24 Sep

Magento Version 1.3.2.4 Security Update

As of Wednesday September 23, 2009, Varien have released a security update covering XSS vulnerabilities. We recommend all users upgrade to the latest version to protect their stores - but please remember to backup prior to an upgrade!. Backing up your store is extremely quick and easy, there are two methods, manually via Sonassi domain … Continue reading

3 Sep

Magento benchmark performance results are in - sonassi is still the fastest

MageBenchmark (Magento Benchmark) was launched as planned on Monday August 31st. After every single Magento host was painstakingly contacted, few actually replied and felt they were up to the challenge. Those brave Magento web hosts, from Sonassi in Manchester as far as Magento E-Commerce in China, were tested and without further ado, here is the … Continue reading

3 Jul

Magento: mini_sendmail and Zend_Mail incompatibility Version II.

This article is now deprecated and the issue has been resolved without changes to core code after our service change. We have recently spotted an issue after traversing our Apache sendmail application to mini_sendmail (read more about the change). In Magento's mail headers, the recipient and sender details have both the email address and respective … Continue reading

2 Jul

Magento 1.3.2.2 has been released!

Changes Added configuration to control redirection of customer after login to current page or account dashboard (default) Added events for before/after product validate Added method validate to Mage_Core_Model_Abstract Added validate before save on Catalog Category API Made urlrewrites controller load layout after initializing registry. Fixed wrong helper calls. Implemented modifiers for Email Template Filter var … Continue reading

29 Jun

Find the fastest Magento hosts easily .... MageBenchmark is semi-live

In the best interests of the community (and the fact we're always up for a little competition), we've soft-launched a new project MageBenchmark. Its in the early stages at the moment as we are just harvesting URLs, we are aiming for a true launch date of 1st August 2009. We encourage all Magento hosts, be … Continue reading

10 Jun

Magento: "Wrong charset, conversion from `UTF-16BE' to `UTF-8' is not allowed"

We have noticed this issue cropping up with Magento. Whilst we originally assumed it was a system level fault, further testing has revealed there is an issue with the implementation of iconv() in Magento. There was a problem with Magento converting strings between character sets, specifically when creating a PDF invoice. Initial testing with a … Continue reading

8 Jun

Magento: mini_sendmail and Zend_Mail incompatibility

This article is now deprecated and the issue has been resolved without changes to core code after our service change. We have recently spotted an issue after traversing our Apache sendmail application to mini_sendmail (read more about the change). In Magento's mail headers, the recipient and sender details have both the email address and respective … Continue reading

4 Jun

PHP: Combine and compile CSS and JS into Gzipped files

This has actually been the secret behind a lot of our great system performance, but as it was open source originally, it's going back to the people. Its a relatively straightforward script and speeds up JS and CSS performance by a huge amount, especially if you are using multiple files (like we do!). It should … Continue reading