Since I got nothing better to do with my time on a lazy Saturday at home (observe the irony!) I thought it would be nice if I practice a bit my Magento skills and create a module (free, for the community) that lists on the product page items that were bought together with the current product by other customers.

For this first free version (obviosly, 1.0) its not much, just gathers a list of the top products bought together, ordered dynamically by “most ordered” visible (Search, Catalog) items and a little admin setup screen where you can enable/disable the module and gives you the option to choose how many products are shown.

The module, fully compatible with Magento 1.6 and 1.7 (might work with previos versions, haven’t tested it), has its own layout XML, template, block, model and a CSS file, so no core/base files were touched, like a proper module. The only thing left to do is to call the block in your fronend theme’s /catalog/product/view.phtml template ( “echo $this->getChildHtml(‘also_bought’)” ) and that’s it, ready to go!

As future plans, for the next version (which might be commercial, haven’t decided yet):
– the ability to select products in the list and add them to cart;
– more options in the Admin screen (show products from specific categories, exclude certain products/categories, etc)

You can view a live-demo of this here and download the module from here, since the Magento website has some problems (what a shocker!) and couldn’t upload it there tonight. Will keep trying again tomorrow so you can install it throught the Magento Connect app.

By the way – this is the first post in my new Magento category. Yey! 🙂