ASchroder.com

It’s been a while since I have written any updates on my Gmail and Google Apps email extension for Magento. I have just released version 0.5 and thought now would be a good opportunity to write a quick update on the changes and what I have planned for SMTP email support in Magento.

Version 0.5 of Google Apps Email/Gmail Magento Extension

Firstly the changes in the latest release of the Google Apps/Gmail Magento extension. Both have been inspired by user feedback so two ‘thank you’s to follow. Firstly thanks to Blue Acorn for pointing out the lack of multi-store capability on the self test. It’s actually a little clunky getting the store parameters in the admin of Magento, my custom button needed to add the parameter like so:

$buttonBlock = $this->getElement()->getForm()->getParent()->getLayout()->createBlock('adminhtml/widget_button');
 
$params = array(
    'website' => $buttonBlock->getRequest()->getParam('website')
);
 
$url = Mage::helper('adminhtml')->getUrl("googleappsmailtest", $params);

And then the controller needed to actually pick up which Magento store to get the config for:

$websiteModel = Mage::app()->getWebsite($this->getRequest()->getParam('website'));
 
$to = Mage::getStoreConfig('contacts/email/recipient_email', $websiteModel->getId());

The other change was a bit of a curve ball. I had a Magento + Gmail user named Matt contacted me with what seemed to be an unrelated issue. I have been poking around in the installation code trying to figure out what has been happening. It wasn’t until I did a full fresh install on Magento 1.3.2.3 that I noticed what was going on. My extension has a dependency on Mage_Core (obviously, right?) and the wiki guide on how to package Magento extensions says to include this dependency. However if you do then the downloader will download the Core files and a whole bunch of other required files. This is no problem if you have been a good boy or girl and made your changes to the themes outside of the default files, but if you have changed the default templates then there is a risk of your changes being lost!

So, the change is to remove this dependency, even though the guide says it should be there. It’s kind of obvious that you need Magento in order to run my extension anyway!

Magento SMTP support

The other update I wanted to post was that I am working on porting my Magento Gmail / Google Apps extension to also support full SMTP capability. I will be releasing the changes as a new extension, as it is important to me that the original goal of this extension (extreme simplicity and ease of use) is not lost under the weight of full SMTP configuration.

I know that there is already an older SMTP extension for Magento. I think I can improve upon it in several ways, I have developed Magento SMTP self test capability, and I have support for Magento newsletter sending. The current SMTP extension hasn’t been updated for nearly a year, and I have an opportunity to create a more modern, user friendly extension.

I’ll be working on it over the next few days and would invite feedback from anyone with ideas on ways to improve the Magento SMTP functionality.

It’s been a while since I have done any of my Magento Hosting Reviews but I’ve finally gotten around to reviewing Crucial Web Hosting. Ages ago (I mean months) a reader specifically requested I review Crucial for their Magento hosting capability, and they were very keen to participate.

Crucial have gone ahead and pre-installed Magento on one of their split shared hosting programs. I’ll talk a little about what that means during the review. Crucial have also kindly offered to keep their Magento demo install up and running so that you guys can try the Crucial Magento demo out for yourselves.

In this Magento Hosting review, just as with my others I’ll be looking at the hosting proposition itself, the value and the price and how they stack up. I’ll also look at the responsiveness of their data centers and comment on the general access levels the hosting provides.

I noticed that my last Magento Hosting Review became a bit of a monster and probably put a lot of people off because it was too long and not that well structured. This time I’ll try and give the whole review a little mini-index so that you can jump to the parts you actually want to read about, if you are not interested in the whole thing.

• The Hosting
• Hardware
• What does split shared mean?
• How does the value stack up
• The Performance
• Ping Tests (Latency)
• Page loads (Server Power and Magento optimisaztion)
• General responsiveness
• Access and Support
• Conclusion

The Hosting

In this section I’ll discuss the actual hosting solution offered by Crucial. I’ll look at the hardware they’re operating, explain the notion of split-shared hosting and how that relates to other shared hosting solutions. I’ll try to weigh up the offering with other similar solutions for value.

