Magento E-Commerce : A Brilliant Open Source solution or a piece of frustrating unsupported crap?

I’ve now built a few shops using Magento E-Commerce Community Edition.

Pros

it can look fabulous
it has features only expensive professional software has
it blows similar software like OSCommerce out of the water.

Cons (you’ll notice a rant below)

Let’s first give the Magento team their say.  The website says;

“The Magento Community Edition is available as a free download under the open source OSL 3.0 license and is recommended for expert developers and highly technical enthusiasts and hobbyists in non-mission critical environments. As this edition is unsupported it is intended to be used by those happy to spend time and resource solving issues independently”

Fair enough.  But I’m left with the feeling that a lot of their web traffic is driven by the “open source” moniker.  BEWARE!  The Open Source license is OSL 3.0 which means that the community doesn’t keep the source up to date,  they can …

Magento – Exception printing is disabled by default for security reasons

When testing your Magento site and you get this error you can enable the exception error printing by:

going to your Magento Root folder and look in /errors/
copy the sample local.xml.sample file and create a “local.xml” version

By default the error reporting is switched off for security reasons. When you’ve tested your system and are going live with your site you should ensure that it’s switched off again.

What happens when you view a website – for beginners

I sometimes have to explain how internet pages actually make it to your PC.

Drawings make everyhting a little bit easier so here’s one I did earlier.

Your PC is connected at a Modem and/or Router.  This connects you to your ISP (Internet Service Provider) via your telephone line.
Your pay your ISP for access to the Internet.
You can now connect to all the services other computers which are also linked to the Internet (like Google, Facebook, Twitter and those silly videos of cats dancing to Mambo Number 5)
To find your website each internet service and site has an address.  The address is known as the Domain Name.  Our domain name is http://www.solarpolar.co.uk.  You have to pay for your domain name.  Typically you pay for the name for a set number of years and you must remember to renew it when that time …

Speeding up WordPress

According to Google Labs Site Performance tool, the Solar Polar WordPress website took an average of 6-7 seconds to load during the month of June 2010. With Google now using page loading times as a ranking factor this was an issue that I had to address.

I started to investigate how to cut that page load time.

After a little internet searching I discovered that Google Chrome browser has a developer tool to help. A “Timeline” view which shows page load time.

I also found this great article by Julius Kuhn-Regnier.   It highlights many steps that can be taken to speed up your WordPress installation.

My Approach

To firstly analyse my site I visited the home page using Chrome and once the page had loaded, right clicked and choose “Inspect Element”.

This opens up the Developer tools in the same browser window.  You …

Installing Magento on Heart Internet Shared Server

Caveat 1

These are my own notes for my install procedures. I’m posting them here as a reminder to myself.  If they’re any use to you then all the better.

Caveat 2

I read that Heart Internet do not suggest that Magento is installed the shared server because it’s too CPU hungry.  I’ll give it a go with this latest version but may have to shift to a dedicated server to ensure performance. (Updated 2012 – Heart have since upgraded their shared servers and there seems to be no CPU problems now – although response times still may be a little slow)

Installation

To install the files you can upload the zip file to the folder you require and using the Heart Internet Control Panel File Manager – right click the zip file to unzip it.

When I searched the Magento forums for information a chap …

Installing Magento on Windows 7 XAMPP

Installing Magento
These notes are currently being updated.

I’ve installed Magento before and remember having problems so I’m gonna document my efforts here so that I don’t forget next time.

First I’ll document installing Magento on my Windows 7 / XAMPP environment.  Once that’s done I’ll show you what I’ve done on my reseller shared server account at Heart Internet UK.

Installing Magento on my Windows 7 / XAMPP

Magento 1.4.0.1 wont run under PHP 5.3.  That rules out the latest version of XAMPP.  If you want to use Magento you may have to downgrade XAMPP to version 1.7.1.

To download Magento you’ll have to register with their site.  Do so and download the Magento Full release and also the latest sample data.  I’m using magento-1.4.0.1.zip which was the latest at my time of install.

I’ve created a new local test folder called c:websitestestshop .

I need to …

WordPress Plugin : Flickr Search Wall

I’m developing a new WordPress plugin to show a FLickr Wall of photos.

Might be fun?  Check out the beta page here and let me know what you think?

www.solarpolar.co.uk/flickr-wall

Creating a WordPress Plugin

I’m currently working on some development of some WordPress plugins. There is a wealth of information on the net but sometimes it’s difficult to put it all together.

This post will build over time and the links below will show what sites have helped me understand plugin development from basic learning to advanced techniques.

How to Build a simple WordPress Plugin

http://www.unmatchedstyle.com/news/how-to-build-a-wordpress-plugin.php

Solar Polar got hacked

We’ll I’m not sure how yet but our site got hacked.  Some dude called “North Storm” got in and changed some code so that it started running malicious code on the server.

The lovely team at Heart Internet we able to identify it and switched scripting off and inform me so kudos to them.

I’ll report fully on the attack later because there seems to be no further information on it.

In the meantime I’m trying to get back all previous posts.

Solar Polar is nowhere on Google Search

If you type “Solar Polar” into Google you won’t find this site within the 1st 15 pages of the search engine.

Let’s be honest, who checks past page 1!

Over the next few months I’m going to try to use SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques to see how far up the list we can get without spending any money.

I’ve always been sceptical of companies who claim that they can get you to the top of the pile, so now I’m going to put some effort in to see if I’m right or not.