How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing I’m a sucker for anything that reminds of late 80s to late 90s computer/Internet culture — add in some publishing and how can I not link it? Great insights on how a business, even with a rock solid lock on their market, can only ignore the flaws in its product for so long.
astormMagento’s configuration includes a hard coded field for the base site URL. This often creates headaches when a user migrates a system to a new server/URL, but hasn’t updated the URL entries in the core_config_data table. These headaches are compounded by The fact that the entries in core_config_data are cached by Magento Most [...]
astormMagento Router Configuration One of those things I wasn’t concretely aware of — each named Magento <routers/> configuration is associated with a specific router object. You specify the router object you want to associate your <routers/> configuration with via the <use>...</use> tag. This is always standard [...]
astormI'm Alan Storm, this is my website. I'm a programmer, and I write about that here. Sometimes people pay me to program things. I also own a tiny technology publishing company. If I had to describe my job I'd say I help other programmers
astormSomewhere in the past few dev releases Magento 2 got rid of the MagentoAppDir class/object. The MagentoFilesystem object (and its getPath method) seem to be a reasonable replacement
astormTracking down Foreign Key Errors A Stack Exchange question where I walk though how to track down foreign key constraints in Magento/MySQL. The subtext here: Turning off MySQL foreign key checks and/or randomly typing things in you read on the Internet usually leads to pain.
astormMagento Index Status A Magento index can have a status of pending, working, or require_reindex. However, the UI represents pending as Ready, working as Processing, and require_reindex as Reindex Required. Did I say UI? I meant Web UI. The command line UI (via shell/indexer.php uses the slightly-different-but-the-same-enough to be [...]
astormMagento source model conventions Pretty good answer from yours truly on the different between toOptionArray and getAllOptions.
astormMagento Programmer’s 404 Extension From yours truly, a Programmer’s 404 page that will diagnose why Magento skipped your custom module/controller routing.
astormOne of the most common Magento questions on Stack Overflow or the Magento Stack Exchange is a variation on "why does my MVC controller 404?" While powerful, Magento's configuration based MVC system leaves lots of room for subtle configuration errors. Not only do
astormMagento Bootstrap Framework Reset Bootstrap is the go to framework for agencies building multi-device “responsive” layouts. Kimberely Thomas’s b-responsive theme is the first Magento Bootstrap reset project I’ve seen that Has a proper open source license attached Has the goal of working with both Enterprise and [...]
astormVarien_Object as PHP Extension Andrey Tserkus implemented the Varien_Object class as a PHP extension to see what sort of performance improvements might lie down that path. Beyond the obvious interest to Magento developers, this project also looks like a nice “hello world” for PHP extension development.
astormThe short version: To assuage whatever guilt I have about selling commercial software and ebooks in an open source ecosystem, I've created and released a new n98-magerun command that allows Magento users to manually and incrementally run Magento's setup resource migration scripts. Our long
astormAround CE 1.4, Magento extended their Setup Resource Migration system with the ability to have data updates as well as structure updates. That is, a setup resource upgrade/install script named like this mysql4-install-0.7.0.php mysql4-data-upgrade-0.7.63-0.7.64.php should contain structural changes to Magento’s database tables, [...]
astormMagento 2 Development Update Video of the Magento 2 conference call from yesterday. Covers a lot of the formal reasons for the changes in Magento 2.
astormSetting Parent Blocks from Layout XML Nice bit of layout XML information from Mr. Clean Ben Marks on setting a different parent block when instantiating from a Layout XML file. Here’s the bit of PHP that makes this possible #File: app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Layout.php if (!empty($node['parent'])) { $parentBlock = [...]
astormIf you’re working in a PHP file that’s namespaced, and you’ve setup a simple try/catch block like this try { //do something that might throw an exception } catch(Exception $e) { echo "Caught you!"; } You may be surprised when your program doesn’t catch the thrown exception. That’s because Exceptions are [...]
astormI’ve been digging into the guts of Magento 1’s setup resource migration system, and I’ve run into some unexpected behavior. Unexpected is probably the wrong word, because I treated a lot of these details as black boxes until now. I’m documenting this here for myself, but reserve the right to come back later if my [...]
astormThe Magento 2 team just threw dev-54 over the wall. One change you’ll notice quickly is they’ve removed the isAdmin method from the store object. This is the method that, in theory, allows a Magento client programmer to know if Magento is or is not running in the backend admin console. I say in theory, because “running [...]
astormPage Layout Drop Downs in Magento Admin A Stack Overflow thread showing how those Page Layout threads don’t always do what you think.
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