Right off the bat the hardware offering is definitely high-end. The Crucual website claims “Quad Core Intel Xeon Harpertown 3.0 GHz, 32 GB DDR-2 RAM, 15K.5 RPM hard drives, and a Gigabit uplink”. I checked this out on the command line and sure enough 8 3GHz processors from cat /proc/cpuinfo! A look at the output of top on the box reveals the beast is hardly even raising an eyebrow at the work it’s doing, an avg 0% cpu usage and over half the RAM is free. Although this is a shared hosting solution, it is definitely not a machine that is being over worked or put under any pressure by too many clients having to share the same hardware.

Split-shared hosting is a way to divide up the available computer resources (the hardware) among more users without having to share the resources with so many people.

In a traditional shared hosting arrangement all of the users on a server are in the same ’system’. That means they are basically all users on the same Linux box. If everyone is playing nice then there’s not too much of a problem with that. Provided the host is not overselling. The problem is that with so many clients on a box, if one of them has security problems, or get’s ’slashdotted’ then the entire system is put at risk.

With split-shared hosting the single Linux box is virtualized into several small Linux boxes. Each is not a real server, but a virtual one isolated from the others by a special underlying piece of software. Each virtual server has it’s own allocated resources which means that if someone in a neighboring virtual server is slowing a server down, it will not affect your virtual server.

Does this really help? Well, yes and no, there is much less chance that you’ll be affected by the shenanigans of one of the clients you share with, when there are fewer of them, but you are fundamentally still sharing a server with others and exposed to the problems that can accompany that. So it’s better than pure shared hosting, but still no match for a VPS or an actual dedicated server.

Now that we know how the hosting works and how grunty the servers are, what do you get for your money? For $25/ month (less if you pay in advance) you get 50GB of bandwidth and 5Gb of storage space. With ecommerce I always think that if someone is doing 50GB of bandwidth they probably have tens of thousands of visitors and should be making enough sales to warrant a much bigger hosting solution, so bandwidth is probably nothing to worry about. With disk space, 5 gigs is probably more than enough for most webstores, even if you used ultra high-res product photos (say 300kb) and had 3 such images per product, that would be 4500 products (with leftover for the actual Store install etc). In general for small Magento stores the disk space and bandwidth will be adequate. For larger ones, do not look at shared hosting!

To put the price in context, for the same monthly amount you could get the SIP account from Nexcess which in my review I do really rave about. How does Crucial’s Magento hosting option stack up in the performance stakes against Nexcess’s Magento optimized SIP? Read on

The Performance

I normally look at page load time and latency when deciding how well a Magento host performs. To test latency I use the free and excellent service just-ping.com. The results of the test against the Crucial Demo server show that the ltency to large parts of the world in in and around that 100ms sweet spot. Us poor antipodeans in NZ, Aus and SA get a bit slow communication, but hey, no-one cares about that right?!

The Watchmouse service is excellent for looking at page load times. I have run the tests and the results are shown below:

WatchMouse test results for the Crucal Magento Demo

And here is even more!

Even more WatchMouse test results for the Crucal Magento Demo

What’s interesting is that even though this is a shared host and there is no advertised performance optimizations carried out on the Magento install, the response times are snappy (around or under 1 second) in most places the tests are run from. That’s really good to see, and if you actually browse around the demo you’ll get a feel for how punchy the pages show up.

Access and Support

Of all the hosting companies I have dealt with I’d have to say I have never had any real problems with the service. Crucial is no exception, the contact I dealt with at Crucial has been polite and really helpful, setting up Magento and installing sample data, responding really quickly to emails and tickets and generally being the good host everyone says they are.

