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”.

Many of our clients use osCommerce for their online store. osCommerce was very popular a few years ago and to date still powers a really large number of stores. Due to a variety of technical reasons, many osCommerce stores are still hosting on PHP version 5.2.

The latest version of PHP is 5.4 and 5.5 is due out fairly soon. Most hosting companies will now regard PHP 5.3 to be the minimum version they will support. By switching to PHP 5.3 they get better performance and better security. Unfortunately if you are running an osCommerce store and your hosting company decides to upgrade PHP then you might find that your entire store stops working.

The first instinct here is to get your store back online as quickly as possible and that is entirely understandable. These days though we really think that osCommerce store owners should be running on PHP 5.3. It is entirely possible to do this and does not necessarily entail a large amount of work depending on which contributions you are running.

The last release for PHP 5.2 was version 5.2.16 released back in 2010. In software terms that is really quite a long time ago and really underlines how much of an issue this is.

You can read about some of the performance gains of switching to PHP 5.3 or greater on this page.

If you would like some help getting your osCommerce store working on an up to date version of PHP then get in touch with Edmonds Commerce today.

Of course another option is to think about moving away from osCommerce and onto a more up to date platform such as osCommerce or OpenCart. If you are thinking of ugprading then 5.3 compatability will be a bonus. If you are not thinking of upgrading platform any time soon though you really do need to schedule in an upgrade to PHP 5.3 at the earliest opportunity.

According to pretty much every source there’s only one sensible way to migrate from 5.0, 5.1 or 5.2 to 5.5 of mysql (or mariadb/percona for that matter), and it’s not pretty (for a server with only two active magento installations for instance, this will take about 3 hours).

The answer is that you have to do an sql dump and restore. This does take an age but does at least provide the reassurance that you are going to have nice clean databases after the upgrade.

So the commands are :-

mysqldump --all-databases --routines --events > fulldump.sql
mysqldump mysql --tables user > users.sql

Then upgrade mysql binaries to 5.5 and empty the database directory – such as /var/lib/mysql and start mysql with it’s script (e.g. /etc/init.d/mysql start). Note, if you’re using a distribution that doesn’t come with start scripts, you may want to run mysql_install as root before starting mysql however you start it.

Then the following will restore the databases and users :

mysql -u root # add -p if you set up a default password when upgrading/installing 5.5
\r mysql
source users.sql
source fulldump.sql
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
\q

At Edmonds Commerce we were staunch Netbeans users for years but we always struggled with large scale projects (Magento I’m looking at you) meaning that Netbeans would sometimes really crawl as it tried to reindex thousands of PHP files.

After a recent upgrade of our Linux desktop environment to the Mate edition of Linux Mint 13, Netbeans seemed to perform even worse and had a few bugs as well. At the same time we had been evaluating other IDE options including Eclipse and Zend Studio (which we all have free licences for thanks to being Zend Certified Developers).

In the end though, the one we tried that really impressed was PHPStorm. It isn’t free open source but it isn’t too expensive, especially considering it is perhaps the single most important and highly used tool of a professional PHP developer.

Now a new version has come out. Downloading and upgrading took all of 5 minutes and we are now going to enjoy better performance and some nice new features. I have yet to really test out the new version so I can’t really report on them but they look good. You can read about all the new features in version 5 here.

Wondering why your Magento admin menu is not showing up after upgrading your live Magento store?

If all attempts to get to a particular admin page with the exception of the dashboard proved abortive, this could be because there is a conflict between the Magento function that merges all Javascript files and the Apache URL rewrite. This could be fixed by turning off this Magento function, and your can run the script below to do this.

UPDATE  <code>[your_magento_database_name]</code>.<code>core_config_data</code> SET  <code>value</code> =  '0' WHERE  <code>core_config_data</code>.<code>path</code> =<code>dev/js/merge_files</code>;

If you would like to upgrade wordpress directly on the command line using bash then you might like this little script:

#!/bin/bash
# This is a script to upgrade wordpress.
# Put it in your wordpress document root (the folder that contains wp-config.php)
# chmod +x to make executable
# ./wp-upgrade.bash to run
# Originally here: http://yabfog.com/blog/2011/12/12/wordpress-update-bash-script
DIR="$( cd -P "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" && pwd )"
TMPDIR=/tmp/wp-upgrader
mkdir -p $TMPDIR
WPDIR=$TMPDIR/wordpress
mkdir -p $WPDIR
cd $TMPDIR
rm -rf latest.zip ./wordpress # Clean up from the last run
wget -nd http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
unzip latest.zip
mv $DIR/wp-config.php $DIR/.wp-config.php.backup # Stash your configuration someplace safe
rm $DIR/*.{txt,html,php} # Delete the old install
rm -rf $DIR/{wp-admin,wp-includes} # Delete more. Don't delete plugins or themes.
cp -aR $WPDIR/* $DIR/
mv $DIR/.wp-config.php.backup  $DIR/wp-config.php # Restore the configuration
# You may not need the last two lines. I like to give my web server the ability to write files.
#chown -R .www-data $DIR/*.php $DIR/wp-admin $DIR/wp-includes
#chmod -R g+w $DIR/*.php $DIR/wp-includes

Please don’t use on a live site or anything like that, but for local development its a quick way to upgrade the site.

The script was originally here I simply edited it a little

So one of our customer’s sites started throwing this error message immediately following an upgrade.
Illegal scheme supplied, only alphanumeric characters are permitted

Turns out 1.6.2.0 doesn’t like anything other than a-z and 0-9 in the store run code and the customer in question had underscores (_) in the store run code.

The simple fix was to strip it out and alter the url to store code logic to match.

Hope this helps someone else out there. As to why someone at magento thought this was a good idea is beyond me though.

Magento have released the latest version of Magento CE (community edition), 1.6.2.0

Major interest to most of our clients will be the refactoring of the indexing process to prevent duplicate indexing processes.

Along with that is a nice list of fixes.

If you are looking to upgrade your Magento store to the latest version simply get in touch

There is a new feature in Netbeans that tries to auto fill the variables for methods and functions in PHP. Whilst this may be something that is a time saver for some, it often gets these wrong, and if you are using descriptive variables in the method then these are overwritten if you have a variable of the same type above your method call.

Thankfully there is a way to disable this feature and revert to the old ways. In netbeans go to Tools - Options - Editor - Code Completion and select Language PHP. From there you can deselect the Use Smart Parameters Pre-Filling and netbeans will work the way it used to

Magento Upgrade with Custom Modules Rewrite

The aim of this project was to upgrade a store from 1.3 to 1.5, without losing the functionality of the site. The old version had had its core files modified, requiring a forensic examination of them in order to find and extract what had been changed.

Love My Frames

Love My Frames is run by highly trained technicians with over 40 years’ optical experience, offering the kind of personal service you would normally expect from a high street opticians. Offering the best for considerably less, professional service and door-to-door delivery, they give their customers the ultimate shopping experience online plus the opportunity to purchase the very latest designs at a great price.

The project asked for a clean install and then rewrite of the existing store. The biggest part of the project was taking the existing layered navigation and rewriting it to work on all pages with a custom design.