It is a proud moment for us to introduce our monthly blog named “MageSquare Monthly”. Here, we will cover our monthly activities in the field of Magento, progress on our Magento projects and an overview of what RLTSquare is all about.
Imagine 2018
The highlight of the month was our participation in Magento Imagine 2018 in Las Vegas, the only Magento agency in Pakistan to do so. We attended the keynote sessions, caught-up with old friends and made some new along the journey.
We also had interesting meetings with the influencers of the Magento world, such as Kalen Jordan and Ben Marks. Kalen was particularly happy on receiving ‘pure honey’ from Pakistan and gave us a shout-out on Twitter as well. On our tour, we met some old and relatively newer clients as well; Chris from Dr Nutrient, Jarod from 911Custom etcetera.
Berg Project – Migration From Magento 1 to Magento 2
The highlight of this project in April included a creation of a fine report of the orders received on his Magento website. The default report does not include the filters that the client wanted so a customization was done to introduce: duration in which orders were received, order status, categorization of orders by country, region and city, tax and shipping calculation in each state etcetera. So, for instance, taking an example of an order, the client can check the numbers of orders in California, and break it down to Los Angeles and compare the tax calculation for the orders received from the New York region. This can finally be taken to another level in the sense that client will be able to see how much profits are being generated from each state/city.
One challenge that we faced in the above was the sheer size and number of orders for which this was to be done. This was causing the memory to be exhausted, so we needed to optimize the server and imported only those fields that were required by the client. Other tasks for the month included website styling, homepage design, cart page customization and website responsiveness. Another feature wanted by the client was the appearance of the page load icon, while this would have taken 1-2 days in Magento, we achieved this within a couple of hours using simple jQuery/Ajax.
Moreover, the client’s second requirement is to create a multi-site. We have started to work on this, and have edited the homepage design so far. While creating the multi-site, we faced hurdles as the server was nginx and configuration files were altered to make it work. This requirement will take at least couple of months in May. His second multi-site is going to sell ice-creams. Yum!
EEZY – Local Magento Build And a Complete ECommerce Solution
EEZY is a one of its kind online grocery and shopping solution like never before for the Pakistani market. Powered by two enthusiasts, EEZY aims to disrupt Pakistan’s online eCommerce market by having in-house logistics and warehousing facility.
This month was quite challenging in terms of the back and forth exchanges from the client. The PSD designs given by EEZY management were created. However, after creating pixel-perfect designs, the client claimed that the PSDs were not according to his vision of the store and we need to copy what major stores like Daraz.pk have done on their online websites. Then, we had to overwrite all the work done and created designs similar to the leading stores of Pakistan. This was a challenge at first since the client wanted some features from one store and some from another store, although it did take some time, we managed to paint the client’s vision on Magento’s canvas. As a process, we kept the previous instance as well and incorporated the new changes as a child theme.
On the backend, two Magento soldiers are working on vendor selection module for EEZY. This basically included work on the radius around the customers’ location to select the nearest and most profitable vendor (for EEZY). The factors considered here were the cost of the product, distance, weight and price charged by the vendor. Moreover, work has started on creating a subscription model as well that allows weekly, fortnight and a monthly subscription of grocery items.
In addition, extensive work was done on the checkout customization for EEZY. This was a challenging part as the checkout is going to be 180-degree of the Magento core checkout process. Also, there were 10 different shipping methods integrated depending on which group the ordered item belongs. If any product group overlaps, then in that scenario, the shipping method would be same and a discount will be given on the cost. Lastly, work on ‘hot deals’ and ‘trending products’ was also done on the product page and code for user location was improved.
All in all, it was a good month in terms of progress on EEZY and we managed to meet the client’s expectations for the month.
J. – Magento 2 Store Ongoing Maintenance
This was a vital month for J. as they had a sale planned on their Magento 2 store. The last sale, on 23rd March, had issues and lessons and as a result, a checklist was created to overcome past mistakes. These included the creation of one-click TCS label shipment print, the addition of order weights and elimination of the phenomenon of duplicate orders by identifying same session ids. Also, to avoid breaching the limit, Amazon email server was configured as well prior to the sale.
There were issues on the admin panel as well, the J. team was unable to see which admin had what access rights and what action are they performing. So, a check was created for this to monitor all admin activity and introduce admin roles in the backend admin panel.
Another thing that we worked on was customizing how the header total appeared because previously the addition was such that a product was of 500 PKR but the header total displayed 1000 PKR. This resulted in customer confusion and after pointing this error in the UI we proceeded to make it user-friendly. Moreover, categories and CMS blocks were created to display a new catalogue magazine on J. website.
Stichmob – Magento Website Customization
For Stichmob, we are in the second month of this project and the tasks included customization of the progress bar while running shirt campaigns. Moreover, performance optimization of the site was a major landmark as we were able to increase the pagespeed insight score from 20 to around 70. For that, we engaged in the following processes:
- Varnish Cache Management
- Nginx server with browser caching
- Minify HTML, CSS and Javascript
- Cleaning code from back-end
- Gzip compression in Nginx server
- Enabling flat catalogue
- Implementing a CDN
We also introduced a featured category for the designer with the most successful running campaign for his shirt design. Furthermore, there were some routine bug fixes, homepage design revamp, addition of new blocks UI fixes etcetera. More to come on this in May.