I have come up with a system of managing my emails in Mail (OS X only) that has helped me tremendously in managing the dozens of emails I receive each day. Before this system, I used to mark emails as unread that I needed to take action on. This became very unwieldy as I would lose track of what I had read vs what I just needed to take action on at a later point. I had many emails fall through the cracks, and urgent emails didn’t get regarded as promptly as they should have.

To solve this problem, I spent time experimenting with Mail’s Smart Mailboxes. I wanted a Smart Mailbox that showed me only unread + flagged messages. This would allow me to read a message, and if I needed to regard it at a later point, I could just flag it (Cmd + Shift + L) and know that my mailbox would force me to see it until I unflagged the message. If you are familiar with Gmail’s new Priority Inbox functionality, this is system is essentially that (minus the algorithms that Gmail has that removes irrelevant emails from your Priority Inbox – eg, I get emails from a Cron system every night that Priority Inbox would exclude).

Mail’s Smart Mailbox functionality forced me to create three different Smart Mailboxes to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish, with two of them feeding my “CLS” Smart Mailbox which is my equivalent of Gmail’s Priority Inbox.

Something to note about this setup: When you’re in the CLS Smart Mailbox and you read an email, that email will continue to show in that mailbox until you either restart Mailbox or click to another mailbox and then click back to CLS. This is sometimes nice, but other times can be a nuisance.

I would highly recommend you trying out this email management system.  It’s revolutionized my email world, and maybe it will revolutionize yours?  If you have questions on how to set it up, feel free to ask in the comments.

Do you have a site with product images of varying proportions? It can be annoying when Magento gives you that white border to make your product image square. Here’s how customize what color that background is: just add backgroundcolor(‘000’, ‘000’, ‘000’)before the resize() method

<code>
<img src="<?php echo $this->helper('catalog/image')->init($this->getProduct(), 'thumbnail',<br/> $_image->getFile())->backgroundcolor('000', '000', '000')->resize(100); ?>" ... />
</code>

Better yet, get rid of the background using keepFrame(false):

<img src="<?php echo $this->helper('catalog/image')->init($this->getProduct(), 'thumbnail',<br/> $_image->getFile())->keepFrame(false)->resize(100); ?>" width="100"  ... />

Resizing after keepFrame(false) will resize the largest dimension. Don’t forget to delete your image height and width attributes (if need be)!

Here’s (most of) the places you’ll want to change these:

• catalog/product/view/media.phtml
• checkout/cart/item/default.phtml
• catalog/product/list.phtml

There may be a few more but I bet you can find them. Enjoy your no longer square (white background) images!

If you’ve ever looked at a var_dump() or var_export() of an order, quote, or invoice object, you might have noticed there are a long list of numbers that are present in that object. Here is a sample taken from an order object:

    'base_currency_code' => 'USD'
    'store_currency_code' => 'USD'
    'order_currency_code' => 'USD'
    'global_currency_code' => 'USD'
    'store_to_base_rate' => '1.0000'
    'store_to_order_rate' => '1.0000'
    'subtotal' => '369.7500'
    'tax_amount' => '0.0000'
    'shipping_amount' => '9.8600'
    'grand_total' => '379.6100'
    'discount_amount' => '0.0000'
    'base_subtotal' => '369.7500'
    'base_discount_amount' => '0.0000'
    'base_tax_amount' => '0.0000'
    'base_shipping_amount' => '9.8550'
    'base_grand_total' => '379.6050'
    'shipping_tax_amount' => '0.0000'
    'base_shipping_tax_amount' => '0.0000'
    'base_to_global_rate' => '1.0000'
    'base_to_order_rate' => '1.0000'
    'subtotal_incl_tax' => '0.0000'
    'base_subtotal_incl_tax' => '0.0000'

There are a lot of fields here and they can be quite confusing.  The goal here is to help you decipher the numbers and explain what they mean.

Note: If the names of those variables don’t look familiar, it’s probably because you won’t see them in the code anywhere. They are accessible via an object’s accessor methods. So to get the ‘base_grand_total’, you’d need to call $object->getBaseGrandTotal(). Sorry for the confusion!

For starters, though, let’s cover a little background on currency.

Currency

It wouldn’t be a good article about money with some discussion about currency. Most people probably won’t have to worry about currency conversion, however, a look at price information would be incomplete without touching on it since it is vital to decoding it. Lines 139 through 155 in app/code/core/Mage/Sales/Model/Quote.php talk about the currency logic Magento uses as well as what to use and not use when dealing with these values.

