Archive:

I have put together an XAMPP based portable Magento demo site. You can easily download it to your windows PC, drop the xampp folder into the root of your C: drive, launch the XAMPP control panel to start Apache and MySQL and then you are away. You can get the files on GitHub here: http://github.com/edmondscommerce/XAMPP-Magento-Demo-Site [...]

As previously announced, we have started to run a Magento training course. The course is targeted at Magento site owners who are new to the system and are keen to get the most out of their Magento store. One of the key advantages of Magento is it’s wealth of professional ecommerce features that all come [...]

Linux has a great little utility called split, which can take a file and split it into chunks of whatever size you want, eg 100 line chunks. However, for CSV files etc, each chunk generally needs to have the header row in there. Unfortunately the split command doesn't have an option for that. However with [...]

If you need to move your osCommerce (and derivatives such as CRE Loaded and Zen Cart) based site to a new server, here is a quick explanation of our approach which enables you to handle the migration without any downtime and no loss of order or customer information despite the fact that in the propagation [...]

If your Magento database has swelled to truly gargantuan proportions, then perhaps you have suffered the same fate as a recent client. Magento happily logs all kinds of data to a collection of tables beginning with the prefix log_ It is possible to configure Magento to clean out these logs on a regular basis as [...]

If you want to check coverage against ICEcat, the best thing to do is to import their dump file available here into a MySQL database. The file format is a bit unusual, but here is a nice command you can run. You need to have created a database in it with a table called prodid_d [...]

I seem to be incredibly busy this month... Managed to do a lot though. One cool thing is the creation of a shared hosting friendly (and also wysiwyg designer friendly) MVC framework. It doesn't require anything more fancy than PHP5 with PDO. No open base dir problems, no modifying the include path problems, no bloat [...]

This weekend saw the second annual PHP North West conference in Manchester. It was great After seeing two talks that touched upon the Symfony framework plus the plethora of other developers with an almost religious passion for the framework that I spoke to, I will definitely be getting into it soon. Especially now I have [...]