The Magento site has recently switched from serving search results internally to using Google to provide the results. Whilst the Google results pages are a lot faster, we now miss the opportunity to search specific areas of the Magento site.

In particular, its now a bit of a pain to track down a suitable module in Magento Connect. To make things a bit easier I have knocked together a simple Magento Connect Search tool.

I could easily extend this tool to provide searching of other areas of the Magento site if you wish. Just drop a quick comment against this blog post and I will do it.

Just thought I would drop a quick blog and link to this nice succinct guide for setting up SSH to be able to log in via public key.

SSH public key tutorial

Using public keys offers you a more secure way of logging into an SSH server and also opens up the possiblity of being able to log into an SSH server without entering your password. This is less secure of course but allows easier remote scripted SSH.

For example you can set up a user account on your server with limited permissions and then on a remote machine set up public key login capabilites and cron an rsync script to maintain a mirror image of your server without the need for any user intervention.

I seem to use this little snippet loads so I thought I would post it up for safe keeping:

Toggling all checkboxes on a page:

<script type="text/javascript">
function toggleCheckboxes() {
// written by Daniel P 3/21/07
// toggle all checkboxes found on the page
  	var inputlist = document.getElementsByTagName("input");
  	for (i = 0; i < inputlist.length; i++) {
   	if ( inputlist[i].getAttribute("type") == 'checkbox' ) {	// look only at input elements that are checkboxes
			if (inputlist[i].checked)	inputlist[i].checked = false
			else								inputlist[i].checked = true;
		}
	}
}
</script>
<button onClick="toggleCheckboxes();">Toggle Enabled Fields</button>

I can’t remember where I first found it. If you know where it originates please feel free to add a link in the comments

If you are getting a weird “cant’ save customer” message in your local Magento development environment when trying to save a new account, but the bug is not on your live store, this might be the solution..

If like me you not only develop Magento sites but also use Zend Framework for other projects (which Magento is based upon) then you might find that there are some clashes between your version of Zend Framework and the Magento version.

For Magento development, you need to be sure that your Magento install is using its own version of Zend Framework and not your own separate copy. To do this you have a choice of either changing your php include path to remove your separate Zend Framework folder or alternatively edit the top of app/Mage.php and make this edit edit on line 31.

//Mage::register('original_include_path', get_include_path());
Mage::register('original_include_path', '');

Here’s a nice little PHP snippet for you. The next weekday as a DD/MM/YYYY string:

<?php
if(preg_match('%(Sat|Sun|Fri)%', date('D'))){
    $next_working_day = date('d/m/Y', strtotime('next Monday'));
}else{
    $next_working_day = date('d/m/Y', strtotime('+1 day'));
}
echo $next_working_day;
?>

To find out about our Magento Training – please Get in Touch

Edmonds Commerce are pleased to announce our new venture in offering professional training on the Magento open source ecommerce platform. We are firm believers in the Magento platform, but we realise that for many new or even established businesses running on Magento, the system can seem a bit daunting.

There are so many great features built into Magento as standard that it really does make sense to make sure you are utilising them all to their fullest potential. This is why we have established this training programme – to help ecommerce business owners and their staff learn how to use Magento to the fullest.

To deliver the course, we have partnered up with NTI who are based in Leeds City Centre. It has great accessibility from all parts of the country thanks to excellent road, rail and air connections.

At the moment we are still discussing the final details for the course and are definitely interested in hearing what you the public would like to see on that course. If you have any comments or would like to register your interest please get in touch about Magento Training UK

If you are using PHP5 on Ubuntu and are having strange issues with missing functions including imagerotate() then you have come up against the problems created by the Ubuntu/Debian packagers decision not to include the GD library included with PHP5 but instead include a more purist version of the GD library which unfortunatley has some missing components.

Check out this blog story for the solution

Just came across another useful keyword research tool.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

This is a bit like the google trends tool but with more detailed information. Handy helping to choose which variations of a search term to go for.

Varien have just released a new tool to help repair Magento databases. The system works by taking a reference database (a clean installation of the same Magento version your store is running) and comparing this to your live store DB.

It then goes through and repairs your store DB, fixing things like missing foreign keys etc.

I haven’t personally seen a requirement for this as yet, but if they have gone to the effort of releasing a tool I imagine it is because there is a requirement for this kind of tool. Definitely something to bear in mind if you ever do need to repair an Existing Magento database.

Read the full wiki post here:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/doc/db-repair-tool

Recently came across this article all about working with IE6.

http://sixrevisions.com/web-development/definitive-guide-to-taming-the-ie6-beast/

Noted here for future reference and for anyone else looking for this.