Magento: Attaching User Manuals and File Downloads to Products

When selling certain products, it can be beneficial to attach assets to the product such as a user manual or file downloads. Attaching user manuals for niche products can be beneficial to your SEO when the manual is only available online through your store.

How to quickly and easily add user manuals to your store:

Download the following extension from Magento Connect:

• M-Connect Product File Upload
• Install using provided documentation

Some of you may stop here. However this extension isn’t optimal – the text for downloading a products resource appears even when their is not an attachment, and in an awkward position at the bottom of the page.

For us, we would prefer to have a tab added at the top called “Product Resources”.

Creating a custom Magento Tab for our product attachments:

To create your custom tab:

• Open catalog.xml in: /app/design/frontend/default/YOURTHEME/layout/
• Find: block type=”catalog/product_view_tabs”
• Below, add:

  <action method="addTab" translate="title" module="catalog"><alias>prodmanual</alias><title>User Manual</title><block>productupload/productupload</block><template>productupload/productupload.phtml</template></action>

Hide block added under product description:

• From your default theme folder, find “/productupload/productupload.xml”
• Comment out all of catalog_product_view

Now, unfortunately, there are spaces throughout the productupload.phtml file, which means that the tab will display whether there are any uploads or not.

Option 1:
You need to go through the file and remove blank spaces and adjust the “if(count($productupload_Collection) > 0)” statement to prevent the display of the subheading.

Option 2:
Use my productupload.phtml file (this should be placed in app/design/frontend/default/YOURTHEME/template/productupload/ AND renamed to productupload.phtml):
– Download it here