We’ve just launched Fronay Collection!

We just launched our newest website, Fronay Collection. Go take a look at their beautiful collection of jewelry for both adults and kids.

www.fronay.com – silver jewelry

WordPress Youtube Gallery Plugin By Bricks & Mortar Creative

Plugin Overview

The Bricks & Mortar Creative WordPress Youtube Gallery plugin is a simple, lightweight add-on for the WordPress platform that adds a featured video and a small 3×3 gallery. It currently uses the Youtube V3 API to make unique requests to Youtube so that the plugin is always showing the most recent videos.

Using the Plugin

First go under the “Settings” tab in the WordPress Admin dashboard. Then when under “Settings” go on the “Bricks & Mortar Youtube Gallery” to access the plugin’s options page.

Now before making changes to the plugin you must first obtain a Youtube Data API key. This step is required to use the plugin. Follow the instructions in the first section of Google instructions here: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/getting-started

Choosing the Featured Video

To choose your featured video to be placed above your video gallery, you need to get a featured video ID and paste it into the input field. In order to do this, get a Youtube URL and copy everything past the “watch?v=”. When done, click “Update Options” to save your settings.

Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpqSdORmCX4 <= COPY THIS SECTION

Choosing what videos show in the Gallery

To create your 3×3 gallery of recently uploaded videos, simply put the username of the Youtube channel associated, and click “Update Options”. *(Please Note): Only recent videos added in the “Uploads” playlist will show.

How to add the B&M WordPress Youtube Gallery Plugin to a WordPress Page

After configuring the plugin options to your liking, go ahead and copy the shortcode “[youtube_video_feed]” and paste it into any one of your WordPress pages using the visual editor. Make sure to view the page to see if your settings are working properly?

Troubleshooting

If you have any questions about our WordPress Youtube Gallery plugin, feel free to send us an email or give us a call.

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We Just Launched The College Choice’s Website

Check out our newest site, www.thecollegechoice.com.

Free Magento Extension: Ajax Loaded Dynamic Catalog Filters

One request that many Magento website store owners have is the ability to introduce multiple filtering options on to their catalog pages so that people can sort by price, category, manufacturer or any other attribute being used on the store. There are a few extensions out there that help to achieve this, but they are often times very bulky, slow loading, and end up ultimately reducing the quality of the user experience you set out to improve.

One of the biggest problems with filtering Magento Catalog pages via attributes is loading the attributes themselves. Each attribute acts as a separate call to the database, and then must loop through all of the records for that attribute, which can oftentimes get very bulky for attributes like “manufacturer”.

In order to combat this while still being able to introduce the intended functionality, we’ve built this Magento Catalog Filter Extension that will allow for the Magento admin to select from any of their available attributes to filter by, and easily include them anywhere you’d like on the Catalog page with a 1 line snippet like the one below:
[php] <?php echo $this->getLayout()->createBlock(‘catalogfilters/test’)->setTemplate(‘catalogfilters/index.phtml’)->toHtml(); ?>
[/php]

Now, when the page loads, it will include the select options for your catalog filters, but it won’t actually run the code to populate the dropdowns with all of your attributes until after the page has loaded by using Ajax. This allows for your users to render the page much faster than they would’ve previously while still giving them as many filtering options as you feel are necessary.

You can download our Magento Catalog Filter Extension below free of charge and is provided as is. This extension does work with Magento 1.9.2 but we do not guarantee it will function properly in combination with all other extensions, so install at your own risk and make sure to create backups beforehand. If you’d like help with modifying this extension, or would like to engage us to build a custom Magento extension, feel free to contact us at info@bricksandmortarweb.com

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Magento Monday: Adding A Custom Page Template To Your Magento Theme

Since we at Bricks & Mortar Creative are such big fans of Magento for our e-commerce projects, we wanted to start a weekly Blog series called “Magento Mondays” where we will cover various Magento topics as well as give away free Magento extensions that we’ve built. For today’s inaugural post, I wanted to focus on something that tends to trip up a lot of beginning Magento developers, creating a custom template for your custom Magento themes.

Unlike registering a new page template in a CMS like WordPress, Magento actually has you register the template or templates as a local extension. Now while this process is very simple to run through, a lot of developers who are just starting out will here “Custom Magento Extension” and run in the direction as quickly as possible. Hopefully this post will alleviate some of those fears and pull back some of the mystery that is Magento. So without further ado…

Step 1. Setting Up Your Extension Structure
The first thing you’ll want to do is start setting up your extension files. This extension will live in your app/code/local directory, so the first thing you’ll want to do is navigate to that directory and create a new directory for your extension, ours will be called “Bricks”. Make sure to capitalize the first letter as this is important for name spacing. Now within your extension directory, you will want to create two new directories, “Templates” and “etc”, where each directory is within the one before it. The directory entire path should look like this: “app > code > local > Bricks > Templates > etc”.

