Many customers got the problem during installing the extension because they did installation in wrong way. So in this article We will show you the right way to install a magento extension properly.

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When installing an extension, you should follow these steps:

1. Backup your site before installing any extension. Some extension might crash your site if you install it in wrong way or it contains the bad code.
* if it is posible then install and review the extension on a stagging server or development site first. This will help you to avoid down time of live site if there is a problem during installing the extension.

2. Make sure you enable magento cache. To do this, go to Admin -> System -> Cache Management
This is also an importance step that some customers missed. If the cache is disabled then magento can start setting up during uploading the extension files. Some importance files might have not uploaded yet and causes the system do setting up in wrong way.

3. If you install the extension via magento connect then go to Admin -> System -> Magento Connect -> Magento Connect Manager. There are some articles show you the detail steps in this way so I will don’t discuss further.
In almost cases you will need to install the extension manually via FTP or SSH. By this way you will need to upload the extension files to your magento location. All extension files should be organized in these folders: app, skin, js and no file should be replaced for the first time you install the extension.
* If you see another folder than app, skin or js folders, be careful before you upload it. Ask the extension provider for making sure it is nescessary and will not effect to your system.
* If the system alerts a file might be replaced in the first time you install the extension, be careful because you might replace the core file and it will crash your site.

4. When all extension files are uploaded, you will need to check the template and skin files to see if they are placed in right folder. Your custom theme might be in these folders:
- magento/app/design/frontend/<theme_package>/<theme_name>
- magento/skin/frontend/<theme_package>/<theme_name>
If your extension template and skin files are in difference theme package:
- <extension_files>/skin/frontend/<other_package>/default
- <extension_files>/app/design/frontend/<other_package>/default
Then you will need to copy these folder to your theme package.
* Some extension might just work in backend and does not have template or skin files. So don’t worry if you don’t see them.

5. Now you can refresh or disable the cache to let magento run extension setting up and start configuring the extension.

6. Logout and login the backend again. Some customers leave this step so they get access denied or 404 error page when accessing the extension configuration panel.

7. Some extension can start working now but some need to do certain configrations in backend or in adjust the custom theme. Follow the user guide of the extension to configure the extension.

8. If you need to customize the extension template or skin, you should copy the files to your custom theme folders. If you do it in the default theme you might lose your work when you upgrade or reinstall the extension.

Here is just some key steps that show you how to install a magento extension properly. Some extension might need to do some special configration or adjust your custom theme so you will need to read the installation and user guide carefully. If you not sure what you are doing then stop and ask the extension provider for help or you might crash your site and lose money in down time. If you don’t have base knowledge about magento then it is better to purchase for installation service. This will keep your head free and avoid risk on your site and business.

Nowadays, there are many Magento Web Development websites available which uses the Magento platform for designing and developing ecommerce websites. Ecommerce is much more than selling a product or a service online now a day. It is obvious that selling of services or products one offers not only lets him/ her expand their business and customer base worldwide but also reduces his/ her burden of controlling maximum customers with less mistakes or loss of desired customers. Today, to be successful in this competitive and fast growing world where internet is everything for the buyers, one must have an eye catching, easy to use Ecommerce website that gets you the best results out from it!

There are many online websites available which provide you with the best in industry Magento Website Development. These have Magento Web Developers who are experienced enough to get you the best website which will attract the customers on its own. These experienced Magento Web Developers can help you design a website that lets you achieve maximum traffic and conversion rates as well as a maximum return on your investment. Magento Website Development is a useful tool for the Ecommerce merchants to promote their products and services online easily. It is essential for an Ecommerce website to fulfill the constant changes in demand in this fast changing technological world and getting your Ecommerce website developed in Magento will help you a lot to meet the requirements of the varied customers.

Magento theme and template design are also there in Magento website development which allows a user or a developer to provide you with innumerable web designs, body, themes, colors and many other things which are helpful in making your website eye catching. Through Magento Web Development, your customers will be able to find your products easily and will be able to order and view product details easily and quickly. When there’s no room for glitches and no time for down time, just get your website developed or redeveloped in Magento which will help you build an Ecommerce website that your customers will enjoy using. To meet such requirements Magento theme and template design and customization could come as a handy tool.

