If you prefer a coding style that doesn't let you get away with as much as PHP does by default then you may like this trick. As standard PHP will let you get away with quite a lot of things that are probably not a good idea. Some times that can be great, allowing you [...]
If you are struggling to understand why Magento is not finding images that are definitely there, the problem may well be that you are not prefixing your image with a slash, i.e for a new image we would put: /image.jpg and the image would be in media/import/image.jpg Unfortunately whoever wrote the Dataflow product importer though [...]
Continuing with trying to improve the developer experience with Magento a key element has been my quest for a detailed exception dump that can also handle the various object recursion issues in Magento that can cause all kinds of issues when developing. Here is my most up to date version of the detailedExceptionDump method. Its [...]
One of the first stumbling blocks newcomers to Magento might find is that when things go wrong, they don't know how to find out what it is that's actually going wrong. This is because Magento does an excellent job of keeping all of the error information away from people browsing the site. This is without [...]
Magento has some great exception logging functionality which is invaluable when trying to figure out why things aren't working. However, like a lot of settings in Magento, its tucked away in the configuration and its not always easy to remember how to enable it. So here it is: System->Configuration->Developer->Log Settings Once its enabled, the log [...]
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: PLAIN TEXT PHP: [...]
Magento has a nice feature which logs exceptions to file and then generally displays a non scary message to the site user. Its not always true, some exceptions do get through and then generate reports. For exceptions that are caught and logged though, (if you have logging enabled) you will find the exception log in [...]