Magento Rental System Version 1.1.1 Released

This is a smaller release, but includes support for Magento 1.8. It also has some admin speed improvements. If you already have a support/updates subscription please contact us for the files. If not, you can subscribe here: 

If you have not yet purchased a Magento Rental Booking software license, you may do so here. 

New Rental Business Marketing & SEO Web Site

We have launched a new website for rental buiness wishing to learn about marketing & seo. Right now the content is slim, but we plan on greatly expanding this website. Checkout the first article on 10 ways to improve your search engine rankings and a rental software directory. 

Rental System Warehouses Module Add-On Now Available

Need to manage products in multiple warehouses, and intelligently fulfill orders from the proper warehouse given the customer’s address? This module handles all of that.

• Add/edit/delete warehouses
• Each warehouse can have its own address which can be used to estimate shipping costs
• Set how an order is assigned to a warehouse – closest to customer address, or priority order that you set
• Inventory report shows for rentals the quantity per warehouse (rather than combined of all warehouses)
• Orders and Shipping page shows what warehouse the order is for
• (optional) Customer can chose the warehouse they want for their order, but this can be disabled
• If the whole order can’t be fulfilled for one warehouse, order can be split between 2 warehouses
• Each warehouse can have an email address assigned so they are informed via email for their orders
• Orders, invoices, and shipments can be viewed by warehouse

More Info: http://rental-e-commerce-software.com/magento-warehouse-inventory-rental-system.php

Installments / Partial Payments Magento Extension Now Available

What Is The Installments/Partial Payments Module?

This module allows you to increase your sales by not forcing your customer to pay for all of the order upfront. This is very common for rental / hire stores especially. The customer can pay for part of the order, then later comeback to the order and pay for the rest. All the information is recorded in the admin for how many payments have been made, and how many remain.  We have updated installments / partial payments module so that it can now work not just from the customer side, but also from the admin side in the admin create order page. The admin can choose to have the order use installments.

• Admin can set how many installments a customer can make for an order
• Customer can make payments from the customer side
• Admin can submit payments from the admin side for each installment
• Separate invoice is generated for each installment payment made
• Installments report page in the admin showing installment payments made – can be exported to CSV
• Customer can still choose to pay for the whole order at once if they want
• On admin order page, a new installments tab showing all the installments, the amounts, and if they are paid or not

More Info: http://rental-e-commerce-software.com/magento-installments-partial-payments-extension.php

Useful Magento Modules Free and Paid

Free:

Blog: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/blog-community-edition.html

Google Trusted Store: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/google-trusted-stores.html

Ebay/Amazon Integration: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/ebay-magento-integration-order-importing-and-stock-level-synchronization.html

Google Shopping Integration: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/google-content-api-for-shopping.html

System Configuration Search: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/system-configuration-search.html

Multi-Table Rates: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/site-management/shipping/webshopapps-matrixrate-1-multiple-table-rates-extension-certified-bug-free.htmlbased on weight, price, quantity

Admin Order Gride Customizer: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/enhanced-admin-grids-editor.html

Mail Chimp Integration: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/marketing/email-marketing/mage-monkey-mailchimp-integration-4865.html our recommended solution for your email marketing

Product Tabs: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/magento-easytabs.html allows more advanced configuration for product info page

Allow Deleting Orders: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/asperience-deleteorders.html

SMTP Email Settings: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/aschroder-com-smtp-pro-email-free-and-easy-magento-emailing-for-smtp-gmail-or-google-apps-email.html

Paid:

RMA $149: http://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/magento-extensions/user-experience/rma.html

Points & Rewards $299: http://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/magento-extensions/featured/points-and-rewards.html has some very nice features like awarding points for reviews, referrals, purchases

Gift Cards $130: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/gift-cards.html

Live Chat (Zopim) $11.20/month http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/zopim-live-chat.html

Facebook/Twitter/Google+ discounts for likes/tweets/+ $90: http://amasty.com/facebook-twitter-promo.html

Special Occasions coupons $79: http://amasty.com/special-occasion-coupons.html

Extra Checkout Fields $119: http://www.aitoc.com/en/magentomods_checkoutfieldsmanager.html

Extra Address Fields $79: http://amasty.com/address-attributes.html

Menu Editor: $65: http://store.paradoxlabs.com/easy-menus-for-magento.html or $59 Flexible Menus: http://amasty.com/flexible-menu.html

