My 2008 turned out to be a pretty great year in general so I’m eager to see what 2009 brings. With a couple large jobs already underway, a new version of Magento just released and a lot of personal projects begging to be either completed or just started, it looks like it will certainly be busy!

One change is that I most likely will not be continuing my role as a project supervisor at Melbourne University, thus ending my three year run there. It was fun but full time work is too demanding on my time and far, far less frustrating. Although there are some good people at the uni, I honestly feel that the whole place is going to the dogs and that some of the people in power really don’t have any idea what they’re doing. Particularly disturbing is when people teaching engineering lack any kind of engineering skill.

I do look forward to having some time to do some work updating and expanding the range of Fontis Magento extensions. 2008 was the first year I made a real contribution to an open source product and I feel a great sense of achievement for having done so. Overall responses to our extensions have been positive and I have been thanked for quite a few people for releasing Australian extensions. I’d like to say a big thank you in return – I truly appreciate hearing that the work that I and my colleagues at Fontis have done is helpful to people.

One of my new year’s resolutions is to post here more frequently, and hopefully I’ll end up following through on it. It does require a fair amount of dedication to write stuff regularly.

Here’s again to a fantastic 2009!

The extension currently provides TinyMCE and FCKeditor and will let you choose which one you’d like to use, as well as which admin pages you’d like it displayed on. There are a number of features that we intend on adding in in the future but, for now, this should provide you with the essentials.

I wasn’t actually involved in the creation of this extension but it’s certainly something that we’re all quite excited to have released! WYSIWYG is something that I believe Magento should already include by default, so we finally have a simple solution to the problem. Enjoy!

Here are some screenshots of the process in action:

Selecting a locality

Final result

Please note that this is still using an older version of the locality database, which has the locality names in uppercase. The latest version of the database has localities properly capitalised. Also note that this will obviously only work when Australia is selected as the country.

I think this is pretty nifty little feature and hope others get something out of it as well. Let me know what you think in the comments.

When using the Australia Post shipping module please keep in mind the following:

• Remember to set the product weight unit accordingly.
• Shipping is limited to items under 20kg. This is a limitation of the Australia Post service itself.
• The shipping origin must be in Australia.

Otherwise it won’t turn up on the frontend.

I tested the extension as a whole with both an upgraded copy of 1.1.3 and a clean install of the same. Let me know if there are any problems.

There seems to be a minor issue with the info block for direct deposit not turning on the right-hand side of the one page checkout process so this will hopefully be fixed soon.

It actually took quite a while to create this, rather simple, first part of the module. This was mostly due to my lack of understanding of the way Magento modules work as well as the Zend Framework upon which Magento is built. At first I only wanted Australia Post shipping (rather than the more ambitious “all Australian functionality”) and, after failing to create a working module based on the outdated tutorial, I was able to get something working by simply adding in the module to the core distribution files, which I achieved by copying things from the existing shipping modules. Unfortunately this isn’t really viable as the module should be separated from the core to avoid conflicts on updates and the like. And it’s not good practice.

So, I then discovered that the shipping methods for the USA carriers (eg. DHL, UPS) were actually contained in a separate module in the core and this inspired me to want to create a similar module for Australia which could include various shipping carriers, payment gateways and GST.

Attempting to extract out the Australia Post shipping didn’t go so well at first and took much trial-and-error and searching of the Magento forums before I managed to get something that actually worked. But work it now does and it should be useful for most cases where you’d want to use Australia Post as a shipping method. It supports all methods available for domestic and international shpping, allows you to set a handling fee and, naturally, uses the Australia Post DRC to work out cost and shipping time.

There are a few things left to do on Australia Post before I’m 100% happy with it: I’d like to add insurance options, give the admin the ability to restrict shipping to certain methods (although I can’t think of why you’d want to do this) and clean up the code a bit. I have also discovered a few things that I’d like to add to the module if Magento actually allows the ability to do so: for instance, giving the user information about the shipping time without having to place it in the method title would be very handy as it means the invoice remains free of superfluous information but the user can make informed decisions during the checkout process.

After this the next thing I want to get working is GST and, following that, move on to getting bank payment gateways running. It will be good when Magento hits version 1.0 and some more developer documentation hits the streets – I may even start writing some up myself based on my experience with this module.

I would very much like to hear back from others about how well the module works on their setup, as well as any feature suggestions for the Australia Post shipping or the Australia module in general.

The first order of business has been to upgrade the version of Cake that’s currently being used, 1.2 alpha, to the new 1.2 beta version. I figured this would be simple since the existing code was being kept in a Subversion repository that we had access to and we had a copy of the latest working version. Unfortunately the code had not been checked in for quite a while, and contained updated code, so I would have to do a “first” commit … and this is where the first problem popped up. It turns out that the repository has since been moved to a new server, because of the project change over, so I had to switch the existing working copy over to the new URL. Anyone attempting this themselves: it turns out a Subversion working copy doesn’t like it when you switch targets with some unversioned files inside it. For the first time ever I discovered a ~ next to the status of several directories – this apparently means something is “blocking” this file.

This is where I ran into the second problem, which is actually rather amusing. Trying to fix one of these directories resulted in some circles: first I would be told that they couldn’t be checked in because the file .svn/entries could not be found. Hardly surprising since it didn’t exist. Trying to create it by svn adding the directory, I got told that I couldn’t add the directory because it was already under version control. Going back to step 1 and repeat! My attempts to fix the problem only exacerbated the problem by moving it further up the directory tree.

Thus I found myself using a rather “brute force” approach to fix it: checking out another copy and copying the original working copy’s files over the top of this new one. Thankfully, this eventually worked.

The moral of the story?

1. Don’t switch over a working copy when it has unversioned files in it.
2. Commit your work regularly – something I’m sure most developers forget!

The new year has brought a change for me – I am now working at Fontis IT alongside two of my friends from my days at uni (when I was still a student that is); it’s nice knowing other people at work right off the bat. I’m still continuing with the jobs I was doing before but now I have a nicer place to work (an office in the city) and the promise of further projects to work on after I’m done with my current batch . Overall I think it should be beneficial for everyone!

So, happy new year, I’m back, back again (tell a friend) and I hope to get some good posts up soon. I predict the first will be dealing with my further experience with ExtJS and jQuery.