Magento
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
Magento HTTPS Redirect Loop
So you've enabled HTTPS in your store and suddenly you are faced with a redirect loop. In Magento versions prior to 1.6.2.0, Magento was only capable of checking the Apache $_SERVER['HTTPS'] variable. In ./lib/Zend/Controller/Request/Http.php the HTTPS sanity check would observe the contents of the HTTPS environment variable, if set to 'on' - it would be … Continue reading
What is Memcache actually caching in Magento
Your Memcache configuration in ./app/etc/local/xml will dictate what Memcache is actually caching. If you are only using a the single-level cache (without <slow_backend>), then Magento will store its cache (in its entirety) in Memcache. **HOWEVER** without the <slow_backend> defined - it is caching content, without cache_tags - ie. without the ability to differentiate cache items. … Continue reading
Secure your Magento Admin
Changing the URL for your Magento admin isn't really a way to protect your store; security through obscurity isn't security at all. Fortunately, there is a nice simple modification that you can make to your .htaccess file to protect certain URLs from prying eyes. For a single-store view Magento installation ############################################ ## Secure admin RewriteCond … Continue reading
Enourmous Magento sales_flat_quote* tables
Recently, we have run into a few stores where the sales quote tables have grown beyond all proportion and resulted in the store grinding to a halt. The worst that we have seen so far is a Magento Enterprise installation that had 17 million entries, consuming a huge amount of space and locking dozens of … 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
Magento batch update category quick script
Just to supplement another post we made on bulk creating categories, below is a script used for bulk updating and attaching images to categories based on a specific CSV. There is no documentation to go with this code, I'm simply posting it because a subscriber has requested it. <?php define('MAGENTO', realpath(dirname(__FILE__) . "/..")); require_once MAGENTO … Continue reading
Magento My Imeta Bug fix on category save
A customer recently came to us stating their categories were not saving correctly, it turned out to be a bit of erroneous code in a 3rd party extension they were using. If you are using My_Imeta and are experiencing difficulties saving your categories, it will be due to this. It is a quick an easy … Continue reading
Magento category children count fix
The children_count field in Magento can sometimes become inaccurate if you have created a category via the PHP API and set an entity_id whilst doing so. It is due to part of the after_save mechanism which overrides the children_count parameter (even if explicitly set via $_category->setChildrenCount()). For the majority of the admin area, an inaccurate … Continue reading
Benchmarking your Magento store
We get asked this quite a lot by normal store owners who want to see how good their host really is. However, our Magento Benchmark service is only really aimed at web hosts themselves. So to answer a popular question (albeit briefly): There isn’t a standardised test – as there is a myriad of different … Continue reading