Multi-Fees $149: http://www.mageworx.com/multi-fees-magento-extension.html

Development Toolbar $49 Commerce Bug 2: http://store.pulsestorm.net/products/commerce-bug-2

CRM ZenDesk Integration $39.99 + Zendesk Monthly Fee: http://turbobird.net/pricing-versions

Email Forms $89: http://mageme.com/magento-extensions/webforms-professional-edition.html

PDF Related

PDF Customizer Fooman PDF makes it easier to edit and customize your order, invoice, and other PDFs $61.50: http://store.fooman.co.nz/magento-extension-pdf-customiser.html

Order QR Code Generator Moogento Pickpack $89 allows generating a pick sheet PDF with QR codes for each product: http://www.moogento.com/magento-pickpack-picklist.html

One Page Checkout

Aheadworks $89: http://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/magento-extensions/one-click-checkout.html

Apptha $99: http://www.apptha.com/category/extension/Magento/OneStepCheckout#ratings_review

Magestore $149: http://www.magestore.com/magento-one-step-checkout-extension.html

Aitoc $129: http://www.aitoc.com/en/magentomods_one_page_checkout_booster.html#reviews

Webtex $139.95: http://www.webtexsoftware.com/step-by-step-one-page-checkout-magento-extension

Shipping Labels

UPS Labels $149: http://www.infomodus.com/magento-extensions.html

FedEx Labels $179.99: http://www.cobbconsulting.net/magento-fedex-extension.html

Shipping Manager (Auto Generate & Pay For Shipping Labels For Various Carriers)

Shipworks ($15 - $50/month Depends on Volume): http://www.shipworks.com/shipworks/

Ship Station ($25 - $145/month Depends on Volume): http://www.shipstation.com/features/

SEO

SEO Suite Pro $149: http://www.mageworx.com/seo-suite-pro-magento-extension.html

SEO Suite Ultimate $399: http://www.mageworx.com/seo-suite-ultimate-magento-extension.html

Aheadworks SEO $149: http://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/magento-extensions/ultimate-seo-suite.html

Affiliate Programs

$99 Magestore: http://www.magestore.com/affiliateplus/pricing.html/

$99 Aheadworks: http://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/magento-extensions/magento-affiliate.html

Quickbooks Integration Options

T-hub atandra order manager with quickbooks export $300: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/t-hub-for-quickbooks.html

Cartspan $500 http://www.cartspan.com/Frontpage/

eBridge starts at $1000: http://www.ebridgeconnections.com/blueprint/

Traxian depends on volume: http://www.traxian.com/account/buynow/magento.html

Magnetic One Store Manager $499 + Quickbooks $129: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/store-manager-for-magento.html & http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/quickbooks-integration-addon-for-store-manager-8305.html

Netfira $99/month: http://www.netfira.com.au/Products/magento.aspx

Rent Master Sales Igniter Version 1.0 and 1.1 Updates

Version 1.0 (For Release May 21)

• Added send & return email notices for rental queue products
• Import/export support using regular import/export which can run faster than import/export profiles
• jQuery conflict fixes for custom templates
• Solved bug on sales > orders for filtering by start/end date
• Fix for authorize.net to authorize only deposit amount for deposits
• Is Reservation is now a required field
• Don’t show the deposit sub-total on checkout unless there is a deposit
• PDF shows just start/end date once per order not per product if there is only one start/end date for the order. Same for admin view order page
• Default send/return report to today’s dates
• Adjust rentals admin menu putting stuff under Rental Queue or Reservations for better organization
• Error check if admin adds serial numbers that the product is set to serial number tracking
• Allow $0 rental prices (some clients want to rent out stuff for free)
• Fix for IE on product page for IE versions 9 or older it was not loading the calendars correctly

Version 1.1 (For Release July 2)

• Send & Return overhaul for faster management - will all be done from Sales > Orders and be quicker to do. Click "Ship"  or "Return" and put in the quantity of each item you are shipping and returning. We will also be adding on new filters to this page for late shipments or late returns.
• Site wide blackout dates
• Only show start/end date once on the order view and PDF invoice if the order uses the same start/end dates for the whole order to save space
• Email logging/debugger for checking that your send/return emails and return reminders are sent
• Quantity calendar icon on manage products page to quickly check the availability by date of products without having to go to the separate quantity report
• Global rental dates on customer side - a setting allowing customers to chose the rental dates once for the whole order rather than on the product page
• Extend rental & buyout rental product features

Responsive (Mobile Friendly) Professional Rental Hire Magento Template For $199

Looking to get started with a professional design template? That default Magento template is pretty tired - we'll have to agree! We can install a Rocket Theme Magento template for you for $299. Checkout the designs below.

