Nexcess Blog

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 […]

The PHP open_basedir directive is a security feature within PHP that allows you to specify which files PHP is allowed to be opened. With open_basedir, you specify the directory tree or trees that PHP can open and PHP will not open anything outside of these directories. There are negative side effects in relation to system […]

To help increase the speed of Magento page loads as much as possible, it is recommended to use the Memcached support built within Magento. Memcached is a high-performance memory object caching system that is designed to speed page loads on dynamic content websites. Magento supports Memcached for caching many objects, but it is not enabled […]

We’re excited to launch our newest product line, the Secure, Isolated Platforms (SIP). Each SIP is a tightly integrated combination of top of the line hardware and software optimized for speed, security and stability. Each SIP will be focused around a third-party web application, with the goal of providing a “one stop shop” for hosting […]