Below you'll find all the Uncategorized articles on the site, followed by a chronological listing of the same. You may also browse the 8 series directly via the following links. Miscellaneous Magento Articles, SugarCRM for PHP MVC Developers, Magento 2: Advanced Javascript, Magento 2 UI Components, Accelerated Mobile Pages, Pestle, Sylius for Magento and PHP Developers, and, Containers, Containers, Containers.
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 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 [...]
astormDates 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 [...]
astormWhile 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 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? A Stack Overflow question showing several techniques to determine if an order exists in your system or not.
astormI 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 Wherein a attempt to answer the unanswerable “what’s the right way to add a block to a page in Magento” question.
astormIf 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 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’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 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? Short version: They’re if-not-actually-then-effectively, non-deterministic for day to day development.
astormOne common theme I've seen with developers new to Magento is not knowing where to start. Magento's default index.php bootstrap and Mage application class offer few surface clues on how a developer should start working with the system.
astormAppologies for the month of radio silence here on ye 'olde personal tutorial website, but I've been hard at work finishing up a long delayed project. I'm finally done, and am proud to announce the immediate availability of Commerce Bug 2.
astormDebugging Magento Configuration Depends Issues Here’s a few useful code locations for debugging Magento configuration “depends” issues.
astormWhat 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 [...]
astormAdding New Magento Cache Types A simple configuration recipe for adding new cache tags to the Magento backend’s “clear cache” feature.
astormThere’s no official Magento “startup” event, but the first “safe” event to listen for in Magento is probably the controller_front_init_before event. I say probably, because there are a few events that fire prior to this one. In a stock installation of Magento 1.7 these events are resource_get_tablename [...]
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