/**
     * Currency logic
     *
     * global - currency which is set for default in backend
     * base - currency which is set for current website. all attributes that
     *      have 'base_' prefix saved in this currency
     * store - all the time it was currency of website and all attributes
     *      with 'base_' were saved in this currency. From now on it is
     *      deprecated and will be duplication of base currency code.
     * quote/order - currency which was selected by customer or configured by
     *      admin for current store. currency in which customer sees
     *      price thought all checkout.
     *
     * Rates:
     *      store_to_base & store_to_quote/store_to_order - are deprecated
     *      base_to_global & base_to_quote/base_to_order - must be used instead
     */

Magento provides a hierarchal system for managing a currency. Currency can be set globally, at the store or “base” level (for display), and then at the quote and order level based on the customer’s preference. The global currency is used in the backend for setting up prices on products. Even if a store is configured to use a different currency, the prices for the objects will be converted from the base currency to the currency of the store. This is important because decoding the names of the values on the object will require us to know how Magento handles dealing with multiple currencies. (Even if only one is configured and used.)

Keeping in mind the three tiers, if we look closely at the object we can see the three tiers of currency information stored in the values:

            <span style="background: #ff8c90;">'base_to_global_rate' => '1.0000'</span>
            <span style="background: #ff8c90;">'global_currency_code' => 'USD'</span>
            <span style="background: #690;">'base_currency_code' => 'USD'</span>
            <span style="background: #690;">'base_discount_amount' => '0.0000'</span>
            <span style="background: #690;">'base_grand_total' => '379.6050'</span>
            <span style="background: #690;">'base_shipping_amount' => '9.8550'</span>
            <span style="background: #690;">'base_shipping_tax_amount' => '0.0000'</span>
            <span style="background: #690;">'base_subtotal' => '369.7500'</span>
            <span style="background: #690;">'base_subtotal_incl_tax' => '0.0000'</span>
            <span style="background: #690;">'base_tax_amount' => '0.0000'</span>
            <span style="background: #690;">'base_to_order_rate' => '1.0000'</span>
            <span style="background: #8c90ff;">'discount_amount' => '0.0000'</span>
            <span style="background: #8c90ff;">'grand_total' => '379.6100'</span>
            <span style="background: #8c90ff;">'order_currency_code' => 'USD'</span>
            <span style="background: #8c90ff;">'shipping_amount' => '9.8600'</span>
            <span style="background: #8c90ff;">'shipping_tax_amount' => '0.0000'</span>
            <span style="background: #8c90ff;">'subtotal' => '369.7500'</span>
            <span style="background: #8c90ff;">'subtotal_incl_tax' => '0.0000'</span>
            <span style="background: #8c90ff;">'tax_amount' => '0.0000'</span>

In red, we see the global currency as well as the conversion rate from the base (or the store) rate to the global rate. In green, we see nine fields. In blue, there are eight fields. You can tell from these values that we are looking at the dump from an order object because one of the fields listed is order_currency_code. Since we are looking at an order, we know that the fields that are not prefixed with base_ or global_ are in the currency of the order. The green fields are nothing more than the order’s fields recalculated in the base (or store) currency for ease of access.

Totals, Amount, Tax, & Shipping

So we’ve essentially got seven distinct values to work with:

• discount_amount
• grand_total
• shipping_amount
• shipping_tax_amount
• subtotal
• subtotal_incl_tax
• tax_amount

Discount Amount

This is the dollar value of the discount that was applied to the order.

Shipping Amount

The amount paid for shipping on the entire order.

Shipping Tax Amount

This amount of tax that is paid on the shipping.

Subtotal

The cost of just the products without shipping, taxes, or discounts.

Subtotal Including Tax

This amount of tax that is paid on just the products.

Grand Total

This is the total amount of the order after includes taxes, shipping, and discounts. For an order or quote, this is what would be paid by the customer.

Closing Thoughts

How Magento does it’s calculations is highly configurable. There are many options in the backend that affect how taxes, shipping, and discounts affect the totals and values we’ve seen in this article.

To summarize, Magento stores copies of each of the values in both the currency that the current invoice, order, or quote is in as well as the currency of store.  This allows a programmer to see and use both values.