Magento Web Development is the backbone of Ecommerce websites and helps in making your website stand among your competitors. To stand different from thousands of rest of the Ecommerce websites, you just need to get your website developed in Magento and modify your themes and then claim a unique back ground experience for your website users. This can be done in order to retain more and more prospective customers who visit your website and become the final consumer.

if you need Magento hosting with affordable price, you can visit our site at http://www.asphostportal.com.

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.

Magento has become a popular choice in the last few years because of all the choices and features it gives while developing an ecommerce website. Magento development has brought in a lot of value to the ecommerce sites as with the help of Magento customization one can really make a website that has the uniqueness required to stand out in the crowd of thousands of similar websites available on the web. Not only this but the ease with which Magento development helps you create and manage your site is proving to be a feature that bring in the quality to create useful websites.

As we all know that most of the businesses are dealing online which gives leverage to your business in the sense that helps in transgressing the physical boundaries and you can reach out to your customers irrespective of your location. This is why ecommerce websites have become so important in the business world. Similarly to handle something this important you need to find a way that will make sure the success is achieved and Magento development is that very option. It not only helps you to customize your site but also helps you add features like third party payment gateways and shipping features through Magento module development so that you can increase the utility of the site.

Whether you hire a Magento developer or create one of your own, Magento is the right choice. Magento module development has helped in creating many such sites that has seen the development of ones business to quite an extent helping their owners to expand and create better business opportunities. Magento themes/ template customization, Magento Module development, Module installation, Custom designed page, Magento template / theme development, Unified payment gateway integration, Magento backend and store management training, Extension development are just few of the options that developers have to utilize in creating useful websites.

Since there are many templates and themes available for Magento, the developers can use the options creatively for creating a customized website which will have features that will suit the business requirement meeting the demands of the customers. This is why Magento has scored over other ecommerce platforms.

So if you want to create better business avenues and want to serve your clients better than create a website that has your signature style and represents your business. Magento development and Magento customization is the right choice for such a purpose.

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.

Magento hosting is currently available from hundreds of thousands of providers. The decision of what Magento hosting company to use can be the difference between the success and the demise of a Magento shopping cart website. While any Magento hosting, eCommerce hosting, or even generic web hosting company may look the same at first glance- placed in very simple terms, nothing could be further from the truth. There are three key elements we are going to be observing:

- Reliability
- Security
- Performance

While these again may appear like generic enough terms to select any web hosting company, they are not. Let's review each of these topics by how they apply specifically to Magento hosting, in hopes to reveal who the few realistic Magento hosting companies really are.

Reliability

It's a simple fact that it is too easy to start a web hosting company. Most hosting companies are "hobby hosts", or one-man shows. They have no systems administration staff, or customer service staff over off hours. They do not have administrative access to the servers that host your site virtually, and certainly not physically. They are resellers with no experience in how to correctly host a web site, and a very low chance of staying in business for very long. Magento has system requirements that are not enabled by default in a very large percentage of the web hosting companies out there, and will likely not function optimally, or possibly even at all, if your web host has not tuned a web hosting environment to play nicely with Magento. These web hosting companies will not have the ability to meet the unique web hosting support demands of your Magento shopping cart.

The first thing that you should look at when choosing a Magento hosting company is how long they have been in business. Companies on the official Magento Enterprise Hosting Partner list are ideal. Firstly, these companies know the ins and outs of the Magento application on day one, and will not be left experimenting on your hosting when problems happen. Some of the companies on the official list, such as Nexcess, have been working directly with Magento for over a decade. The number of Magento hosting companies that this can be said for can be counted on one hand, but are a great place to start your search.

Security

Security is a topic that's crucial for any eCommerce web site. If your site stores valuable financial info such as credit card numbers and personal contacts, as most Magento shops do, the severity of this topic is multiplied. No organization can afford to risk the devastating effects of having such data compromised. Many Magento hosting environments consist of private, virtual partitions of a server. This protects against a number of potential exploits that can be opened up by irresponsible webmasters that might otherwise share a server with your Magento shopping cart site.

