I recently worked with one of our Magento Enterprise Cluster clients who wanted to improve the performance of their site. This client was using our Content Delivery Network to offload the serving of static assets, and was following all of our recommended Magento Optimization best practices. They were also using Memcached as the fast-backend in […]

Web hosting is a competitive industry. Hosting companies can often find success by differentiating themselves through specialization. To that end, companies specializing in hosting certain popular web applications such as WordPress or Magento have been able to compete against the bigger players. Yet even within these niches, the fundamentals of support and performance end up […]

It seems that every site you visit has a link to share this article, page or product with your Facebook friends. This tutorial will make it easy for your customers to share your products with their Facebook friends. For this article I will use the Magento default theme as reference, you may need to adjust […]

Many Magento store owners continue to operate old versions of the rapidly maturing e-commerce application. With the 1.6 release looming on the horizon, now seems like a good time to consider upgrading. If you’re running a version prior to the 1.4 release, you will need to make some changes to your theme in order for […]

When you’re working on your store and trying to get something important done, momentum matters a lot, and anything that interrupts your workflow can really get you out of the zone. I find that this happens to me a lot when I just want to take a free Magento Connect extension for a spin. Normally, […]

Sooner or later, you will probably want to install a Magento theme other than the default. The good news is, Magento theme installation is quick and easy. This will be accomplished in just 3 simple steps. Step 1: Download a Theme There are lots of places to find a good Magento theme. Here are a […]

“What is the difference between the “Flush Magento Cache” and “Flush Cache Storage” buttons?” We get this question often enough that it’s worth making a short blog post about it. In order to understand the difference between these two options, it’s important to know a little about how caching works in Magento. Specifically the concepts […]

In previous weeks, we’ve covered some debugging tools for both MySQL and PHP that can be very helpful in troubleshooting problems with your LAMP-based web applications. However, there is a little known feature in the Varien library installed with Magento that will automagically log database queries to a file. This feature not only provides a […]

We’ve seen a few customers failing PCI scans due to Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities on the catalogsearch page. Initially it seemed like it was a bug in Magento where it wasn’t sanitizing its input but when we tried to see if a new install, using the default theme, was vulnerable we found it wasn’t. […]

APC (Alternative PHP Cache) is an opcode cache for PHP that works very well to speed up page loads when used on servers running Magento. There are many opcode caches available (APC, accelerator, xcache, etc) which can be used with Magento, but we will be focusing on APC here as it along with eAccelerator are […]