Tag / 1.4

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...

---

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...

---

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...

---

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')...

---

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):...

---

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...

---

I was recently upgrading a Magento installation from 1.3.2.4 to 1.4.1.0 using the fresh installation technique, which I'll discuss in an upcoming video tutorial.  After entering the database name, username & password in the 'Configuration' area, I got the "Exception printing is disabled by default for security reasons" message. Upon checking the error report I found the following: [code lang="php"] a:5:{i:0;s:263:"Error in file: "/WWW/mydomain.com/magento/app/code/core/Mage/Sales/sql/sales_setup/mysql4-upgrade-0.9.51-0.9.52.php" - SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access...

---

Magento have released the long awaited 1.4.1.0 version of the Community Edition.  There are a few key improvements and changes in this version.  The PayPal module has had a major overhaul making it incompatible with previous releases of Magento so if you've made any modifications to the core code directly, or via updates in your theme folder, those changes will not only be over written but are most likely not to work.  Any extensions that utilise the PayPal module are also likely to stop working so be sure to check the extension publisher has updated their module before you upgrade your site....

---

Here's a quick Magento developer tip for you.  At some point in your career as a Magento developer you'll need to get data from the database or put data in to the database.  Here' how it's done. READ Queries [code lang="php"] // Prepare the SQL $sql = "SELECT * FROM mytable"; // Execute the SQL and return the results in to $getData $getData = Mage::getSingleton('core/resource')->getConnection('core_read')->fetchAll($sql); // Parse the results for($i=0; $i < count($getData); $i++){ /* your code */ } [/code] WRITE/UPDATE Queries [code lang="php"] // $write is an instance of Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract $write...

---

I've always found quick reference guides or cheat sheets extremely useful, so I thought I'd put a few together for Magento.  The first in this series of 'Quick Ref Guides/Cheat Sheets' is the backoffice Admin Menu system. Let me know if you find these useful.  Next on the agenda will be a quick ref guide that looks at the configuration settings for Magento.

---