Buckley is a UK based company that prides itself on designing and manufacturing high quality fashion & costume jewellery at competitive prices since its inception in 1989. The company has rapidly expanded into a worldwide brand with jewellery collections available to a vast market of over 200 stores including more than 60 Duty Free shops and 120 airlines . We are glad to hear that Buckley has contributed over US$3 million to the funding of the Royal British Legion through the sale of its elegant Buckley Poppy.

The development idea:

Buckley Jewellery was initially launched using WordPress and used an ecommerce package called ShopperPress. As the company grew and they started to expand their business to Duty Free shops and airlines, it became apparent that WordPress could not provide enough support for their complex modifications and customisations. This is when the idea of re-building the site in Magento was suggested.

We started working with Buckley in 2011 and have been providing them with continuous support since then. Some of the main requirements were broadly to do the following:

1. Magento implementation and migration from previous platform

We installed and configured Magento onto Buckley’s chosen hosting platform and installed the essential extensions such as shipping and payment gateways including PayPal and SagePay. We also migrated all of their products, customers and orders database from the previous platform into Magento. A clean and clear design was created and customised to their specification and we have been tweaking it per their needs and requirements ever since.

2. Magento training

After successfully migrating the site to Magento, we did an on-site one day introduction course with Buckley, where we gave them the background understanding and some useful skills required to get the most out of their new Magento store.
Here is a quote from Mark at Buckley Jewellry: “The day was extremely useful with just the right amount of content to set us on our way.”

3. Magento upgrade and Magento security patch applied

It is important to make sure that your Magento site is up to date. We have done two upgrades for Buckley so far and they all went really well.The upgrades were done in three separate phrases – exploratory upgrade, bugs fixing and deployment to live. We hit a few bugs but managed to fix them within hours.
Around mid July 2012, a serious security hole was found in Zend Framework which allow hackers to gain access to mysql server credentials. A patch was quickly applied to Buckley live store using a nice Bash script we put together. We offered this free security patching service to all Magento sites with a voluntary charity donation and had a lot of sites take us up on this offer.

4. Ongoing support

Buckley have joined our retainer scheme where we provide them with daily maintenance supports, bugs fixing and consultation services. Various firesale promotions, extensions and marketing exercises were installed and configured into their website.
Recently we had migrated Buckley and its sister site Attwood & Sawyer to a dedicated server, which is faster, more secured and gives them better control over the sites.
Buckley also engages in designing beautiful vintage inspired pieces in the silver Bouton rages and we are currently managing the merger process of Bouton into Buckley main sites.

Testimonial

Here is a quote from Mark Noble, IT Manager at Buckley Jewellery:

“Buckley Jewellery originally approached Edmonds Commerce to take our existing site and develop it onto a Magento platform. Since this first project we have used Joseph and his team for a further website and additional work to develop & expand our ecommerce business. The offer of installing the Magento patch across our websites was typical of a company who provide an honest and refreshing approach to website design. I would not hesitate to recommend Edmonds Commerce for any ecommerce development and advice”.

We are big fans of Google Apps and have built a large portion of our business processes around the system. For this reason we have absolutely no problem recommending the service to our clients and have assisted numerous clients with a migration to the system.

The first benefit you will get is your emails migrated over and a much better email service. You have the option of using normal IMAP access so you can continue to use your preferred desktop application however we suspect that you will start to use the web interface as it is really quite powerful with some unique features that you can not access on a normal desktop client.

Along with this you have great support of mobile devices, especially if you opt for Android with powerful and free native apps meaning that you can have all the access to your emails that could possibly wish for.

Along with the really excellent email functionality you also have powerful online documents giving you the basic office application functionality along with really powerful collaboration features allowing multiple people to be working on the same document simultaneously from geographically separate locations. This can be great when putting together proposals, specifications etc.

Now called Google Drive, the documents system has grown from managing purely office documents into a fully featured online file store that can be used to store and share all kinds of files across your organisation and with third parties.

Finally the calendar functionality is great. If you have never used Google Calendar then I suspect the first things you will notice is the abilty to easily drag and drop appointments around when reorganising your schedule. The ability to quickly create appointments using natural language such as “call steve at 11am” is really nice. A full barrage of reminders can be set up if you wish including on screen, SMS and emails meaning you should never miss an appointment again.

All in all we think Google Apps is great and would love to help you move your organisation across to the system. If you would like to discuss this in more detail please do get in touch today.

Edmonds Commerce are a Google Apps Reseller.

Recently I setup a machine with Linux Mint.

One of the things that was I needed to install was an up to date version of Sun Java. However, for various reasons, this no longer appears in the official repos.

Thankfully there is a different repo available here http://www.duinsoft.nl/packages.php?t=en where you can download the latest version and ensure that it is updated

If you want to be able to run multiple queries in a single function call, for example doing the classic drop table blah; create table blah; then you might like this function.