Templates:

NOTE: Each Design has styles you can chose to vary the colors (chose the style drop down Style changer usually on the top right of each template):

• Graffito
• Kirigami
• Ximenia
• Momentum
• Clarion
• Ionsphere

Of course you still need to purchase a license for our rental system if you don't have one already :) for $499 if you want to use our rental system, but this could be the way to go if you don't want a full customized template. If you need help customizing the designs our hourly rates are $85/hour for things like changing the logo, putting in custom images, etc however the admin panel for the template will probably get you by mostly for doing these type of changes without needing knowledge of web programming.

10 Rental Software System MUST HAVES

Looking for a good rental software system to run your rental hire business? Make sure that the software you chose has the following features:

1. Role based permissions for the administrators. This means that you can create different administration logins that can access only the areas of the admin they need to have access to. Your marketing login might only be able to access your blog. Your data entry person can only access the product catalog. The login for yourself will probably have access to everything.

2. Overview Rental Inventory Calendar to show where all your rental inventory is by day, week, month. Should show how many items are available, and click to show the details of where the inventory is by client.

3. Social Integration. The system should be able to integrate with facebook logins and likes, google + logins and likes, and all other popular social networks.

4. Email confirmations of orders, send confirmations, return confirmations, and return reminders.

5. Product Filtering. Ability to filter products by rental price, product attributes (colors, sizes, categories, features) on the customer side so customers can quickly find what they want.

6. Loads Fast. The rental system you chose should have page load speeds of 1 second or less per page. Studies show that customer buy more from quickly loading web sites.

7. Open Source Rental System. The code for your rental system should be open source. No two rental businesses are the same. Do you need custom features that are not already offered in your rental system? If so you'll need to make sure your rental software is open source so these new features can be coded in.

8. Serial Number Inventory Tracking. This will make sure you can make barcodes or QR 2 dimensional barcodes to stick to each of your products. If your rental system can't handle serial numbers, you will not be able to accurately track your inventory.

9. Tracking Of Send & Return Of Rental Products. Don't try and customize an existing E-commerce system to add rentals. You'll never be able to do so on-time or on-budget. Critical to any rental system is a different form of tracking inventory. You'll need a page that tracks both the send AND return of your products. E-commerce systems are only built for sending, not returning by default.

10. Integration With Major Rental Shipping & Payment Gateway APIs. Make sure your rental software system ties in with the major shipping services like DHL, UPS, FedEx, USPS, etc. For payment gateways you'll probably need Authorize.net, Paypal, Moneris, Sage Pay, Skrillr, etc. Trying to integrate these APIs from scratch will cost you a lot of time and money.

Rental System Software Free Trial On Your Server

Need a free trial of our rental system software to run on your server? No problem. We are now offering 30 day free trials that you can install on your server. Our rental system software is online based and is a rental extension for the already powerful Magento E-commerce Framework. To run our hire rental system you will need:

• Installation of Magento
• Ioncube php loader installed on your server: http://www.ioncube.com/loaders.php

We'll email you the rental extension with the ioncube encoded license files. You can install it using Magento Connect. To signup just use our free trial form on our pricing page.

