Knowledge Base
Magento with Varnish
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 … Continue reading
The Best Magento Server Set Up
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 … Continue reading
Magento Debug Process
Debugging is a bit of an art, but something that can easily be mastered by following a simple regimen. 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. … Continue reading
Our Magento Git Guide and Work Flow
We have long been advocates of using SVN - but times have changed and so has the style of the way we work - which is what makes Git such an appealing choice for us. So if you're coming from SVN too, some things worth knowing are: Repositories are de-centralised - With SVN, you have … Continue reading
Quicker Dumping of a Magento MySQL Database for Branching
Any experienced Magento developer will certainly have felt the pain of dumping a multi-gigabyte MySQL database for a Magento store. Which is certainly a tedious process when you want to make a quick branch or rapidly update your staging environment. We're big advocates of branch often and merge often - but this also means updating … Continue reading
Quickly Purge a Magento MySQL Database
I'm sure everyone has got to that point where they need to empty a Magento MySQL database and you've logged into PHPMyAdmin, selected all the tables, then clicked delete. Only to find out only a small proportion can be deleted because of foreign key constraints. But if you persist, running the "select all" and "drop" … Continue reading
Rich Snippets Gone Wrong
With SEO methods evolving, an approach to increasing CTR (click through rates) is to take advantage of Google's Rich Snippets. Running an E-Commerce store (Magento or otherwise), it would be foolish not to take advantage of this offering, either by adding product or review information to your Google listings. Especially since most SEO's have reported … Continue reading
Giving support access to Magento (for EE support) ... with a regex
As part of an EE upgrade, we've just hit a reproducable core bug with 1.11; as we have to focus on the other fixes, we're letting Magento's EE SLA'ed support take care of the core bugs. But, in order to do that, they need access to the machine. The Magento support IPs 207.86.19.64/28 216.127.124.224/27 67.88.151.96/28 … Continue reading
Maintenance page with Nginx with specific permitted access
At the moment, we're in a fairly complicated upgrade of a Magento live store and during the upgrade window, it is necessary to put up a holding page. A simple maintenance.flag file isn't going to cut it for this process, so cutting off users at the web server is more suitable. For this particular customer, … Continue reading
Fully Automated Magento Install Script
As we're a popular Magento hosting and Magento development company, we find ourselves installing Magento quite a lot throughout the day. A few years ago we wrote an installation script, but rudely forgot to share it with the community. You can find it here The features Using the script is really easy Support for CE/EE … Continue reading