Edmonds Commerce Blog

Over at Magentocommerce.com they have just posted a blog story detailing the top ten most popular Magento extensions of the moment.

There are some great Magento extensions out right now and the selection is growing all the time.

Just another reason to use the most promising ecommerce package available today.

If you are looking for a Magento Developer or Magento Designer to help you get your Magento Ecommerce store online, get in touch today with Edmonds Commerce – UK based Magento and Ecommerce specialist.

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Just installed Google Chrome for Linux (Beta), so I could check out this pure CSS3 ATAT (requires a webkit browser).
http://anthonycalzadilla.com/css3-ATAT/index.html

Chrome seems to work fine, nice

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If your firefox address bar is getting a bit slow and laggy as it tries to find suggestions, I found one single about:config tweak totally sorted it out for me.

browser.urlbar.search.timeout = 100

change to

browser.urlbar.search.timeout = 10

To do this, open a new tab and type about:config

Then agree to the thing that says you know what you are doing and in the filter bar at the top type:

urlbar.search.timeout

you can then double click on the value (set to 100 by default) and change it to whatever you want. I tried 10 and that seems to work great for me, but you might want to experiment.

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Just discovered another great Firefox Addon

Custom Buttons..

tired or too lazy to use the right click for that frequent action (view source, reload all tabs)

this addon is for you

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5066

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Douglas Crockford, author of Javascript the Good Bits and Yahoo’s Javascript architect is delivering his famous lectures.

The first one is now available to download.

Douglas Crockford is Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect and a member of the committee designing future versions of the world’s most popular programming language. In the first three months of 2010, Douglas will be delivering his acclaimed series of lectures on the history of JavaScript, its features, and its use.

http://yuiblog.com/crockford/

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If you encounter the error :

Invalid bind-variable name xxxxxx

When trying to use named bound parameters with Zend Framework, then you are probably using the Mysqli adapter. Unfortunately this doesn't actually support named parameters, but the Exception message isn't really clear on that, despite being thrown in this block of code:

The Exception should really say:

You are trying to use named parameters with an adapter that doesn't support them

The solution is easy, just switch your adapter from Mysqli to Pdo_Mysql

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To make your RewriteRule strip the query string, simply append a ? to the end of the rewrite path, eg:

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Very interesting this one:

http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?story=358&blog;=1

With HipHop we've reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent

sounds good to me

HipHop for PHP isn't technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it.

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Every Magento based site I seem to look at is still using the default Magento favicon.

Whilst its cool to advertise that you are using Magento, perhaps you should be advertising your own business!

Its actually very easy to do - here's a step by step guide:

1. Create your Favicon.

First create a roughly square image with your logo in it, then upload it here to create your favicon itself:

http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/

2. Find the path to your Favicon.

All you need to do is go to your home page, view source and look for two lines like this:

You now know where your favicon is being stored on your server.

3. Upload your Icon

Fire up your favourite FTP client, connect to your server, browse to the path you go from above skin/frontend/****/****/

Now rename the favicon that is up there to favicon.ico.backup

Now upload your custom one.

4. Check it out

Just reload your page. Note you may need to clear cache for the new favicon to display properly.

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If you use Zend_Db_Statements directly as well as using the Zend_Db_Table family of classes for Active Record et al then you might find the following little tip useful.

By default, if you run a query using something like

then every time you call your query method, you will be preparing the statement again.

Of course that's not really a good idea if you are repeating the same query multiple times simply changing the parameters to be passed in.

In that kind of scenario you can do something like this:

Heres an example of a chunk of code that is working out a category path from an ecommerce system for a particular category id.

This tip alone can add a lot of speed if you are doing repetitive statements

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