Excellent New Magento Book Now Available

May the Magento community rejoice! Finally there is a good book out there to learn how to program Magento. It's no longer necessary to piece together bits and pieces of tutorials from all over the net to learn how to program Magento the right way. The book is Magento PHP Developers Guide by Allan Macgregor. This book excels in many ways. It covers topics that other books on Magento ingore or don't cover well. A few of the things I loved about this book:

• Goes step by step through making a real Magento module, not just some hello world or blog
• Teaches about Magento testing techniques
• How to properly deploy Magento and Magento modules
• Covers the admin grid system - how to set them up for new modules or edit them
• Magento layout xml files - how they work
• First few chapters go over all the Magento codebase in a thorough manner - get up to speed on what you need to know very quickly. Much faster than going through the 40 hour fundamentals of magento screencast.
• Covers how to setup Vagrant - though I already had done this it's great to have a resource there for people learning it and how it will help your development

Even if you are already a experienced Magento developer there are sure to be some things for you to learn in here. Obviously Allan researched well this book and is applying the "correct" way of writing Magento modules. If you try and find online tutorials they are often of low quality or plain don't work. This book is different and will save you a lot of time in the Magento learning process. Thanks Allan for writing such a great book! Looking forward to more like this!

I emailed Allan and he emailed back saying he may be writing more books so I'm certainly looking forward to that. It's always been strange to me how such a large E-commerce framework like Magento had such low quality learning resources, but hopefully that will change now!

Book: http://www.packtpub.com/magento-php-developers-guide/book and the official website: http://magedevguide.com/

Magento Rental System

Project Management Software Recomendation - Active Collab

We've used a great deal of project management systems. The top ones being JIRA and Basecamp. We never really liked them though as for a web development company JIRA felt way to complicated, slow, and hard to navigate. It left a lot to be desired. Basecamp was too simple - things like not being able to prioritize tasks, make sub-tasks, and no direct SVN integration really bothered us.

Well finally we came back to Active Collab - and really we can not recommend it enough! It is SUPER fast loading, has everything a web development company could need for project management, handles SVN, and you don't have to pay per month to use it, just one flat fee of $499. Originally that was what kept us back since we usually just pay the $30 - $50/month fees, but the license fee is worth it and of course saves time in the long run.

So if you aren't sure what project management system to use, make sure to give Active Collab a try! www.activecollab.com

Oh - and if Active Collab developers are reading this - please support private github repos for your source code management tool :)

Magento Image On PDF Invoice

Here is a quick module that allows you to display images in your Invoice PDF in Magento. This was taken and combined from 2 other web posts I found here:

1) http://www.webmasterbulletin.net/2009/06/magento-display-product-image-on-invoice-shipping-pdf/873 2) http://inchoo.net/ecommerce/magento/magento-pdf-invoice-with-product-images-extension/

but neither one worked quite the way I wanted so I combined them. All the module does is extend 2 base Magento classes for PDFs, one is for the invoice the other is for the invoice items. It adds to the invoice items class the images code, and to the base invoice class the line header for the Product Image text and adjusts the spacing x values. Both classes are commented so you can check them if you want.

Here is the module: www.rental-e-commerce-software.com/pdf_image.zip

 Install instructions:
1) Upload the app folder to your magento app folder
2) Clear magento cache in admin
3) Try printing a magento invoice

Best WAMP Magento Development Environment

Well, after some screwing around I found what I think is a good dev environment, maybe it will help you. Tried out a few and AMPPS seems really nice as it has latest versions, and a very good control panel. Also it seems faster than WAMP. It has softaculous built-in to it so is easy to test out scripts if needed.

It is:

1) AMPPS

Install from: http://www.ampps.com/download

2) Xdebug Extension

Copy and paste your phpinfo output to: http://xdebug.org/wizard.php and it will show you exactly how to install it.

Here is what I put in php.ini to turn it on:

xdebug.remote_host=localhost

xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp

xdebug.remote_enable=1

Screenshot showing how it can dump out variables at a breakpoint:

3) APC Cache

Download from here: http://downloads.php.net/pierre/ put it in your extensions folder for ampps, and put in php.ini: extension=php_apc.dll

It is nice cause it runs pretty fast and the Xdebug thing is pretty nice for setting breakpoints. It will run up to that breakpoint and dump all the variables as shown in the attached screenshot.

4) Magento Notes

localhost does not work good for some reason logging into the admin it doesn't set cookies right so set your url to be 127.0.0.1/yourfolder/ in your mysql database table > core_configs that is what I found after comparing my install with a softaculous install that is how it does it so that is how it works.

