.
I would dare to say that one of the most annoying and dangerous areas of extension development are the theme view files. For example, imagine an extension that adds some “color switcher” like functionality on the product view page.
Usually extension developer will create his alternative of /app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/product/view.phtml or /app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/product/view/media.phtml file placing it under the default theme.
This approach is bad for at least two reasons:
- what if some other extension already does the same thing
- what if theme developer deletes it and places its own code in it
Ah, what a mouthful. First off all, sorry to disappoint you, as this article is purely result of my imagination. There is no such thing as “Magento Extensions Quality Assurance Certification” (aka MEQAC) at least not at the moment (as to 1/12/2010).
But let’s for a moment imagine there is such thing. Let’s discuss one possible direction of thinking. Let’s discuss the current issues with Magento extensions development.
Seems like Magento’s extremely flexible architecture where you can do almost anything if you are up to the task imposes some serious issues when it comes to general free/commercial extensions you can grab from either Magento Connect or from the developer/company site.
To make it clear, I do not blame Magento that much for this situation as I blame the extension developers. Magento just gave you powerful eCommerce tool/platform, its your problem if you are narrowed in thinking or better yet short on time to code something robust and unobtrusive. Before I go any further, and someone feels threaten by the “if you are narrowed in thinking” expression I just gave above, allow me to say that I too code my extensions as wast majority of others, so this goes on me as well.
Whether your web-shop is already generating revenue or it’s at it’s very beginning, it’s always good to enhance it where it’s needed especially if it’s for free.
These 10 extensions for magento are here for their value and usefulness. Also, almost all of them exist for quite some time so they have been tested and more importantly supported by their authors with the exception of the Easy Lightbox but it works with Magento 1.4.
One of them is our own product by Domagoj Potkoc.
In my last post about translations I was explaining how to translate words in Magento with inline translation tool as an option, but there are more techniques for translating besides that.
In this post I will try to cover translations for custom modules so they all refer to a single csv file.
Ok first thing is to actually prepare words for translating. Translations will not work if we don’t use proper string for them. So string will look like this:
|
1
|
< ?php echo $this->__('desired word') ?> |
Ok now we need to go to the app/code/ and create a directory for all custom modules, so we will make a directory named local. Inside we need to create another directory called Translations for translation module.
