Magento Configuration Search
I'm proud to announce my first Magento Connect Extension, System Configuration Search, distributed free through the Magento Connect marketplace.
astormMagento System Overrides and Upgradability
An oft-touted and often overused feature of The Magento Ecommerce System is the ability to override core system behavior. Another oft-discussed topic for Magento developers is upgradability, and how overrides get in the way of that. Today we're going to look at the various
astormCommerce Bug 1.1 and Supporting the Future
I'm proud to announce the immediate availability of Commerce Bug 1.1. The biggest upgrade is actually a downgrade.
astormVarien Data Collections
Originally, as a PHP programmer, if you wanted to collect together a group of related variables you had one choice, the venerable Array. While it shares a name with C's array of memory addresses, a PHP array is a general purpose dictionary like object
astormCommerce Bug 1.0.2 is Out
Small maintenance release for Commerce Bug. If you're running Windows (who knew there were so many of you) you'll be happy to know I've I've reacquainted myself with escaping javascript and you can get rid of those manual patches.
astormGenerated Magento Model Code
This is a quick one for advanced users, and was inspired by a recent question I answered over at StackOverflow.
astormIn Depth Magento System Configuration
Last time we talked about Magento's System Configuration system. If you missed it, you'll want to go back and catch up. So, we glossed over a lot of the tags you could use within an individual field.
astormSlides from Magento Developer’s Paradise
Despite the volcanic eruptions making a mess of things there's a small group of us (the Mallorca 13) who are making the best of it at the Magento Developers Paradise conference.
astormAnnouncements
Two big announcements. The first, which you already know if you've been paying attention, is I'll be speaking at the Magento Developers Paradise conference in (!) less than a week. In addition to my first conference speaking gig, this will be my first
astormMagento Configuration Lint
The biggest challenge for Ruby and PHP web developers coming to Magento is having to deal with individual module configuration. This is an integral part of of Magento that won't ever go away, but I think there's huge steps we can take to make
astormCustom Magento System Configuration
One of the more powerful parts of the Magento eCommerce System is the Admin's System Config section. As a developer, it will allow you to quickly and easily setup forms elements that allow your end-users to configure their Magento System and your custom modules
astormSimple PHP Job Queue
If you following my grumblings on twitter you know I've been putting off learning a distributed version control system for a while now because CHANGE BAD, SAME GOOD. Well, the future has managed to pull me outside kicking and screaming, and I've released a
astormYou’re Next
As much as possible I try to stay away from opinions here, if only because this is my public face and people don't hire me for my opinions, they hire me to solve problems with computers.
astormMagento ORM: Entity Attribute Value; Part 1
In our last article we told you there were two kinds of Models in Magento. Regular, or "simple" Models, and Entity Attribute Value (or EAV) Models. We also told you this was a bit of a fib. Here's where we come clean.
astormGruber’s URL Regular Expression Explained
While America threw on its eating pants and combed the Thursday circulars for deals, John Gruber spent Thanksgiving preparing to unveil his regular expression for finding URLs in arbitrary text.
astormParsing HTML with PHP
There's a long held bit of conventional wisdom that says you don't want to parse HTML with regular expressions. While it's a great way to learn regular expressions, it's trivially easy to write something that's only going to work correctly on a subset of
astormContents Shifting, Please Remain Seated
I've been fiddling with this design in my off-hours, and while I've never been 100% happy with it I was sick of dealing with a few of the limitation the old design presented. For example, implementing your own CSS Drop Shadows were all the
astormDiff the Contents of the Last Two Clipboards
The title pretty much says it all. This Applescript will use BBEdit's (or TextWrangler's) internal diff functionality to compare the last two bits of text that have been copied to the clipboard. Tested in 10.5, not 10.6 (because I have work to
astormSetting up a Zend Application in a Subdirectory
This was surprisingly tricky to figure out, although that points more to the smoothness of setting up an application when it's living in the site root. Sorry for the brevity here, this one is here mainly for my own reference but as it may
astormIf it Ain’t Broke, Make it Slower so we Can Keep Busy
I snarkily posted something to Twitter about a bit of UI weirdness I saw over at the php.net site. The various call-out boxes had/have gained the ability to fold up or down when you double click them, which interfered with my "randomly click
astorm