TWIM – This Week In Magento

Until the 17th April you can now get 26% OFF any purchase at GoDaddy.com. Use the discount code gdz417bd in your cart when you order. Don't wait, shop now. If you want to receive regular discount vouchers, coupons, or codes completely FREE, you can Follow Us on Twitter or add our RSS feed to your favourite RSS Reader.

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This weekend (9th & 10th April, 2011) GoDaddy.com are offing 15% OFF any order over $50. The offer applies to all products including domain names, SSL certificates, website hosting and email. Simply spend $50 or more and use the voucher/discount code gdz331h when you check out to get your discount.  Don't wait, shop now. The savings end April 10, 2011 at midnight (Pacific Time), so be quick! If you want to receive regular discount vouchers, coupons, or codes completely FREE, you can Follow Us on Twitter or add our RSS feed to your favourite RSS Reader.

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In a previous article about EmThemes.com I discussed some of the great products and services from EMThemes.com and gave you a 10% off coupon.  Due to the success of that offer, our friends at EmThemes have kindly agreed to extend the coupon until the 12th December 2010.  So hurry and grab yourself a great offer ready for the Christmas period.  All you have to do is click here and use ‘screencastworld‘ as the discount code during the checkout process. In the coming weeks I hope to write some detailed product reviews for some of the themes, templates, and extensions from EMThemes.com so stay...

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You'll be pleased to know that ScreencastWorld has secured a 10% saving on all Premium Magento Themes, Templates, and Extensions from EMThemes.com.  All you have to do is click here and use 'screencastworld' as the discount code during the checkout process.  Hurry!  This offer is only valid until the 31st October 2010. Who are EMThemes EMThemes is a relatively new to Magento world, but the company behind EMThemes, QuickSolution, has a long established web design and developer history.  In addition to the templates and extensions, EMThemes also offers Magento Installation Services, where they...

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A long time ago in a Googleverse far, far away...... they gave us static search.  Then came Google Suggest which displayed the top 10 search criteria based on what you were typing.  The latest incarnation of search comes in the guise of 'Google Instant Search'.  Released to the world on the 8th Sepetmber, 2010, Google Instant search brings an interesting, some say revolutionary but I'll hold back on that, way to search. What is Google Instant Search? Google Instant Search displays results within the web browser as you type.   Here's a few stats taken from the Goolge Instant Home Page. Before...

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If you navigate to System -> Magento Connect -> Maganeto Connect Manager and find no packages listed similar to that shown in the following screenshot, it means that you've not initialised PEAR yet.  This can happen if you used the full distribution bundle to install Magento.  If you used the 'Downloader' option then PEAR will have been initialised and used to download and install the necessary packages. To resolve the issue all you have to do is initialise PEAR by running the following commands via SSH on your web server: [code] <pre>./pear mage-setup ./pear install magento-core/Mage_All_Latest [/code] If...

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If you try to upgrade Magento using the command line PEAR interface you may encounter the following: [code] ./pear mage-setup Running initial setup... Warning: date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. Please use the date.timezone setting, the TZ environment variable or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We had to select 'UTC' because your platform doesn't provide functionality for the guessing algorithm in Registry.php on line...

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I recently came across the situation where I was no longer unable to access the Magento Connect area of a previously working installation of Magento.  After logging in to the backend and going to System -> Magento Connect -> Magento Connect Manager I got the following error (note: I had "ini_set('display_errors', 1);" uncommented in my index.php file). [code lang="php"] Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required '/WWW/mysite/magentocommerce/downloader/pearlib/php/PEAR.php' (include_path='/WWW/solargizmo.co.uk/magentocommerce/downloader/pearlib/php:/WWW/mysite/magentocommerce/app/code/local:/WWW/solargizmo.co.uk/magentocommerce/app/code/community:/WWW/solargizmo.co.uk/magentocommerce/app/code/core:/WWW/solargizmo.co.uk/magentocommerce/lib:.:/var/php/5.2/pear')...

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After what appeared to be a successful upgrade from 1.3.4.2 to 1.4.1.0 using the command line, I was unable to login to the Admin area.  Instead it displayed the following report: [code] a:5:{i:0;s:31:"Invalid mode for clean() method";i:1;s:2982:"#0 /www/www.yourdomain.com/magento/app/code/core/Zend/Cache/Backend/File.php(532): Zend_Cache::throwException('Invalid mode fo...') #1 /www/www.yourdomain.com/magento/app/code/core/Zend/Cache/Backend/File.php(538): Zend_Cache_Backend_File->_clean('/www/www.solarg...', 'matchingAnyTag', Array) #2 /www/www.yourdomain.com/magento/app/code/core/Zend/Cache/Backend/File.php(279):...

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If you've just upgraded your Magento Commerce site to the 1.4.x release from a 1.3.x release, and you forgot to change the theme/template to the default one before you performed the upgrade, you'll probably end up with a blank white screen. The first thing to do is enable debugging by uncommenting the following line in your 'index.php' file: === index.php === ini_set('display_errors', 1); === END === If you refresh the webpage now, you'll still see a blank page, but go and check your webserver error_log and you may see something like this: [code] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] PHP Fatal...

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