Whatever company you choose for Magento hosting, it's a good idea to do daily PCI (payment card industry) scans, using a service such as ScanAlert or McAfee Secure. In addition to the extra assurance that these badges give your visitors (which have been proven to drastically improve conversions by bolstering trust), this also means your Magento hosting remains safe. New exploits come out every day, and countless web hosting companies never test for PCI compliance. Before ordering hosting, ask your host if they are PCI compliant, but don't stop there- test it yourself!

Performance

Performance tuning is a topic not to be taken lightly in a Magento hosting service, and overlooking the impact of this factor is perhaps the most common mistake that companies make when selecting their Magento host. Did you know that studies have repeatedly proven that users gravitate drastically towards faster web sites? Think about it. No venue is more competitive to sell your product that the Internet. If two Magento shopping carts have the same products, but one is consistently just 10% faster, which would you gravitate towards?

This trend has become so clear, that Google has taken to penalizing slower web sites in their search results. In fact, the search giant is so serious about penalizing your slow web server, that speeding up your web site is directly stated in their Webmaster Guidelines as a way to make your site rank better in their results. While Magento is pretty fast out-of-the-box, it won't perform up to spec unless you are in a Magento hosting environment tuned for Magento, and overall performance. Such performance gains can be found by looking at Magento's official Enterprise Hosting Partners, referenced on the Magento web site, as a number of these hosts have developed isolated Magento hosting environments tuned specifically towards speeding up the unique behavior of a Magento shopping cart.

In conclusion,

1. Don't make the same mistake that most amateur Magento webmasters make. Take the time to learn about your Magento hosting provider before your order service, and they will treat you well!

2. We have been in this business for years and you can trust your site with us. You just spend $5.00/month to get professional magento hosting.

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.

If you are installing Magento directly on your server, then you may get some errors while opening the installation wizard on your browser, i.e, 500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR. Its mainly because of the wrong FILE PERMISSIONS.

The best way to solve this issue is here,

1. Download Magento Cleanup Tool
2. Unzip magento-cleanup.php to the root directory where Magento is installed.
3. Browse to http://yourdomain.com/magento/magento-cleanup.php

Hope it 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.

Some of you might have worked on Magento.

I am listing here points for connecting another database from Magento.

1) Suppose your database for Magento Project is named ‘magento’.
2) There is one other database named ‘wp’.
3) For using this database inside Magento, you need to setup connection in ‘config.xml’ file which
resides in ‘urmagentodirectory/app/etc’
4) In ‘config.xml’ there is a tag ‘’ inside which default connection is setup, you need to write this code under this.

<wp_setup>
    <connection>
    <host>< ![CDATA[hostname]]></host>
    <username>< ![CDATA[username]]></username>
    <password>< ![CDATA[password]]></password>
    <dbname>< ![CDATA[wp]]></dbname>
    <model>mysql4</model>
    <initstatements>SET NAMES utf8</initstatements>
    <type>pdo_mysql</type>
    <active>1</active>
    </connection>
</wp_setup>
<wp_write>
    <connection>
    <use>wp_setup</use>
    </connection>
</wp_write>
<wp_read>
    <connection>
    <use>wp_setup</use>
    </connection>
</wp_read>

5) Now you can use this connection by following

<?php
$read = Mage::getSingleton('core/resource')->getConnection('wp_read');
$write = Mage::getSingleton('core/resource')->getConnection('wp_write');
?>

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.

There are a few articles and extensions I've come across showing how to add "Featured Products" on the home page of Magento. The problem is that none that I have read, seem to fully tackle the issue of being compatible with Magento 1.4.x (Magento 1.4.0.1 at the time of this writing) AND fully using Magento's features while being fairly easy to implement (i.e. without adding complicated, unnecessary,redundant or outdated code).

Here's a fairly simple way you can add a featured product listing using the standard Magento files, which should work for any version of Magento.

In your Magento /admin section:

1. Create a category as usual (you can put it in any path) and call it, e.g., "Featured Products" and make sure to note the "ID:XX" number. You can set this directory to "Active:NO" if you don't want it to display in your category listing on the front end of your site or just leave it as is. You can leave everything else at the default settings.

2. Go to each product, that you want to appear under "Featured Products", and edit as usual, but this time put a check mark next to the new directory you created "Featured Products". Do this for every product you want to be a "Featured Product". Easy enough.

