March 7th, 2009
Magento provides the option to use categories in your product URLs for the search engine optimization benefits it brings, but they’ve implemented it in a very unusual way. Basically, if you enable this option, you’ll end up with at least 4 URLs per product. Once people realize it, this often raises a number of concerns including possible duplicate content penalty from Google, fractured link juice for product pages, frustrated admins, etc.
With so many people also searching for a clever solution, I decided disabling the feature was an unacceptable solution, and took the challenge.
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Tags: Magento, Patch, SEO
Posted in Development | 7 Comments »
March 7th, 2009
Beats me why this isn’t an option in Magento core back-end administration already. I have been using the core patch for Magento Dataflow which allows me to import categories with my products similar to the way Yahoo! eCommerce lets you do it. It makes things easy for importing but you end up with the categories appearing in the order they were specified in your .CSV file you imported, and not alphabetically as most customers would expect when browsing your product catalog from the front-end.
So, rather than manually attempting to reorder 68 categories across 3 levels one-by-one using the tools provided in the Magento back-end, I decided to write a simple MySQL script that would do it all for me automatically. Here it is, for anyone else who may be running into this problem.
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Tags: Catalog Categories, Dataflow, Magento, Mysql Script
Posted in Development | 1 Comment »
February 24th, 2009
First off, the first reaction I always hear when others are introduced to Magento [including myself] are complaints about how difficult it is. The truth is it is just as easy as what we’re all used to. I’m going to show you that today by drawing comparisons between Magento and some other popular open-source projects we’re more familiar with such as Drupal and WordPress.
This guide is meant to be a quick-start supplement for the official Magento Design Guide, and not a replacement for it. It assumes you are already familiar with and have completed themes for Drupal and/or WordPress.
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Tags: Magento
Posted in Development | 6 Comments »
February 13th, 2009
For anyone who doesn’t know, Zend Core is a new solution for PHP developers as of 2008.
Prior to this all we had were solutions like XAMPP, WAMP, with a surprising number of others still pursuing the hard way. Personally, I’ve been relying on XAMPP Lite and the good people at Apache Friends to provide me with timely updates and seamless upgrade paths between versions for the better part of 3 years. I have to admit, it was hard to part, but there are clear benefits to making the transition.
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Tags: Apache, MySQL, PHP, Zend Core, Zend Framework
Posted in Development | No Comments »
February 12th, 2009
Very frustrating! With XAMPP Lite 1.6.8 on Windows XP SP3, I could get Magento 1.2.0.1 to work but Apache would crash randomly every 3-5 minutes triggered by new page loads or refreshes. Upgrading to Magento 1.2.0.2 and then 1.2.1 didn’t help. Upgrading to XAMPP Lite 1.7.0 made it worse because Apache would crash on every page load, finally making it impossible to work with. That’s when I realized these types of problems were known issues between Magento and XAMPP.
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Tags: Apache, Magento, XAMPP, Zend Core, Zend Framework
Posted in Development | 2 Comments »
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