Magento has emerged as one of the Internet’s leading eCommerce solutions, and perhaps the greatest reason for this is the massive community that is constantly documenting new tricks and writing extensions. Want to get started with your own web-based storefront? There is no better starting place than this definitive list of articles written by actual […]

We often have clients that set-up a staging environment in addition to their production e-commerce environment. We also do a lot of website moves for clients who want to see their site on our servers before the final cut-over takes place. While many web applications are domain agnostic Magento is finicky about being run under […]

Magento version 1.5.0.1 was released on February 9th, 2011. It adds a number of performance improvements in the areas of dataflow and checkout, and comes with the hot new Magento Mobile module installed. While we have not run into the same sorts of upgrade woes that plagued the 1.3 and 1.4 releases, the upgrade method […]

The latest stable version of magento, version 1.4.2.0, was released on December 8th. Upgrading Magento Community Edition always poses some problem or another, mostly due to user-customized themes and third-party extensions. However, upgrading from a vanilla 1.4.1.x install does generate one error that we’ve noticed. There was a change in the way that Wishlists are […]

In the Magento 1.4 release, the memcached backend configuration has changed. There are now more options listed than in previous Magento versions. Some confusion has resulted in how to configure memcached in this new version as the previous configuration for memcached no longer works resulting in the Magento site failing to load if used. Documentation […]

By default most software packages are installed with the most lenient file/directory permissions and ownership. This is normally done for the sake of the software developer given that their software must be installed on a range of diverse systems with varying configurations. This article is meant to give you an overview of how to setup […]

There are times when the web-based administration of Magento hits a snag and no longer works as quickly as we’d like it to. Perhaps product exports or backups time out, or refreshing the URL rewrite table seems to run for hours with little progress. Or maybe you simply want to automate these functions using a […]

During the development of your Magento eCommerce store, performance usually takes a back seat to functionality and design. However, after you’ve installed all of your extensions and have checked the spelling on your last cms page, you’ll want to focus your attention on making your shop as responsive as possible for your customers. Granted, it […]

As covered in our last article, you should have a “cron job” (crontab) set up to run Magento’s cron.php file every so often (15 minutes or so is fine) via PHP directly on the server to take care of housekeeping tasks that keep Magento working well. Some other tasks, like updating tracking / inventory status, […]

For as long as we can remember, Magento has had issues with Import and Export profiles, especially regarding performance. We have tried many different solutions for speeding up DataFlow and dealing with other import / export related issues. We’ve found a solution that seems to help in the majority of cases. First, I’d like to […]