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
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
Why shouldn't I use Nginx for Magento
We are going to give you a loose analogy – a (Magento) fast-food restaurant. The cast The customer (at the drive-through), is the customer on your web store. The till operator (who sits on a chair and hands you the bag of food through the window – Web Server) The chef (who cooks the meals … 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
We're against PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) - are you?
Try having a look around the internet today (Wednesday 18th January) and you'll soon run into a few roadblocks; especially if you're trying to reach one of the most popular and arguably best encyclopaedic resource around, WikiPedia. Big media and its allies in Congress are billing the Internet blacklist legislation as a new way to … Continue reading
A view from our new office
The Dock Office Manchester has been looking pretty impressive at nights recently; all the more so now we're looking at it from our new office. After three years at Exchange Quay, we said farewell and have now moved on to a bigger and better premises, the Dock Office. We've got enough room here to swing … 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