Over a year ago, I released a free Magento Featured Products Widget which groups the featured products by category.  Since releasing it I’ve had a lot of traffic, and a lot of pleasant feedback from users.  Now I’ve finally been able to get round to upgrading the widget to be even better with a lot of rewritten code, testing and few new features too.

New Features

• Creates featured attribute on installation
• Displays Review Summary
• Displays Add to Cart button
• Shows path to categories when selecting categories in admin (easier to distinguish between different stores with same category names)
• Caching
• Code rewrite (better documented and better Magento conventions)
• Compatibility checked on 1.4.0.0 to 1.6.2.0
• More flexible styling (font colours are now theme defaults)
• Included Minimum price for Bundled Products
• Products only fetched from current store
• Mixed template is now a lot cleaner

Screenshots

Grouped by category

Configuration Options

Mixed Display

Installation and Documentation

Installation

Copy the app and skin directories into your Magento installation

Usage

CMS Pages

1. Login to your Magento admin
2. Go to CMS > Pages
3. Select the page you want to use
4. Click the Content tab
5. In the WYSIWYG Editor, click the Insert Widget button (for me it’s top row, second from the left)
6. As Widget Type select Cube Websites - Category Featured Products
7. Configure your Widget using the available options

Frontend Template
Categorised – Displays the products grouped by the category they belong in
Mixed – Displays all the products in a single block with no grouping

Categories (only applies if Categorised Frontend Template is selected)
The categories to select products from

Number of Products
If Categorised – the number of products from each category
If Mixed – the total number of products

Products Per Row
How many products will be displayed on each row in the frontend

Products to Display
Featured – Displays featured products only
All – Displays all available products

Featured Attribute Code (optional)
By default this is cube_category_featured but if you’ve created your own featured attribute code then you can use that instead.

Within your template

1. Open your favourite text editor
2. Within find the Layout XML you want to add the block to within the app/design/frontend directory
3. In your .xml file, add the following in the relevant position

    <block type="categoryfeatured/list" name="featured_products" as="featuredProducts" template="categoryfeatured/block.phtml">
    <action method="setData"><name>categories</name><value>1,2,3,4</value></action>
    <action method="setData"><name>num_products</name><value>4</value></action>
    <action method="setData"><name>products_per_row</name><value>4</value></action>
    <action method="setData"><name>product_type</name><value>featured</value></action>
    <action method="setData"><name>featured_code</name><value>cube_category_featured</value></action>
   </block>

template
categoryfeatured/block.phtml – Displays the products grouped by the category they belong in
categoryfeatured/mixed.phtml – Displays all the products in a single block with no grouping

categories (only applies if categoryfeatured/block.phtml template is selected)
The categories to select products from (comma separated)

num_products
If categoryfeatured/block.phtml – the number of products from each category
If categoryfeatured/mixed.phtml – the total number of products

products_per_row
How many products will be displayed on each row in the frontend

product_type
featured – Displays featured products only
all – Displays all available products

featured_code (optional)
By default this is cube_category_featured but if you’ve created your own featured attribute code then you can use that instead.

If you need to output the block in a certain location of your template, then make sure you include the following in your .phtml file <?php echo $this->getChildHtml('featuredProducts') ?>

Downloads

I’m currently awaiting approval from the Magento Connect site, but I’ve also made this project available free on GitHub.

Download from Magento Connect (awaiting approval)
Download latest version
Download 2.0.1

Fork on GitHub

Feedback and Support

If you have any questions or issues please feel free to post in the comments.

The post FREEBIE: Magento Featured Products Widget Version 2 appeared first on Cube Websites.

If you’re an active user of GitHub and work on any open-source projects then may want to show off your projects and activity on your own website.  This is where Gitview comes in.

Gitview allows you to display all your GitHub repos, and gives the option to display a detailed version including a graph of your project activity, or a simple compact version if you prefer.  Not only that, but all the information displayed is live.

The full feature list is:

• Asynchronous loading of all date
• All data is 100% live
• The Activity Graph uses the Canvas element
• You can toggle the regular or small version
• No need for additional styles
• Works with all JS frameworks (jQuery, Prototype, Mootools, etc)
• WTFPL license

Using it is very simple:

1.  Include the script on your page

<script src="http://logicalcognition.com/Projects/Gitview/Gitview.js"></script>

2.  Create a GitView anywhere on your page from a script tag or a JavaScript file:

var view = new Gitview({
  user    : 'cubewebsites',      // any github username
  domNode : document.body,  // domNode to attach to
  compact : false           // if set to true, will display smaller version of widget (no participation graph)
});

Enjoy!

The post Gitview – JS Widget To List GitHub Repositories appeared first on Cube Websites.

Today I launched my first Magento widget.

Features

1. Group by category.  Using this widget, you can specify the categories to display products from, and on the frontend you’ll be able to see the products grouped by those categories.
   This is a lot more useful to customers, plus provides more flexibility to you as a store owner – you could even show featured products for each category at the top of that category’s page.
2. It’s free.  Need I say more?
3. Feedback is welcome! This isn’t a one-hit-wonder. I will attempt to actively develop and add features to it according to user requests.
4. Random products too.  It’s not only a featured products widget, if you prefer it can select any random product from a category (if specified), or from all your categories

Options

Download

I’ve submitted the extension to MagentoConnect and will post the URL as soon as it’s live.
For now you can download it using the links below:

Zip file (upload all contents to server): download
Pear package: download

Screenshots

All products, Mixed mode

All products, Grouped by Category

Admin Configuration Screen

License

Basically, you can use this extension for free on your store.  You can include it with your Magento themes and templates (as I’m about to with my next template).

The only thing I ask is that you give credit where credit is due.

Enjoy!

UPDATE 4 FEBRUARY 2012: An updated version  of this widget is now available here

The post FREEBIE: Magento Featured Products Widget appeared first on Cube Websites.