Step 2. Setting Up Your Extension Config File
Next, we’ll want to create a new file called ‘config.xml’ within the ‘etc’ directory you just created. This file is where almost all of the magic is going to happen, so it’s important that this file is formatted properly. Once you’ve created the new file you’ll want to paste in the following code:

[xml] <?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
<modules>
<Bricks_Templates>
<version>0.1.0</version>
</Bricks_Templates>
</modules>
<global>
<page>
<layouts>
<homepage translate="label">
<label>Home</label>
<template>page/home.phtml</template>
<layout_handle>home_page</layout_handle>
</homepage>
<!– add more layouts here –>
</layouts>
</page>
</global>
</config>
[/xml]

There are a couple of important areas to point out in this code block. First, you’ll notice that under the “modules” section, the module name is capitalized and also matches our directory name spacing. Second, you’ll notice that the custom “homepage” layout is stored within our global page layouts, so can be accessed just as the standard 1 column or 2 column templates can be accessed. Now that you have this file created and saved it’s time to turn the extension on.

Step 3. Enabling Your Custom Magento Extension
Now that you’ve setup the bulk of your extension, you’ll need to let Magento know that it exists and that you’d like to turn it on. You do this by creating another xml file within your modules directory, or app > etc > modules. This new file will need to be named after your extension name space, so ours will be called “Bricks_Templates.xml” and the full file path will be app > etc > modules > Bricks_Templates.xml. Once you have this file created, open it up and enter in the following code:

[xml] <?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
<modules>
<Bricks_Templates>
<active>true</active>
<codePool>local</codePool>
<depends>
<Mage_Page/>
</depends>
</Bricks_Templates>
</modules>
</config>
[/xml]

You will see that we’re telling Magento to look in the “Local” code pool for an extension called “Bricks_Templates” and that it is active because it’s status is set to true. If you wanted to disable the extension while leaving all of it’s files in place, you could do that by setting it’s active status to “false”. Now that you’ve turned on your extension, all that’s left is to create your custom page template.

Step 4. Create Your Custom Page Template
In our config.xml file, we told Magento that our custom home page template would be found at ‘page/home.phtml’, so we’ll need to create a home.phtml file within the ‘page’ directory of our template files. In this case I will use the ‘base’ theme for my example, so the file would be included at ‘app > design > frontend > base > template > page’. You can add whatever code you would like in to this new page template, whether it be static HTML, a CMS block, or other custom Magento code of your choosing. Once you’ve finished the setup of this page template, your custom page template extension is ready to be used on the store of your choosing.

Step 5. Creating Additional Custom Page Templates
Let’s assume that now that you’ve added your custom Home Page template, you now want to add in a custom About Page template as well. To do this, all you will need to do is open up your extension config file and put your cursor on the line directly after you close your home page layout. You will then register another page here in exactly the same fashion, so it would look something like this:

[xml] <?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
<modules>
<Bricks_Templates>
<version>0.1.0</version>
</Bricks_Templates>
</modules>
<global>
<page>
<layouts>
<homepage translate="label">
<label>Home</label>
<template>page/home.phtml</template>
<layout_handle>home_page</layout_handle>
</homepage>
<!– add more layouts here –>

<about_page>
<label>About Page</label>
<template>page/about.phtml</template>
</about_page>

</layouts>
</page>
</global>
</config>
[/xml]

As you can see, we’ve registered a new page template that points to a brand new template file, about.phtml. All you would need to do at this point is make sure to include the about.phtml template within your Theme’s template directory along with your custom home page template. Now that all of your page templates are created, you’ll want to put them in to use on Magento.

Step 5. Using Your Custom Page Templates in Magento
Now that the page templates are created and ready to be used, you’ll want to include them on the necessary pages. To do this, open up your Magento admin dashboard and navigate to “CMS > Pages”. Once on this page, go ahead and open the “Home Page” you’ve created and click on the “Design” tab in the left hand navigation options. At the very top of the Design view, you should see a dropdown option with the label “Layout”. Click on this dropdown and you should see your newly created custom template available to be used. Simply select the template, save the page, refresh your cache and you should be all good to go.

We’ve also made our files available for you to download, use, and fork as needed, feel free to use however you would like.

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