BIOSTALL

Comparing products in Magento is a useful feature that allows potential customers to handpick a selection of items that they are interested in and view the differences between them side-by-side in a single grid.

When recently developing a Magento site and including this ‘Compare’ feature, only a handful of attributes were appearing in my comparison grid and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why only these select few were showing. If you’re experiencing the same problem, follow the steps below to see how I resolved this issue:

Step 1
Login to your Magento admin panel.

Step 2
Navigate to ‘Catalog > Attributes > Manage Attributes’ and you will see a grid that contains all your attributes. The furthest right-hand column titled ‘Comparable’ is the one that interests us here. The attributes that have ‘Yes’ in this column are the ones that will appear in the popup grid.

Step 3
Edit the attributes that you want to add/remove from being compared by changing the ‘Comparable on Frontend’ dropdown accordingly.

If you don’t see the changes immediately remember to clear your cache.

SagePay, previously known as Protx, has always been a popular payment option for both myself and customers when working with e-commerce sites, primarily because of easy integration, good documentation and quick support response times when issues have cropped up.

Three types of integration are offered when working with SagePay; Form, Direct and Server. Due to PCI DSS compliance (or lack of) I’ve always leaned towards using the Form method. The result being that the user is taken to the SagePay website upon checkout completion to fill in their card details, and then redirected back.

A recent (and my first) project using Magento which required SagePay functionality adding was also going to use this method. “Easy” I thought. A quick trip to Magento Connect would surely flood me with various extensions to do just this. Oh how wrong I could be…

After a couple of hours looking I could only find extensions that catered for the Direct method of payment. I did find one plugin that was created back when SagePay was known as Protx that sounded just like it would fit my needs. One installation of this plugin, one ruined Magento, one backup restoration and one stressed out developer later, I was back to square one. Turns out the plugin was only compatible with older versions of Magento, pre 1.3.2.

Finally, after a couple more hours looking my research had paid off. I stumbled across an extension, titled ‘SagePay (formerly Protx) Form‘, that was only released in February 2010 and was still in it’s first beta release. After installing and testing the plugin it did exactly what I needed. Easy to setup, no errors and a successful first dummy payment, I was over the moon.

I recommend to anyone looking for a Magento SagePay Form module to download this extension and save themselves the time and effort in looking for others.

MS Internet Blog and extension installation instructions.