Yireo - Extensions, tutorials and blog for Magento and Joomla!

Magento Shop By Brand or Manufacturer

It is one of our lesser known Magento extensions, but still very useful: ByAttribute allows you to build a list of attribute-values - it sounds vague but is actually requested a lot: For instance, to display a list of all manufacturers in your shop, where each manufacturer-link leads to a page with all products of that manufacturer. But there's more.

ByAttribute - hard to explain

While the functionality of ByAttribute is great, it is always a bit harder to explain: It displays a list of manufacturers, yes. But a manufacturer is not a set-value in Magento, it is just an example of a product attribute. So instead of limiting you to create a list of manufacturers, ByAttribute allows you to create a listing of any product attribute you might have. Flexible but hard to explain.

ByAttribute - preferring simple XML-code above complex GUIs

Because ByAttribute is aimed to be very flexible, we have included good documentation: But instead of focussing on a complex GUI, we have decided to use only the tools that Magento theming you normally offers: XML-layout. With Magento, the theming layer is based on blocks and all these blocks are based on XML-code. Using this XML-code you can modify a lot more than you would when just using a GUI - but it requires almost programming knowledge to work with this XML-code in a professional manner.

ByAttribute does not change this: It offers sample XML-code within its module-package, it offers online documentation to guide you through the various options, it offers you a flexible Block-class full with usable PHP-methods and parameters. But it still requires you to know about the difficult bits of Magento. It's therefor not the ideal tool for users who want to click together their Magento shop, but instead, it's ment for real developers who want to work with flexible developer-tools that do not dictate them what to do. We think that's awsome. 

ByAttribute widget

While ByAtribute's core functionality is solid, we have been thinking about new functionality for a while. Magento 1.4 introduced the new concept of widgets, small pieces of functionality that can easily be inserted into CMS-pages for instance. The plan is to work on creating an easy-to-use ByAttribute widget, which should still contain most of the functionality that is now already possible through XML-layout-code. We will baptize that version to 1.0.0, because version 0.9.9 has proved to be very stable. Versioning is a beach.