Knowledge Base
Magento Checklist for Design Elements
We are starting a new Magento Enterprise project today and whilst populating some of the base items in the Basecamp project, I thought it might be of use to the community to list the basic minimum items we add to our templating/skinning check-list for a Magento website. Ignoring any project specific pages/customisations, the following list … Continue reading
Simple cPanel Backup Rotation Script
cPanel has a brilliant backup facility built in, however it only keeps 1 backup per backup type. So if you have daily backups enabled running every day of the week, your previous day's backup will be lost - the same applies to weekly and monthly backups. This can be a bit of a nuisance if … Continue reading
Stop Magento Permissions Errors ... Permanently
When working with customers not hosting with Sonassi Hosting, we continually run into the same permissions errors - along with the rest of the Magento using world. This isn't an issue if PHP runs as the same user as your FTP/SSH user, but if they are different, all kinds of headaches ensue. Whenever granted root … Continue reading
A Poor Mans Staging/Live with WordPress and Rsync
Firstly, this isn't meant to be a serious contender for 'proper' version control, Eg. Subversion or Git, or anything of the kind. But instead just a nice little way of managing a WordPress staging and live site, so that you can perform simple design tweaks/changes on a staging site and roll out those changes gracefully … Continue reading
Staging / Development / Live SVN with Magento
Whether you are making £10 per hour, or £100,000 per hour - making adjustments to your live site is a practice best avoided. Whenever we start work on a new site, the first thing we do is set up an SVN repository and the relevant staging/dev domains. In this example, we are going to create … Continue reading
Quickly associate images to your Magento products without using dataflow
Dataflow is great and does allow the association of multiple images natively, but upon wanting to add around 2,500 product images to a catalogue in Magento 1.5.0.1 - we noticed that they have broke the core support in dataflow for this,great! So instead, we just knocked up a quick script which would associate images to … Continue reading
Magento 1.4 Install Errors
We imagine there is going to be a few, but here are the ones we have come across so far: 1 Unsupported operand types ... Hostname.php Solution: Comment out line +471 in ./lib/Zend/Validate/Hostname.php #$regexChars += include($this->_validIdns[strtoupper($this->_tld)]); 2 Invalid mode for clean Solution: Remove ./app/code/core/Zend/Cache/ 3 Invalid argument supplied for foreach ... toolbar.phtml This is due … Continue reading
Magento/WordPress injection vulnerability
We had been recently contacted by an agency (non-Sonassi Hosting) keen to resolve a Magento redirect on checkout bug. We quickly realised after inspection that the site had been subject to an all-too-common POST injection vulnerability. Discussing ultimate prevention is beyond the scope of this post, but you can check for tell tale signs. If … Continue reading
Quick script to batch create Magento categories
A site we administer with a reasonable amount of SKUs (far in excess of 100,000), needed some quick category manipulation for a series of new data to be dropped in. The new information had a desired category tree that had to be built up quick, but with over 600 categories to be created, human effort … Continue reading
Export Excel CSVs with double quotes
This is a necessary evil for anyone who is working with CSV files manipulating them for data import to Magento (when XML is not suitable). Add the following function (sub routine) to Excel and hit the Macro button to run it. You'll have no more failed Magento imports with this handy function. Sub subExportCSV() On … Continue reading