Magento cheatsheet

How I started with Magento and survived

In place of introduction

I must admit, that most of my programming finished with C and Visual Basic, some time ago, but still, I think could say I have some feel for it.

Until lately I was satisfied with HTML and CSS and some line of PHP or Java. That way I could create Joomla or Wordpress themes, modify existing ones, or program macro in Excel (actually OO Calc.

But one nice sunny day, ok it was gloom grey day in December, my boss told me, that I am in charge of  development of our company web store. We had programmer and I should cooperate with the guy, checking his work, make some graphics adjustments etc. All in all easy task, that should not take a lot of my time.

So, what did I learn from this in the end - never trust another programmer with your life. Guy had almost zero time and promised a lot to my boss. And so, somewhere in beginning of January I was stuck with Magento installation, without programmer, without any real knowledge about magento and with deadline for web page. Did I back down, did I survive, did I make my boss love me or fire me? Well, let me put it this way, I kept the job, I learned a lot about Magento, quite some PHP and I even earned small bonus on top of my salary. 

Here I will describe some small modifications I made. I can not promise you solutions to all your problems, but I do hope that some of solutions will come handy to some of you and will make your life easier. Not to mention, that this will be my personal cheat sheet for future Magento battles.

I will slowly build list as time permits. All modifications were made to magento 1.5x version

How to add new link in menu to new CMS page created in magento