3. Now... go into your CMS --> Pages and select your home page (you can identify which is for the home page, by looking at the url key which would be something like "home")

4. Click the "Content" tab--switch to HTML editor (non-wysiwyg) and paste in the Content text area:

<div class="featured-products">
<h2 class="heading">Featured Products</h2>
{{block type="catalog/product_list" category_id="YOURCATIDNUMBER" template="catalog/product/list.phtml"}}
</div>

since my category id # was ID:36, I would do the following

<div class="featured-products">
<h2 class="heading">Featured Products</h2>
{{block type="catalog/product_list" category_id="36" template="catalog/product/list.phtml"}}
</div>

Save, and you're done.... You will be presented with a listing of the "Featured Products" on your home page.

- NOTE: you can make a copy of the list.phtml file and name it, e.g. "feature-products.phtml" if you need to make further edits to the listing. Also, if you've upgraded to magento 1.4 , it may be a good idea to copy the latest template file from:

app/design/frontend/base/default/template/catalog/product/list.phtml

and paste this into your template directory overwriting the old.

5. However, if you want it to appear in a grid--i.e. more than the single column, which you will get by default--then all you need to do is edit your CSS file…
Simply add this to your css file used to style your site (I put my at the bottom of my css file):

/* View Type: Featured products, list changed to grid */
.featured-products { width:100%; float:left; clear:both; padding:0;  }
.featured-products .products-list { margin:0; padding:0; border:0px solid red; float:left;}
.featured-products .products-list li.item { list-style:none; list-style-image:none; border:1px solid #D8D9D9; background:#FFFFFF; margin:0 3px 3px 0; width:205px; float:left; height:400px; padding:8px; }
.featured-products .products-list h2.product-name { margin:6px 0 6px 0; padding:0;   }
.featured-products .products-list h2.product-name a { font:bold 12px/14px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; display:block;}
.featured-products .products-list .product-image { float:none; }
.featured-products .products-list .product-shop { float:none; width:auto; margin:0; padding:0;}
.featured-products .products-list .price-box { float:none;}
.featured-products .products-list .desc { float:none; font:normal 11px/13px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin:6px 0; display:block; width:100%; float:left; }
.featured-products .products-list .desc .link-more { display:block; }
.featured-products .products-list .add-to-links { display:none; /*i hide this since I don't want to show "compare" link on the featured section */}

note the critical usage of ".feature-products" class, which we wrapped around the "Featured Products" block in the CMS home page--without that, this won't work, as you don't want to mess with the regular listing throughout the site, you just want to make the list view into a grid view for the "Featured Products" only.

To change the width and height of your grid, simply change the width and height under

.featured-products .products-list li.item {}

Alright, then…

That should do it... a pretty simple way to create a "Featured Products" section on the home page of Magento, that should be compatible with any current, past, or future Magento versions

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.

To install a theme from Magento Connect you need to follow certain steps which are explained below (Advance users may skip few steps):

1. Select the theme by browsing the huge Magento theme archive. OR, If you know the direct URL of your favourite theme just open it’s Magento connect URL

2. Now, you will see a button right under the theme image called “Get Extension Key”. You need to click “Get Extension Key” and agree to extension license agreement.



3. After you select agree checkbox and click “Get Extension Key” you will see the Magento extension key right there itself (displayed in the box). You need to paste this extension key in your store’s Magento connect tab. Keep it safe.

4. Copy this Magento extension key. E.g. It will look like “magento-community/Magik_Autocomplete”

5. In order to install this theme into your Magento store you need to login to your store admin panel and go to System->Magento Connect->Magento Connect Manager. Magento connect manager will ask you to login again. You need to use your store admin login credentials to get past the login screen.



You need to paste the theme extension key copied from the Magentocommerce.com’s Magento connect here.

Magento connect checks for the extension key validity and downloads the theme on your system. Depending upon your internet connection speed (bandwidth) and theme size it will take time to install. These extension keys are specifically created with a unique combination so that there is no confusion over which extension to download. If you have correct extension key and there are no errors in theme or your internet bandwidth you will not see any error messages. In case there are any error messages try downloading and installing again. If you do not succed at all then you can contact the theme owner or ask questions in the theme documentation tab.

