There are 2 very important directories you need when wanting to create a theme for Magento 1.4

- Directory 1: app/design/frontend/<interface name>/<theme name>/
- Directory 2: skin/frontend/<interface name>/<theme name>/

These directories contain all the files necessary for creating a Magento theme. Directory 1 contains the layout settings and html files of your pages, and directory 2 contains all the styling information (CSS and image)

A Helpful Theme

I started out with the Magento Blank Interface which is included with Magento 1.4. This is a very basic interface and theme which allows you to start almost from scratch.

First start by creating a folder in the "app/design/frontend/" directory with the name of your interface and in there a folder with the name of your theme. Next you do the same thing, but in the "skin/frontend/" directory.



The easiest way to learn how the blank theme works, is to copy and paste everything from the "skin/frontend/default/blank/" directory into the folder you just created. This makes sure you have some basic styling already, which you can easily adapt to your needs.

To start using your new Interface and theme, you must let Magento know to use your adapted "blank" theme as the new default one. This can be done by accessing the Magento admin panel and going to the Design configuration tab (System - Configuration - Design).

Then you need to fill in the Interface name in the "Current package name" field, and the name of your theme (-folder) in the Default field. If everything is working correctly, you should now see your empty theme being used on the Magento front-end.



Note: Do not forget to disable the system cache by going to System -> Cache Management and disabling all the caches. Else the changes won't be reflected in the front end



Theme Hierarchy

There is a very important thing you need to know of how Magento works:

There is a certain hierarchy in the themes. To make sure nothing breaks when a certain file is not available in a theme, Magento automatically falls back to the theme lower in the hierarchy. The base theme (Default) contains all the necessary files and is the final fallback option. This means you can just copy the files you want to change to the new theme folder (with the same folder structure as the original files and folders) while the others can be left as they are.

This makes it easier to adjust your theme when there is an update of Magento and it also makes it easy to adjust certain parts of your site, for example if you want a seasonal version of your design. You can just override the files needed with a new theme and leave the others alone.

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You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
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- Data Center
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- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
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ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
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ERROR:

There has been an error processing your request
Exception printing is disabled by default for security reasons.
Error log record number: 9447134067

Solution:

1. Navigate to the “magento/errors” folder.
2. Rename local.xml.sample to local.xml
3. create a tmp folder in the root Magento folder
4. Open magento/lib/Zend/Cache/Backend/File.php and look for:
protected $_options = array(
‘cache_dir’ => ‘null’,
5. Change it to:
protected $_options = array(
‘cache_dir’ => ‘tmp/’,
6. Save and refresh

Hope this helps!!

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

Suppose, you have a product collection and you want to filter it by category. Suppose, you want to filter it by more than one category. You can use addCategoryFilter if you have only one category. But, what if you want to filter by more than one category?

Category ids are stored for product in a comma separated way. So, to filter product collection by more than one category, you have to use: 

addAttributeToFilter(‘category_ids’,array(‘finset’=>$categoryIds));

$categoryIds can be a single category id or comma separated category ids.

The following code filters product collection by two category ids (36 and 37).

$_productCollection = Mage::getResourceModel('reports/product_collection')
   ->addAttributeToSelect('*')
   ->addAttributeToFilter('category_ids',array('finset'=>'36,37'));

finset does so… when we use finset, the mysql function find_in_set is used in the sql query by Magento.
mysql function find_in_set:

FIND_IN_SET() looks for the first occurrence of a string within another string containing comma-separated values.

SELECT FIND_IN_SET(‘b’,'a,b,c,d’); // result = 2

Good luck

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.