July Day UK 2017

Joomla Day UK 2017

joomla, Open Source

This year’s UK Joomla Day is on 8th July at the Ilec Conference Centre, in west London.

There’s a varied programme of talks on topics such as the new custom fields in Joomla, Joomla & SEO, and a chance to sit the new Joomla! administrator certification exam.

So, if you’re a Joomla! designer or developer, a Joomla! webmaster or own a Joomla! website, there’s plenty of good stuff on offer. These days are also a great opportunity to meet other Joomlers and take part in the wider Joomla! community.

Perhaps we can meet up if you’re going?

J&Beyond 2017

joomla, magento

This year I’ll be delivering a talk on “E-commerce Pratfalls & Pitfalls” at the Joomla! & Beyond 2017 conference at Krakow, Poland. Drawing on 15 years experience in e-commerce, I’ll be outlining some of the issues that site owners encounter & how to overcome at least some of them.

Magento Custom Options

Using Magento’s Custom Options

magento, Open Source

While delivering some Magento training, I was demonstrating how to create Configurable Products and one of the trainees visibly wilted at the thought of creating hundreds of child products to meet her multi-variant product catalogue. However, as she didn’t need to manage stock (as her products were unique, one-offs), I reassured her that she could use Custom Options on a simple product to represent the multi-variants.

So, let’s see how this might work in Magento.

Continue reading Using Magento’s Custom Options →

Testing Paypal Pro & Magento

magento, Open Source, ,

Within Magento CE you are able to display certain checkout functionality based on the location of the customer. For example, you’re might want to offer flat rate shipping only to customers in  your country. To do this you just select the desired country from the Ship to Specific Countries for that particular shipping method.

You can then test this by  choosing to ship to another country and making sure that the flat rate shipping option is not available in the checkout.

You are also able to do something similar with payment methods. I was recently testing that Paypal Pro was only available to customers within the EU. However, I found that Paypal was available to customers shipping anywhere in the world.

The answer was actually pretty obvious really. Paypal looks not at the chosen shipping country but rather the customer’s residential country. I’d been testing using a UK customer  and Paypal was available no matter what shipping country I selected in the checkout. Testing with a non-EU customer and I got the desired behaviour – Paypal was not available as a payment method, even if I was trying to ship to the UK.

So, the Paypal Pro payment method at least tests on the customer’s country of origin rather than destination in determining whether the payment method should be available.

Joomla! & Beyond 2015

Uncategorized

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ll be reprising my talk on Pricing for Freelancers (“You’re Too Cheap – & not nearly nasty enough”) at the Joomla! & Beyond 2015 (#JaB15) conference in May in Prague.

#JaB15 is the leading European conference for Joomla! developers and integrators, bringing together people from over 30 countries, and this year’s programme is stuffed with great speakers covering a broad range of subjects.

If you’re interested in Joomla! or how it can help you (whether you’re a individual programmer or company) please take a look at the programme and see what’s on offer.  It promises to be a really great and inclusive event this year.

Joomla Day UK

joomla, Open Source

I’ll be speaking at this year’s Joomla Day UK conference on 4th October on the tricky subject of pricing. The title of my talk is “You’re too cheap & not nearly nasty enough”, which gives you some idea of what I think about the subject.

Tickets for the event are still available and there’s a great line up of talented speakers. Hopefully we’ll see some of you there.