JTS

Magento Google Custom Search Integration

We have a lot of experience setting up Google Custom Search engines for both CE and EE versions of Magento. Before making the jump to outright purchasing the Google CSE (Custom Search Engine), we recommend installing the free/ad-supported version on a site to see how relevant the results are with the site. Below is a brief, step-by-step overview to setting it up.

1.) Setup your custom Google Search Engine at Google and copy the code they provide.

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WordPress Upgrade Causing Admin Issues

Recently after the latest round of updates to several client sites, we noticed that we started seeing a bunch of weird wp-admin issues. Some issues occurred in the widget section where we couldn’t move or edit widgets and others happened in the WYSIWYG section of the post editor, where the “link” button wouldn’t popup.

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Magento EE Load Product By URL Key

Just a quick tip. If you are using Magento Enterprise and finding that “loadByRequestPath” doesn’t always work when you try and load a product by the url key, it is because it’s a “feature”. According to Magento Enterprise support, Magento EE, uses its own urlrewrite model.

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State and Local Tax Report Automation

We do a fair deal of data reporting and extraction on local county tax records for a variety of clients (Tax collection, lawyers, accountants, etc). One of the more interesting aspects of this data mining, is when we are required to retrieve, normalize and create reports based on the data from state or local sources.

The local sources are often challenging as they sometimes have no data integrity rules in place to dictate the format for either first or last names. Often times, the data does not have any “legend” or data specification, so we need to deduce our own rules.

When the data can also include sub-owners, the problem becomes exponentially greater.

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Magento SEO Breadcrumbs

Magento Breadcrumbs are a bit to be desired, when it comes to consistency and SEO purposes. Product breadcrumbs would shift to whatever the latest category they were added to. So if a product goes on sale in a special “sale” category, then the breadcrumb would be rebuilt and shown on the product page.

This had a negative effect on SEO, in that the products where showing up in sales or even newsletter categories.

We found a post here at StackOverflow and an answer by “Fiasco Labs” got us started on the right path.

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