"Recent" Posts

Redeemded Gift Card Report

The Gift Card functionality in the Enterprise Edition of Magento is a key selling point of the platform. Unfortunately it appears that some of the technical implementation was either half baked or not thought out completely. In particular, the data structure of the gift card account and relating it to orders is not possible. The data exists, in some fashion, just not in the normalized fashion that one would expect.

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Basic Magento/PHP development environment - Part 2

In this second part we're continue some setup and go through a test magento install. You can find the first part here if you missed it.

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Basic Magento/PHP development environment - Part 1

In this tutorial we'll walk through setting up a basic PHP development environment for use with Magento. This will be a two part series. The first half we'll be primarily focused on installing PHP, MySQL, Apache on Debian using VirtualBox as our virtualization platform. This walk through was done on OS X 10.6.8, but should not be too different on *nix or Windows. Let's get to it.

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Interactive Magento Console

I started working on a console script to help aide in testing certain Magento functionality without having to go through a browser. This will also avoid adding debug code into places like action methods, templates or index.php. In all its alpha/first round glory I present my simple “interactive Magento console” script.

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View Merged Magento Layout XML

Here's a quick way to view the Layout XML that is generated in magento, it can be added at the end of index.php.

<?php
Mage::app()->getLayout()->getNode()->asNiceXml('/tmp/foo');

It's a quick and easy way to verify custom layout changes have been merged in, an XML file will be saved in the specified path.

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