Magento MySQL Replication
We've got a fairly vast experience of MySQL clusters - and Percona have worked with us on a number of occasions when pushing the boundaries of complex configurations. Can Magento natively handle read-only slaves Magento is natively capable of splitting off reads/writes to different database servers (with the exception of a few broken releases, eg. … Continue reading
Its that time of year again, we're closed for Christmas
Another year has passed and we'll soon be saying the end to 2012 and hello to 2013 - but you'll have to do it without us, well, at least until we re-open on January 7th 2013. Our Manchester office will be shut from 21st December 2012 until 7th January 2013. Team members will still be … Continue reading
Decorating our Dock Office
After 3 successful years of growth, the time came for us to move locations. So we said farewell to our Regus office in Exchange Quay and said hello to the Dock Office, Salford Quays. We had toured many, many sites in Manchester and kept seeing the recurring theme of "Chrome & Glass" Regus-esque style serviced … 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
Magento Enterprise Theme Fallback
If you are adopting a minimal-is-best approach to templating your Magento Enterprise store (ie. local.xml method), you'll soon run into some odd behaviour with the theme fallback. Typically, a Magento store will try to load a file in the following order ./app/design/frontend/custom_package/custom_theme ./app/design/frontend/custom_package/default ./app/design/frontend/base/default However, if you are using Magento Enterprise and which to use … Continue reading
Why Siege isn't an accurate test tool for Magento performance
We're getting pretty concerned at Sonassi HQ with the growing confusion surrounding transactions per second (TPS), requests per second (RPS) and concurrency by the community as a whole. Shamefully, I fear that we are guilty for bucking this trend. We created a monster, now its time to put it down 3 years ago, when we … Continue reading
Important Magento Security Update – Zend Platform Vulnerability
We have recently learned of a serious vulnerability in the Zend platform on which Magento is built. This note provides information on how customers can access and install a patch that addresses this issue. The Issue The vulnerability potentially allows an attacker to read any file on the web server where the Zend XMLRPC functionality … Continue reading