Any Magento developer worth their salt is familiar with Magento's PHP based event system. This critical piece of functionality provides for unobtrusive tweaks to Magento's functionality. Less talked about is Magento's frontend event system used by the admin console. This article seeks to shed
astormHard to believe I haven’t mentioned this one before, but if you’re going to be doing javascript development in Magento, you’ll want to look in the following file js/varien/js.js and comment out or nullify the following code if (!("console" in window) || !("firebug" in console)) { var names = ["log", "debug", "info", [...]
astormAlthough the latest version of Magento offers the ability to control how PHP caches the SOAP server’s WSDL file, and my own Mercury API extension offers similar functionality for older version of Magento, sometimes the WSDL caching can still bite you in the butt. While the above features control the caching at the server level, if [...]
astormWidget Data and How Hard Can It Be? This Stack Overflow question is a nice example of how something that seems simple (querying for and updating a widget instance’s data paramaters) can be harder than you think. Most Magento projects go off the rails because someone assumes something like this is easy, and then modern company [...]
astormWelcome back to the desert of the Magento API. We've been wandering for what seems like 40 years, but we're getting close to the end. This week we'll be talking about one of the newer API features, "WS-I Compliance" mode.
astormRewrites for Resource Models (include collections) Rewriting a resource model in Magento can be tricky business. This Stack Overflow answer covers the how and why.
astormIf you've been following along, it may seem like we've reached the end of our API series. We've covered routing and controller dispatch, the API server, configuration, adapters, handlers, and the use of the response object for direct API output. I imagine there were
astormIs this Cached? A Stack Overflow answer where I run through the steps I take to determine if there’s caching logic around the “Custom Variables” feature.
astormIt's been a long and arduous trek, but we're finally ready to discuss how the business logic of a Magento API call is implemented. This article will contain all the information you'll need to debug Magento's mysterious API faults, as well as point you
astormIf you’re having trouble with a call like echo $this->getChildHtml('foo'); returning an empty string, add the following debug code to your template var_dump(array_keys($this->_children)); This will print out all the children of the current block. If you don’t see the block you’re trying to echo above, that means [...]
astormThere's no new Magento API article this week, primarily because everyone's going to be too tired for code after the Magento Imagine parties. If you're not in Vegas this week you'll need to settle for living vicariously through twitter hash tags.
astormNothing dredges up fear and loathing in an e-commerce developer like the phrase so we’ll just add [—] to the order success page That’s because testing any changes to this page requires a full purchase flow. Most web developers work in a “type, save, refresh, examine, oops, type, save, refresh” mode, and the idea [...]
astormLast time we looked at the full request and response flow for a Magento XML-RPC API call. Today we'll look at the same flow for a Magento SOAP API call, and see how the architecture holds up. We still haven't reached the point where
astormFully Automated Magento Install Script I haven’t had time to check it out, but the Sonassi folks have shared their build script for rolling out a new version of Magento. I think we all have something like this sitting on our harddrives, but I know mine is sort of janky so I’ll be checking out the Sonassi version right away.
astormNow that we have a general picture of the Magento API architecture, we're going to take a look at that architecture's ideal implementation in the XML-RPC adapter.
astormMore strange behavior in Magento due to EE’s new Mage_Persistent module
astormI've been wanting to write about the Magento API for a long time, but it's one of those slippery topics that has no clean entry point. It's easy to talk about small slices of the API, or provide tricks for using the API methods
astormIf you follow Magento closely there have been hints, but it seems like the cat's out of the bag. Yoav Kutner, Magento's co-founder and CTO, is moving on.
astormThere's two design patterns used in PHP systems that are often conflated. First, there's the event/observer pattern. This pattern allows a system-developer to issue global events which client-developers may then setup listener object/methods/functions for. These listeners observe the event, and then perform some action
astormWhen is Data set in an XML Update Available in a Block
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