Magento AWS Treasure Map
Magento AWS Treasure Map Great overview of the steps you’d take to get started with Magento on Amazon Web Services from the new public beta Magento StackExchange.
astormCategory: Programming Quickies
Back in they day, I ran a Tumblr blog named Magento Quickies where I’d post shorter, less in-depth posts about my travels through Magento’s source code. This Programming Quickies categories is the successor to that Tumblr blog. You’ll find all the old Magento Quickies content here, as well as new short posts about programming in general.
This section has its own RSS feed, the old Magento Quickies feed should should be redirecting, and we’re cross posting notifications for new posts over to magento-quickies.tumblr.com. In other words, you shouldn’t need to know any of this, but the duct tape that keeps the internet held together isn’t aging well, so your mileage may vary.
Below you'll find all the Programming Quickies articles on the site, followed by a chronological listing of the same. You may also browse the 7 series directly via the following links. Pestle, Four Steps to Async Iterators, Checking in on OpenMage and Magento in 2020, Text Encoding and Unicode, Shopware's Development Environment, A Sentimental Gen-X Programmer Culls his Tech Books, and, Containers, Containers, Containers.
Magento Layout XML Quirks on CMS Pages
Magento Layout XML Quirks on CMS Pages This Magento StackExchange question is a good example of how Magento’s flexible system behavior can be seen as inconsistant by people outside the project. My answer also contains a few good examples of how Commerce Bug can help track these sorts of things down. The Magento StackExchange [...]
astormDebugging Category 404 Pages
Debugging Category 404 Pages How to debug why your category page is returning a 404 error. (Need an invite to the Magento StachExchange private beta? Get in touch.)
astormProgrammatically Undo a Magento Rewrite
Programmatically Undo a Magento Rewrite An answer on the new Magento Stack Exchange site that shows you how to modify the Magento configuration at runtime to conditionally undo a class rewrite. Possibly the worst idea ever. If you need an invite to the Magento StackExchange tell me why you’d be a good addition and I’ll get an [...]
astormHow “before” and “after” Work in Magento Layout XML
How “before” and “after” Work in Magento Layout XML The Stack Overflow question/answer is a perfect example of the I don’t think that feature does what you think it does problem. These sorts of problems get magnified when a project’s culture doesn’t support transparent, open, respectful [...]
astormLets speed things up a bit: Hide the payment methods on specific shipping method in Magento
Lets speed things up a bit: Hide the payment methods on specific shipping method in Magento speedupmate: I’m getting lot of questions on how to hide a payment method when specific shipping method is chosen in checkout. While asking this users also point to magento forums where examples are given with extreme template hacking and payment [...]
astormAdding a Date Range to a Magento EAV Collection
Dates and time are always messy to work with in programming environments, and coming up with the right set of filters to accurately represent a date range in Magento is no exception. This is “extra” true given the trickiness of creating nested OR queries with Magento’s ORM. Fortunately, someone on the Magento core team [...]
astormTop North American Magento Cities
While most of my consulting opportunities come via word of mouth, I still keep half an eye on the various tech job boards. Partly to see what sort of compensation people are offering (everything from $7/hour to $125,000/year), and partially because I grew up in Buffalo during the 80s and have an ingrained fear of any job market bottoming [...]
astormMoving a Block in Magento
Moving a Block in Magento Ben Marks takes a break from promoting the new Magento Stack Exchange site to explain to move a block in Magento.
astormDoes an Order Exist?
Does an Order Exist? A Stack Overflow question showing several techniques to determine if an order exists in your system or not.
astormContent vs. Commerce
I was listening to the Stack Exchange podcast about Hurricane Sandy, and one of the guest mentioned offhandedly that Square Space hosts around a million and a half websites. That’s backed up by this Business Insider content blurb. For those not familiar with the platform, Square Space offers a custom online CMS for creating and [...]
astormAdding a Block “The Right” Way
Adding a Block “The Right” Way Wherein a attempt to answer the unanswerable “what’s the right way to add a block to a page in Magento” question.
astormMagento Connect Package Files
If Magento Connect’s installation procedure is a little too mysterious for you, check out the contents of downloader/.cache This hidden folder will contain a copy of the downloaded tgz package files downloaded by the connect manager.
astormA Rewrite too Far
A Rewrite too Far An interesting Magento question that shows some of the problems with a super flexible OO system. In summation, a client developer tried to add a simple rewrite which added a type_id product collection filter. However, in a second part of the system, a core team client developer used the filters on the product collection [...]
astormMagento Option Labels not Saving
Magento Option Labels not Saving Magento’s UI layer uses metaphors more commonly found in Java GUI programming. You just call something like addInput from PHP, and don’t worry about the HTML that’s produced. One side effect that always to crops up when these patterns are used is out of control HTML forms. This Stack [...]
astormObserver Strategy for a Winning Redirect
Observer Strategy for a Winning Redirect Magento redirects confused the h— out of me for a few years. Most PHP developers are used to a header('Location: ' . $url); exit; pattern. When you use the Magento response object to perform a redirect, execution continues, and the redirect doesn’t happen until after the controller has [...]
astormWhere do those numbers in Magento URLs come from?
Where do those numbers in Magento URLs come from? Short version: They’re if-not-actually-then-effectively, non-deterministic for day to day development.
astormDebugging Magento Configuration Depends Issues
Debugging Magento Configuration Depends Issues Here’s a few useful code locations for debugging Magento configuration “depends” issues.
astormWhat is a Magento Area?
What is a Magento Area? This is a Magento 2 presentation so take everything in there with a grain of salt, but this is the first time I’ve heard anyone from Magento Inc. describe what a Magento “area” is. (Or more specifically, what an area was intended to be — it looks like Magento 2 will implement and refine this [...]
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