Some of these are simple code quirks, such as spelling mistakes in code that are repeated elsewhere by necessity (what does the variable $accress do?), others are amusing comments (“TODO: ask Moshe about this”). Most irritating are the features that one might expect, based upon what is already there, but that don’t exist – being able to restrict user access based on store for example.

One thing that I’ve spent a bit of time working on lately is being able to sort products by their average rating. It seems to me that, if you have a rating system and the rating is displayed on products, then it would make sense that you’d be able to sort by those ratings. Apparently not.

Whilst I do hope that some of these major annoyances will be fixed in the future, a part of me also hopes they don’t as it will mean all the work that I’ve put into them will be rendered meaningless! What would be really nice would be if Varien accepted patches for Magento. That way we wouldn’t to expend even more time trying to “extensionise” something that should be in the core system anyway.

Magento as a product continues to progress but sometimes I wish the community had more involvement in direction and helping it move forward.

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!

I’d like to know if anyone actually forks out money for this.

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.

Installation

1. Install extension through Magento Connect.
2. Create var/log/ directory and make it world writable.
3. Log in to PayWay.
4. Go to Setup API -> Security. This page will provide you with the username and password to enter into the extension configuration.
   
5. Add the IP address for your server to the access list. (You can get this by making a test transaction and recording the rejected address shown in the error message.)
6. Go to Setup API -> Certificate.
   
7. Set “Choose your API Technology” to “PHP” and click “Go”.
8. Click “Download PHP Certificate” and save the file somewhere.
9. Upload this file to a location off the main Magento directory. By default the extension will look for the file var/certs/ccapi.pem but this is configurable.
10. Go to the Magento Admin Panel and to System -> Configuration -> Payment Methods.
    
11. Enter merchant ID, username and password into extension settings.
12. Ensure the extension is enabled and that the certificate setting has the correct pathname for the file you uploaded previously.

Usage

Usage is just like other credit card modules – the customer enters their credit card details during checkout. These details are then sent to the PayWay gateway and processed when the customer clicks “Place Order” at the end of checkout.

Hopefully this provides you with enough information to get it running on your site. If you have any problems or feedback, please leave a comment.

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.