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I’ve made a new Magento extension for submitting your store sitemap to Google, Yahoo, Ask and Bing. My new extension can submit automatically whenever the sitemap is regenerated, or on-demand from the admin UI. More about how I made it and how it works below, but first a little background.
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This post is about the Magento Event system – a full explanation of how it works and a couple of issues I had with it resolved. Hope it is a help for people wrestling with the Magento event dispatch mechanism.

My particular situation was this: when automatically fetching tracking details from our carriers via a Magento cron job, the resulting Google Checkout Magento event did not fire, so the end customer was not receiving the notification properly – even though the ’shipment’ object within Magento was correctly displaying the tracking details.
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In a bid to help solve a weird 404 error that Kevin has been experiencing with the self test I offered him a pre-release copy of my upcoming ‘unified’ Magento email extension. It will support both SMTP and Google Apps/Gmail along with a few new features.

Anyway, if anyone is keen to try the extension please contact me or flick me an email or post a comment and let me know, I’ll send through the files, I’d rather not post it for public availability here yet, because it’s not as stable as I’d like. But expect it very soon!
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I wanted to add a small selection of products to the Magento homepage, and I thought I’d quickly write up how I did it, because it brings together a few little tidbits from around the net. This solution will use a specific category which can either be an actual category with a few products in it (e.g. specials), or one you created specifically for displaying on the home page (let’s call it ‘home page featured’). It takes only 3 simple steps as shown below.
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Wow a month since my last blog post, I’ll have to stop calling this a blog and make it a magazine if these blog posts don’t get more frequent huh?! Anyway, I do have something interesting to report from the world of Magento email extensions, particularly my Google Apps/Gmail extension and my SMTP Pro extension are in for a bit of a shake up.
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