The use case is for things like database migration systems which you might copy and paste chunks of SQL including multiple queries from things like phpMyAdmin

/**
 * Run multiple queries passed in as a single string
 * This is optimised for copying and pasting from phpMyAdmin
 * 
 * Handy for things like database migration systems
 * 
 * @param string $sql  multiple queries terminated with ; and a new line
 */
function multiQuery($sql)
{
    $sqls = preg_split('%;$%m', trim($sql));
    foreach ($sqls as $q) {
        if (empty($q)) {
            continue;
        }
        mysql_query($q); //suggest you replace this with your custom query function or if not throw in some extra error checking at least
    }
}

If you need to transfer a large amount of data from one server to another you might normally create a large tar archive, send it across and then untar it on the other end.

However a slightly slicker and easier repeated way of doing this is to pipe tar directly from one server to the other doing all three steps in one go.

For this you would create a script on each server. You could of course type the commands directly but in the interests of easy repeatability and removing the scope for human error, scripts are my preferred way of doing this kind of task.

Old server script:

#!/bin/bash

cd /var/www/vhosts

# where new server IP is 123.123.123.123 and 9999 is the port the new server is listening on
tar -xvj . | nc 123.123.123.123 9999

New Server Script:

#!/bin/bash

cd /var/www/vhosts

nc -l 9999 | tar -xvf --same-owner

Now save these scripts and make them executable (chmod +x)

Now run the new server script on the new server and then run the old server script. You should quickly see the list of files being transferred appearing in both terminals.

That’s it.

If you are handling a server migration and would like to have a scripted way to copy the crontab from one machine to the other then you might like this little snippet.

ssh -p2020 root@123.123.123.123 'crontab -l' | crontab -

This will get the contents of the root crontab from one server and apply it to the current server, replacing any current cron tab settings.

This is nice if you want to have a repeatable server resynch process whilst you are migrating and the crontab on the old server may change

So, you’ve just moved a magento setup from one host to another, and you want to check if the email setup is correct, how do you do it?

The simple easy way to do this is to have a test front-end user (which you probably already have) and send a password change email to the user.

A simple trick but a good timesaver.

Grass Seed Store – Migration from OSCommerce with Custom Functionality

The Grass Seeds Store wants to migrate away from OSCommerce to Magento in order to improve stock management. They also need to maintain DEFRA compliance and have custom reports generated to do so. The custom reporting was based on the sales of seeds.

The Grass Seed Store

The Grass Seed Store specialises in the sale of a many different types of grass seed, fertiliser and live stock pasture.

This project is a great example of customising Magento to be compliant with an industry governing body and shows that Magento can be used in almost any for the sale of any type of product. The project is currently a work in progress and the Magento implementation is currently only a wire frame demonstrating the functionality that is ultimately required.

Over Board – Migration to Magento from OSCommerce

Over Board wished to move away from OSCommerce due to limitations encountered while using OSCommerce. Using Magento allows the company the flexibility they desired. This project involved implementing a new site design as well as importing data from the old OSCommerce site.

Over Board

Over Board are an eCommerce company specialising in the sales of water proof device cases and bags.

This project was terrific as it demonstrates the ability to move away from a relativity old system to a new system and at the same time enabling a lot more functionality and flexibility.

Migrate your osCommerce, CRE Loaded or Zen Cart store to Magento for as little as £1280. Get in touch today and we can discuss your particular requirements and help you at every step of the way in your migration to Magento, without a doubt the best open source ecommerce platform available today.

If you are thinking of upgrading or migrating from your osCommerce, CRE Loaded or Zen Cart based store to Magento then you should definitely get in touch with us.

Edmonds Commerce have years of experience working with osCommerce and its derivatives and know the platform inside out, back to front. We have done all kinds of things with osCommerce and still have a large number of clients still using the platform with great success.

However Magento is becoming more and more of an attractive option. It is new, modern, powerful and is definitely on the up. Certain Magento features, such as the multi store would be so hard to achieve with an osCommerce based store (or CRE Loaded, Zen Cart) that a migration to Magnento is the only realistic option.

Edmonds Commerce are one of the UK’s leading Magento specialists, we have worked on a large number of Magento sites for a wide range of clients in all kinds of industries. We spotted Magento on the up when it was still in its infancy. We knew that osCommerce was getting a bit long in the tooth and the market was wide open for its successor as the most popular open source ecommerce platform.

A few years later and it has certainly achieved that status, eclipsing osCommerce in every way apart perhaps from the number of sites running it. Having been around for a long time and being very successful, there are still a large number of sites using osCommerce (or CRE Loaded, Zen Cart). However we are now seeing more and more new and existing clients looking to move away from osCommerce and onto Magento.

We are able to help you perform and smooth and seamless transition from one platform to the other. We can migrate all the necessary data over and get your new store working perfectly and to your satisfaction before making a seamless switch so you suffer no down time.

If you would like to get some Magento training we are also able to help you with this, offering both classroom based Magento training in Leeds, West Yorkshire and online training for those for whom Leeds is a bit difficult to get to.

If you would like to know more or get in touch
Please click here to go to our contact form and get in touch with us regarding osCommerce to Magento migrations by osCommerce and Magento experts.