After upgrade magento to 1.5.0.1, my client’s website was stuck in magento maintenance mode. I wasn’t able to easily find a way to fix it by looking in the normal database tables, but did locate a file called “maintenance.flag” in the magento root. So, to fix maintenance mode look for the maintenance flag and remove…
I don’t often have fields much longer than 256 char, but a web application I am working on makes use of varchar 512. I’m not really able to change the field to text as the PHP Docs suggest. MS SQL doesn’t allow the equal operator, and grouping on text fields, and it’s also very slow…
Tonight, I’ve encountered a very strange situation where the session data was empty after each page reload. Have you ever had an issue with the session data not being set after a page refresh and the session has been for sure been started using session_start() ? I modified the php.ini file located on the server…
Before you upgrade magento you should be sure to make a complete back up of your files and your database. (It also isn’t wise to test the upgrade on a production store!) To upgrade the easiest way is to make use of downloader, using a user with permissions, sign in, and then use the following…
The owner of Nature Bumz wanted to be able to add featured products to the home page of their magento store each day without having to modify to edit the content. Inchoo has created a great extension, called Featured Products, that features a great backend allowing the admins to choose featured products from a simple…
Quick steps on how to redirect back to your magento store upon a successful purchase. Unfortunately, you can only redirect to one page. Sign into Paypal account Click directly on Profile -> Website Payment Preferences Change Auto Return to on. Fill Return URL to http://www.mymagentositregoeshere.com/checkout/onepage/success/ Save and then go test it! After a successful paypal…
A couple of visitors have asked me how I am automatically tweeting my post title to twitter: I’m of course using a plugin that required very little configuration and making sure that I always use Posts -> Add New because the quick post functionality doesn’t work. The plugin I’ve been using that has worked so…
BRCline Consulting has been busy working on its first ecommerce site to create Niagara Fall’s Natue Bumz Cloth Diaper Shop. The owner, Crystal Cline, needed to accept paypal, credit cards, and be able to create her own blog along with adding inventory, and all of the traditional sort of business functions. I chose magento to…
Magento is an excellent project that so far hasn’t been too difficult to program for. Initially learning how to use magento has been fairly tough: there are a lot of settings and fields that should be set before the site becomes visible to visitors and of course indexed. I won’t touch on magento seo right…
jQuery is very well suited for cross browser JavaScript development, but I bet you didn’t know jQuery is also fairly well suited to parsing XML. I often use jQuery to send XMLHttpRequests and then parse the XML returned by a PHP script on the server and then manipulate the return in some way. I won’t…
I haven’t been using MODx for very long, but I have worked with several other content management systems previously and experienced both the good and the bad with them. MODx appears to be a fairly simple MVC style content management system with a bit of a pluggable architecture. I haven’t written any plugins for MODx,…
Many junior PHP developers seem to feel that PHP objects and variables are retained between requests. In PHP4 and PHP5, no variables are retained outside of the contents of $_SESSION and other stores between requests.
For the last couple of weeks, I have began playing around with Drupal because I’m so sick of fighting proprietary CMS. The proprietary CMS suffers from the vendor updating only updating the CMS when convenient for them and this ends up holding the purchaser hostage. Overall, I know that drupal has enough of the functionality that I need in modules and the core to significantly improve the efficiency of my programming and possibly offer a large learning opportunity on software architecture.
The biggest advantage of the change is being able to better take advantage of Microsoft SQL Server features that probably made you choose to use SQL Server in the first place.Making the change wasn’t overly difficult because I took time and wrote a simple Database Access Layer.
Installing WampServer and PHPUnit doesn’t have to be difficult. Check out this post on how to install PHPUnit on WampServer.
Always make sure that you modify the session.save_path to somewhere meaningful and ensure the directory has the correct file permissions.