Learning To Program Rental Software for Magento, PHP, etc. "The Right Way"

If you are like me you have tried to learn to program for awhile but never really "got the hang of it." Will I finally got it, and the key to learning it was very simple. Here are my tips:

1) NEVER COPY AND PASTE CODE FROM TUTORIALS - type it all out. This was the biggest mistake I was making. I thought I could read the tutorial and understand it and then I had learned it. Well that is not the case. When you are learning to code, don't copy and paste anything. Type it all out. Yes it's slower, but the process of typing it all out (and maybe after you type it changing a few things to experiment) is the key to learning to program. You will make mistakes as you type out the code. Then when you run it you will get errors. Correcting these errors is actually teaching you how not to make mistakes and how to catch the grammatical side of the programming language.

Copying and pasting code is equivalent to trying to learn a new language like Spanish and recording people that speak it and playing back the recording when you want to talk. Of course that wouldn't work, you'd never learn.

2) The second key to learning to code is to find the right learning resources. Here are the best ones that I have found in order of how good I think they are, they are very popular so you have probably already heard of them:

• Codeschool.com - excellent hands on approach to learning to code with videos and lessons. 
• https://tutsplus.com/ - really well written tutorials - especially the ones by Jeffrey Way. A few of my favorites:
• https://tutsplus.com/course/php-fundamentals/
• https://tutsplus.com/course/laravel-essentials/
• http://net.tutsplus.com/sessions/test-driven-php/
• Lynda.com - try their fundamentals courses on jQuery, PHP, Ruby on Rails, PHP Debugging, LAMP server setup, and MVC frameworks.
• http://sqlzoo.net/wiki/Main_Page - best resource and online lessons I've seen for learning SQL

So what are some key programming languages & concepts you should learn when starting out?

1. HTML & CSS
2. PHP
3. Ruby on Rails - not necessary really but PHP & Ruby are the 2 of the most popular web development languages
4. jQuery
5. GIT file versioning and deployment system
6. How to use Objects and what Object Design Patterns are
7. SQL
8. Photoshop basics for web developers (from lynda.com or tutsplus.com they both have this course)
9. Linux command line basics (also available from tutsplus.com)
10. Try setting up your own LAMP (linux, apache, mysql, php) server using Virtual Box
• https://www.virtualbox.org/ download virtual box here
• download Linux here: http://www.linuxmint.com/ (or whatever your preferred vareity is like Ubuntu or CentOS)
• Install it, follow online tutorial guides for how to get LAMP up and running in your virtual box
• What you learn will be invaluable in your web development career.

Ok So What About Learning Magento?

So now coming to the important point - really to learn Magento you need to know all the concepts above except for Ruby on Rails and GIT. The best way to learn Magento right now is to go through all of Alan Storm's tutorials at his website: http://alanstorm.com/category/magento then also buy his book "no frills magento" and try out those tutorials too. 

We are planning on releasing our own eBook on learning Magento via hands on Module creation. We are not statisfied with the learning materials that are currently out there to learn Magento. We've paid the $350 for the "quickstart to Magento development" directly through Magento Inc. and it's the best one but overpriced and doesn't teach you everything you need to know. We'll keep this blog posted for when we release the eBook. Here are some topics we plan to cover:

• Step by step module creation with explanations along the way of everything that is going on. We are not talking about "hello world" type modules, but actual modules that are useful in the real world like
• Admin sales staff commision calculation
• Request for quote module
• Writing a payment module
• Writing a shipment module
• Shipping labels module
• How to develop Magento modules using Test Driven Development
• Debugging techniques 
• Speed optimization
• Breakdown of available events to tie onto in Magento using observers
• Using the Magento API to show products on another website

Our goal with this eBook is that by the end of reading it and typing out the examples you should be a professional Magento developer and save lots and lots of time over trying to learn Magento via what is currently available online. 

Magento Paypal Recurring Profiles IPN 503 Error Sanbox Mode

This is just a quick post to help those struggling with this error. The issue appears to be that Paypal Sandbox when enabled does not record orders for testing Magento recurring profiles. It will only record the recurring profile. So if you enable Paypal live mode the order recording will then work. So just ignore the IPN 503 error because when you set it live the order recording will then work we wasted a lot of time researching what was wrong but nothing is wrong, it's just a issue with Paypal sandbox. Just make sure that in order to record the orders in Magento you setup the following:

On Paypal settings in Magento:

On Paypal IPN settings at Paypal > profile > my seller settings > ipn notifications

Then after that you should start to see orders being recorded under the recurring profile like this: