Search Results for: git

Using Redis cache backend and session storage in Magento

Using Redis cache backend and session storage in Magento

Combined with the power of Zend Framework, Magento currently supports many cache backends with file system, APC and Memcached being the most widely used. Every supported cache backend brings it’s own set of upsides and downsides, but since there’s a lot to choose from, one could easily assume that as far as cache backends are concerned, Magento is very well covered. To some degree this might be true, but when you seriously up the number of requests, none of the cache backends scale well. Besides poor scaling, some of the cache backend implementations also suffer from serious limitations like not having support for grouping of related cache entries, a.k.a. tagging. With this in mind, and in order to provide support for stable and scalable cache backend, latest versions of Magento are turning to Redis key-value store. In this article I’ll do my best to describe process of implementing Redis as cache and session backend with recent versions of Magento Community and Enterprise Edition.

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Programmatically add a custom block in Magento Admin

Programmatically add a custom block in Magento Admin

Howdy! Recently I was in doubt about how to add custom Magento Block for my client’s requirements. One approach was to deal with it through .xml file, but when I was thinking about it I asked myself: “ Why add another .xml and load it?” And at this point, I decided to go with programmatic method.

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PHP shell scripts for Magento

PHP shell scripts for Magento

There are times when it’s necessary to access Magento system from outside Magento. A way to do this is using PHP shell script that bootstraps Magento. An average PHP developer would just go to Magento root directory to create Magento bootstrap file with it’s own code at the bottom. As you’ve probably guessed, there are two ways to bootstrap Magento, regular way and Magento way. In this article I’ll provide an overview of Magento way of creating PHP shell scripts.

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How to add custom product relations in Magento

How to add custom product relations in Magento

Currently there are three types of product relations in Magento: Up-sells, Related Products, and Cross-sell Products. Recently while discussing client’s requirements, we’ve come to conclusion it would serve our purpose best to link products in the same way Magento does, and then use our own relations independently of Magento’s built in product relations. In this article I’ll show you how to add custom product relations as addition to existing Magento product relations.

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Sheeel.com wins best e-commerce website in Kuwait award!

Sheeel.com wins best e-commerce website in Kuwait award!

It is always great when your work gets recognized. And when your client wins an award for the best e-commerce site in their country, that’s something remarkable. Sheeel.com, a daily deal website based in Kuwait, operating in several other countries, is about to receive the Kuwait e-Award from the Emir of Kuwait later this week. Read on for an interview with our client, Nasser Al-Sabah, talking about his business and experience of working with Inchoo.

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Easily manage LAMP name based virtual hosts

Easily manage LAMP name based virtual hosts

I’ve been developing inside LAMP environment since the day one of my web development adventure. Reason for this is that all of the web development tools like web server, database management system, source code revision control systems are at home when I log into the Linux powered workstation. Of course there are some downsides to developing inside LAMP, most importantly the sheer complexity of LAMP environment configuration. With this in mind I’ve created tool designed to simplify management of name based virtual hosts on Debian based Linux operating systems. In this article I’ll give my best to provide an overview of this tool and present you with a few clear examples illustrating its usage.

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Magento Maximum Allowed Order Amount

Magento Maximum Allowed Order Amount

Recently I have been working on a project that had its own set of small fraud prevention features. One such feature was maximum allowed order amount. While it may sound strange at first; why would someone want to limit the maximum amount of order?! Given the nature of the product that shop was selling (cannot disclose that information) that feature request seemed pretty reasonable.

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Recap of Magento Imagine 2013 – The Art of Commerce

Recap of Magento Imagine 2013 – The Art of Commerce

3rd annual Magento Imagine eCommerce conference took place in early April and saw over 1500 Magento merchants, solution and industry partners and individual developers from the total of 44 countries meet for the biggest single Magento event ever. We were there as well, so check out our impressions and some interesting notes we made.

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Magento form field AJAX validation

Magento form field AJAX validation

In this short article I will show you a quick way of adding an AJAX-ed validation on Magento form field. If you open up the {MAGENTO_ROOT}/js/prototype/validation.js file and look into its header comments you will see that Magento’s JavaScript validation is actually done trough 3rd party JavaScript library called Really Easy Field Validation by an author named Andrew Tetlaw, with its own GIT repository available here.

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Enhance Magento 404 page

Enhance Magento 404 page

Magento default installation already has a predefined custom 404 page (no-route). But is it enough to help visitor/customer get back on right track!?. Let’s look over a few examples of custom designed 404 pages. http://centar-alata.hr/404, https://github.com/404, http://www.bluedaniel.com/404, http://www.casino-lemonade.com/404/ – as you can see, it can be funny, creative or you can take advantage of this “case” and try to engage potential customer. Here are a few quick and dirty ideas on how to reuse custom 404 page in Magento and try to serve specific content on it.

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Inchoo Flickr Gallery Magento Extension

Inchoo Flickr Gallery Magento Extension © By Wholtone (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Inchoo Flick Gallery is an easy-to-use Magento extension that will integrate any Flickr gallery into your Magento website. It is fully customizable using a simple Magento back-end configuration page and it uses Flickr API to get all the required information and data. Extension is tested on Magento 1.6 and 1.7 but it’s still the first version so be careful if you decide to use it on your live site.

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Magento mobile theme – imobile

Magento mobile theme – imobile

Magento meets jQuery mobile (ver 1.1.0), before we start please note this is only experiment, use this theme on your own, this is not (yet) production ready. In a nutshell we have “package” under which we place all edited files. For start we use magento iphone theme and then add some “extra stuff”.

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Validate your input, Magento style

Validate your input, Magento style

I’m sure most fo you will agree that Magento’s frontend validation for form input fields is a nice feature. All it takes is for you to add some CSS classes to the input fields and then upon form submission validation is triggered that outputs, by default, red colored messages that point the possible validation failures etc. This validation is done on the client side via Java Script.

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Installing & setting up PHPUnit manually without PEAR

Installing & setting up PHPUnit manually without PEAR

If there is one thing I hate in PHP world then that’s PEAR. With full respect to it, but it simply does not work for me. I usually jump around from Linux, Windows, OSX on a monthly basis and honestly I have never had it work out of the box. There where always some installation issues with PEAR itself then with the packages. Experience I’m describing here is completely subjective so please do not look at it as me trashing the PEAR. If it works for you, then great. If not, then here is s little HowTo on installing the PHPUnit manually without PEAR.

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Geocoding Customer Addresses in Magento via Google Maps

Geocoding Customer Addresses in Magento via Google Maps

Geocoding is the process of finding associated geographic coordinates (often expressed as latitude and longitude) from other geographic data, such as street addresses, or zip codes (postal codes)… so says Wikipedia. Geocoding an address is pretty simple if you are using Google Maps API. Since all we do here is Magento, let me show you how easily you can geocode customer address.

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Magento’s “Quote/Order/Invoice” workflow

Magento’s “Quote/Order/Invoice” workflow

The purpose of this article is to shed some light onto the flow of things that happen behind the scene in the process of creating and later invoicing order in Magento. In order to properly code new functionality surrounding order creation process, one must have a solid understanding of that process otherwise you may impose some serious issues on to the system via custom coding around orders.

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Inchoo Learning Day 2 – Surviving the Blizzard

Inchoo Learning Day 2 – Surviving the Blizzard

Inchoo Learning Day is fast becoming something you won’t want to miss. This time, even though it’s only our second such event, we already went international. Here is a brief story of what went on last Friday in a small village on the outskirts of Baranja.

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ZendFramework example on using Google URL Shortener service

ZendFramework example on using Google URL Shortener service

Seems like URL shorteners have gain extreme popularity with web services like Twitter. Not to mention the fact that long URLs are somewhat hard to pass along. They are also harder to verbalize in a conversation, and above all in some cases they are almost impossible to remember.

There are quite a large number of URL shorteners out there these days, mostly free. One of the freshest is Google’s URL shortener. This article is not about outlining the features that make this shortener better then the other ones (as I am sure some offer more features at the moment). This article is merely for the purpose of showing you how easy it is to use the Google URL Shortener service via your ZendFramework libraries.

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PhpStorm IDE overview

PhpStorm IDE overview

Developing sites and applications demands the best tool you can afford. PhpStorm is by far the best friend you can get when dealing with web development. Here’s why.

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Internal link structure – PageRank flow change

Internal link structure – PageRank flow change

Internal link structure of a website is of grate importance in terms of SEO. Well architecture link structure was always able to do SEO miracles. The internal linking technique SEO’s use in order to get a better ranking for some terms is called PageRank Sculpting.

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Flash Google maps to embed

Flash Google maps to embed

Long time ago when Google released Google Maps API for Flash, i created small flash which i embedded on multiple sites. I thought it looks nicer that usual javascript version, maybe you will too.

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