6. Soon after you see “Theme successfully installed” message go to System->Configuration->Design->Themes and provide the theme name in Default field (which will change your default theme to this new theme) and click “Save Config” button at the top right corner of your screen.



7. A Magento theme revolves around different columns in your theme layout. In case your store home page doesn’t load properly and shows weird design then go to CMS->Manage Pages. You will notice that there are two different layouts for the home page (may be more depending upon how many themes you have tried in the past). Based on your new theme layout disable all the other home page layouts. You can easily disable/enable the layouts by clicking “Enabled” or “Disabled” links provided in the status field.



8. Check your home page if the store is looking just like your new theme, you are done. If you still see problems chances are that you haven’t disabled the correct home page layout. Repeat step 7 until you see a correct store home page (not required if you have only two home page layouts showing in your “Manage Pages” section.

This was the easiest and fastest way of installing a Magento theme using Magento Connect manager.

Many Magento theme sites don’t publish their theme template in Magento connect (sometimes their themes do not pass through Magento connect guidelines). These themes are provided directly by the theme owner sites. If you are interested in downloading a Magento theme from such sites then following are the steps required to install a Magento theme within your existing Magento installation.

How To Install A Downloaded Magento Theme

Unlike single template themes (WordPress) Magento themes are quite different as its layout depends on four elements i.e.

- Layout – Present is (app/design/frontend/your_interface/new_theme/layout/)
- Templates – Present in (app/design/frontend/your_interface/new_theme/template/)
- Skins – Present in (skin/frontend/your_interface/new_theme/)
- Locale – Present in (app/design/frontend/your_interface/new_theme/locale/)

In order to install and integrate a new theme you need to follow few steps more than what you are accustomed to follow in case of wordpress themes.

If you have already downloaded your preferred Magento theme then here is how you can install and integrate this new theme into your existing Magento installation.

- Uncompress the zip file containing theme templates (you can use winrar or winzip to uncompress files on windows machine or use unzip zipfilename.zip to uncompress files on Linux server)
- Copy entire app folder of your new theme under Your_Magento_Installation/app/design/frontend/default/ so it becomes like Your_Magento_Installation/app/design/frontend/default/new_theme
- Copy entire skin folder of your new theme under Your_Magento_Installation /skin/frontend/default/ so it becomes like Your_Magento_Installation/ skin/frontend/default/ new_theme
- Now, as you have added your newly downloaded theme in your Magento store you need to login to your Magento store admin to tell Magento which theme to use as layout.
- Sometimes Magento Cache doesn’t let you see your changes instantly. In order to test your new theme it would be wise to disable cache for the time being. Go to System > Cache Management and select “Disable” then click “Save Cache”. Once you are done with all the steps Enable the cache again.
- Now go to System -> Configuration and select the Design Tab.
- Type the name of your new theme which you have copied in your Magento installation in front of skin (Images/CSS) input box and click “Save Config”.
- Optional – If you have downloaded a widget ready Magento template then you need to install the widget provided with the theme. In order to install Magento theme widget you have to go to CMS -> Static Blocks and click on “Add New Block”. Based on your widget installation instructions you have to add your new widget and activate that using this new widget block. Finally select “Enabled” and click “Save Block”. Go and select “Custom Design” Tab and in Layout select “Homepage” otherwise your widget won’t show on home page.
- Optional – Home page of default Magento store is a CMS block so you have to provide custom code there in order to display something on home page. To do so you have to go to CMS- > Manage Pages and select “Home page” and in the content area type the home page content code which comes up with your new theme. You can change this area anytime you want.

All set. Open up a new page on your browser and type in your store name to see the new theme. Your new Magento theme is ready to be used.

I have installed a New Magento Theme but i can’t see any products showing up, why?

Well, It can only happen in case of a new store. You need to follow few steps to fix this problem

- Go to Catalog -> Manage Categories
- Select the category you want to show on your Homepage and look for its ID.
- Go back to CMS -> Manage Pages and select Homepage
- Paste the code for showing Products on home page with the selected category ID.

I hope this is quite comprehensive tutorial for installing Magento themes. I would love to hear your thoughts, views and experiences. Please leave me a comment and let me know.

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

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.

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.

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.