May 17, 2013 ·
1 minute read
phpstormmagicento
Magento’s Template Path Hints feature can be super handy for working out which templates are in use, but logging into the Admin, navigating to System, Configuration, Developer, Debug, Change Store Scope, Change to Yes, Press Save, Reload is an arduous process. So much so that often it’s easier to just suss it out from the folder structure. No more! Magicento has an entry in its menu to enable these at the click of a menu item.
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May 9, 2013 ·
1 minute read
magento
Often you’ll have your site in maintenance mode, but obviously before you show your changes to the world you’ll want to check the site over. The best way to set Magento into Maintenance Mode is to add a maintenance.flag file to the web root, and there’s a snippet of code in Magento’s index.php which handles this: $maintenanceFile = 'maintenance.flag'; ... if (file_exists($maintenanceFile)) { include_once dirname(__FILE__) . '/errors/503.php'; exit; } You’ll want to set this to also take your IP address into consideration, so just make the following amends and you’ll have added conditional maintenance mode: $maintenanceFile = 'maintenance.flag'; ...
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Apr 25, 2013 ·
2 minute read
magento
Here at Edmonds Commerce when we are working on Magento design projects we use MyBalsamiq on-line mockup tool which We’ve found as one of the greatest in terms of support provided and especially for - live linking, which allows you to create live mockups in order to deliver the overall feel of navigation and User Experience to client more effectively. It has awesome sharing function as well - really easy to work and communicate ideas with clients, especially important in e-commerce projects where we like to test different approaches and see which could generate highest conversion rates.
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Apr 25, 2013 ·
1 minute read
prestashop
Magento developers are no doubt familiar with the concept of defining a server environment variable MAGE_IS_DEVELOPER_MODE so that when running Magento locally it is always in developer mode but there is no chance of accidently deploying a live site in developer mode. This little trick will allow you to use the same environment variable to also have the same effect when working with PrestaShop. To explain - developer mode generally means that things like error messages and debugging information are displayed clearly in the browser which makes things much easier when you are developing, to see what is going wrong.
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Apr 22, 2013 ·
1 minute read
apache
If you are having issues with mod rewrite apparently abandoning sections of variables after encoded hashes then this could be your solution. The use case is particularly clear when using mod_rewrite in front of a search engine (such as Solr which I am really enjoying working with at the moment). Imagine someone search for a partcode ABC#123 This gets encoded to search/abc%23123 Your rewritten search term will then be mangled by Apache and your search script will only actually see ABC.
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Apr 11, 2013 ·
1 minute read
apache
As part of our Magento SEO service, the first thing we do is to make sure there are no issues with the crawlability and general health of the clients web site. Whilst working on the Google Webmaster Tools crawl errors for a client I noticed one specific and intruiging problem for which I couldn’t immediately see the reason, everything looked to be set up perfectly. Certain URLs were getting 404 responses.
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