Awesome, Talented and Eager PHP Magento Developers Wanted

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Benjamin

Hi there potential employee, are you a PHP Developer? Looking for a job in the Manchester area? We’re still hiring … We are Sonassi, a Manchester based PHP development agency that specialises in Magento development. We specialise in the creation of e-commerce solutions, using Magento as the platform for all of our projects. There are two big aspects to our business, one is Magento web development (our key focus) and the other is Magento web hosting (we have our own rack-space and equipment in data centres across Manchester). Right now, we are looking to grow our current extraordinary team and have PHP developer positions to fill. Sound interesting, read on … The job role You will be required to build new websites (both front-end and back-end development), maintain existing websites, speak to customers on the odd occasion (we like our customers to speak direct with who they are working with), … Continue reading →

RedHat

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Benjamin

On Debian/Ubuntu The most straightforward installation is pretty easy using tomcat and your package manager. The dependencies will be met automatically. apt-get install tomcat6 On CentOS/RedHat You need to grab some alternative repo’s to make this possible Eg. rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm Then you can install the package from yum yum install yum-priorities ant tomcat6 tomcat6-admin cd /usr/src/ mkdir sun-java cd sun-java Now it gets a little trickier. Sun used to permit direct downloads; but they now have a stupid session validation in place – so download the binary via your PC and upload it to the machine. You need both the Linux JDK and JRE. The commands would have been: wget -O jdk.rpm.bin http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/6u29-b11/jdk-6u29-linux-x64-rpm.bin wget -O jre.rpm.bin http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/6u29-b11/jre-6u29-linux-x64-rpm.bin You can alternatively use OpenJDK wget http://jpackage.org/jpackage50.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/jpackage50.repo yum install -y java-1.6.0-openjdk Once you’ve uploaded the binaries chmod +x *.bin ./jre.rpm.bin ./jdk.rpm.bin ln -s /var/lib/tomcat6 … Continue reading →

Magento with Varnish

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Benjamin

Is Varnish right for you? Varnish isn’t the be-all and end-all of Magento performance. Its great to offset load from bots & window-shoppers – but it shouldn’t be your first port of call to actually making your store faster. In fact, implementing Varnish should be the last performance modification to your store. Only drop it in once you are seeing the page load times Magento is capable of delivering without it (Eg. <600ms page load times). Your store still needs to be fast As Varnish still requires at least a single page load to prime the cache, it means your un-cached performance still needs to be very good. A vast majority of unique URLs (layered navigation hits, search queries etc.) will never really end up being served from Varnish unless either: a) Your TTLs are so high, that a search query from 4 days ago is still valid today b) … Continue reading →

The Best Magento Server Set Up

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Benjamin

We recently came across an all-too-commonly asked question over at Stack Exchange – that was worthy of a lengthy answer on our blog. Our client we are currently working with has a requirement that first response from the web server must come in under 200ms in the UK. Currently under 2 dedicated web servers under load balancer and 1 db server, we are coming in at 800ms. The site at the moment has less than 5 customers, 2 products, 4 categories, there is no frontend to the site at the moment, it is style free and image free. It is also being run on EngineX with Varnish. Can anyone give me any advice on web server setups? Why is ours coming in slowly? What can you recommend to optimize this? Need to get 400% quicker! Here’s what we had to say You won’t achieve those figures without the aid of … Continue reading →

Magento Debug Process

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Benjamin

Debugging is a bit of an art, but something that can easily be mastered by following a simple regiment. Follow each point until you finally reach a solution. Enable PHP Errors This is key to most issues. For security or other reasons, PHP error display could likely be disabled by default by your PHP configuration. You can enable errors with a more permanent solution, or something merely more temporary. Permanent solution For Apache/mod_php users In your document root .htaccess file – just drop this at the top. php_flag display_startup_errors on php_flag display_errors on php_flag html_errors on php_flag log_errors on php_value error_log /home/path/public_html/var/log/system.log For Nginx/fastcgi users In your Nginx virtualhost configuration, in either the final location .php { directive, or in the fastcgi_params file (if you have one specified) fastcgi_param PHP_VALUE display_startup_errors=on; fastcgi_param PHP_VALUE display_errors=on; fastcgi_param PHP_VALUE html_errors=on; fastcgi_param PHP_VALUE log_errors=on; fastcgi_param PHP_VALUE error_log=/home/path/public_html/var/log/system.log; Temporary/Universal solution For any platform Edit the … Continue reading →