ASchroder.com

Wow, long time, no post – no excuses really*, just been really busy. This post will give you a quick tip for masking password fields in your Magento extensions. I wanted to mask the password in my Google Apps and Gmail Magento Extension and despite a few Google searches, I couldn’t find a simple answer. There’s also not really any good documentation on the various configuration xml files in Magento, it seems.

Thankfully i960 over at the Magento forums gave me this simple tip, which I think should be shared. Here’s how to mask or hide your admin passwords in the backend of Magento. This is particularly useful when creating your own Magento extensions.

In etc/system.xml add xml like this:

 <password translate="label">
    <label>Password</label>
    <frontend_type>password</frontend_type>
    <sort_order>10</sort_order>
    <show_in_default>1</show_in_default>
    <show_in_website>1</show_in_website>
    <show_in_store>0</show_in_store>
</password>

The key being the frontend_type of password in case you hadn’t noticed that.

Anyway expect me to be a bit more active with some Magento tips over the next few weeks.

*In a lot of ways you can blame Amazon for creating some of the worst financial reports I have ever had to work with! Parsing those to pull meaningful information has been like pulling teeth. Anyway I’ll add some feedback on those in an upcomming post.

I wanted to share this, it made me laugh when I noticed it. Every now and then I take a look through Google analytics at the Magento keyword searches that get people to my site but cause bounces, in case there is some useful content I could add. I spotted this little gem of a keyword search amongst the far more boring Magento searches and I though it was pretty funny.

For those of you that develop/design with Magento, the first few weeks of frustration when you’re first learning can be tough, I bet this is a common feeling!

A frustrated Magento developer looking for answers?! I know the feeling!

Ironically if it hadn’t been for this really rude commenter then this search would have never found me, so in a way it’s a good thing!

It got me thinking, it’d be a kind of fun trick/game to play to find the most obscure search that would still actually find someone’s site and then visit them using it – just in case they’re looking through their keyword lists.

So if I spot any more funny ones, I’ll post them up – if it’s yours, feel free to claim responsibility in the comments. You can’t do “fuck aschroder” though, because I just tried that already (and it works), be creative!

Ok, so not long after my last Free Magento Hosting competition I was approached by Richard at elief.com with an excellent offer to sponsor a new Free Magento Hosting competition. I was really amazed with the generosity shown and am excited to offer this prize to my readers. Elief are offering 1 year free hosting on their beginner reseller hosting account (that’s worth over $200!). This would allow you to run multiple Magento stores and even resell Magento stores. You can read more about the reseller hosting here.

Some of the quite cool features are the pre-configured merchant account (so that you can process your own credit card payments without Paypal or Google Checkout). Multiple IP addresses which support many different SSL domains easily and the ability to set up each store with it’s own unique cPanel, which let’s you easily resell the stores you build and host. Cool.

So what do you have to do to get your hands on this super sweet prize? Simple, tell me what innovative business you’d start on this reseller platform! So for example, you might start a completely free Magento host, or a commission based Magento host, or you may even try and do some sort of wiki-shop where anyone can add their products for sale in a sort of organic Amazon – wouldn’t that be fun?

To enter just pop over to my competitions page and submit your entry.