The server access is top notch as well. SSH access is granted by default, and the initial support ticket had all the access details required. Anyone who has approached me for Magento installation help/advice will know that as soon as someone tells me they only have cPanel or (far far worse) only Plesk access, I normally run for the hills and advise others to do the same. As far as I am concerned if you are serious about running a webstore and you want at any time to get a professional involved in support or customizing your store, you need to have the ability for them to access your server using SSH.

Conclusion

Geez this is really tough for me to say! On paper I’d say Nexcess’s SIP looks the better plan for the same money, it’s been optimized for Magento and offers slightly more value. But, I’ve tried out the Crucial demo, I’ve looked at Crucial’s server and I have to say it is as fast or faster, the support is great and I can’t really fault them either. In the end it will probably come down to preference. Both companies offer a money back first month, so perhaps you should sign up for both and decide for yourself based on your interaction with their support and sales team!

PS: As with my other reviews I’m inviting feedback from my readers on personal experiences with the hosting company, because often (as was the case with Simple Helix) the negative experiences that come out of the woodwork can be a real influence in the hosting choices we make.

This is a Magento hosting review for Nexcess Hosting. Savy readers will recall, Nexcess sponsored my last Free Magento Hosting competition by giving away one year of free hosting on their entry level plan.

For this review I’ll be looking at the latest offering from Nexcess, the Magento SIP platform. This is a purpose built ecommerce hosting environment that is both secure and optimized. In this review I’ll look at what that security means, and also be running some tests for performance. I have a demo Magento SIP environment set up that you can try, to see for yourself how fast it is.

If you can’t be bothered reading the review below, my bottom line is; if you are prepared to spend the money, this is the fastest, most convenient Magento hosting solution I have seen to date, get it here.

Read more…

This is just a quick post about the Magento javascript giving a 404 error because it tripped me up and really shouldn’t trip anyone up. Basically the problem is the javascript include in Magento that looks like the one below gives a 404 error and causes javascript errors on the page:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://example.com/js/index.php?c=auto&amp;f=,prototype/prototype.js,prototype/validation.js..../>

The problem

Trying to load the javascript URL directly in a browser gives a 404 error, which in turns breaks everything javascript related in Magento. For example the checkout page will no longer work, the Magento admin menus do not display which then causes the whole admin interface to be unusable.

The fix

Set the correct permissions on the javascript files in you Magento installation.

cd /path/to/your/magento/
chmod -R 755 js/*

That should get the javascript files showing up again without the 404 error, and once they are, your Magento admin interface, add to cart, checkout and everything else that relies on javascript, will also work, yah!

This is just a quick little note to suggest two ways to solve the problem that you cannot log in to your Magento admin interface after a fresh install of Magento.

The Problem

The problem will manifest itself as a redirect back to the login screen, even though you typed the right username and password. If this problem is affecting you, you will be redirected back and see no error message. This indicates you have the right credentials, but the Magento Admin is just not letting you in. You can verify it by typing the wrong username and password, you’ll see you get redirected back and it shows an error message.

The problem occurs because the Magento backend tries to set a cookie on your browser, and then for some reason when you next make a request, the cookie is gone(or was never there). This makes Magento think you have never logged in, and of course it redirects you to the login screen. So the real guts of it is the missing cookie, we need to find out why it’s missing.

There are two solutions I have come across that will solve this, there may be others too, so please feel free to post them below. Both of these solutions have been suggested in the comments of my post on Setting up Apache Virtual Hosting.

Solution 1: Domain Name with no dots

This is the most common solution, if you have set up Magento to run locally (on MAMP for example) then you may be accessing the Apache webserver using the localhost hostname. A security setting in browsers means that the cookie will not be set, though apparently in FF3 at least, this behavior is a bug?.

So simply stop using localhost, you can use your localhost interface (e.g. 127.0.0.1 or 127.0.1.1). To determine your localhost interface you can look at the contents of your hosts file:

# Look for the number to the left of localhost
cat /etc/hosts

or your interface configuration.

# Look for interface loX with the LOOPBACK flag (probably lo0)
ifconfig

Once you know which number to use, you can replace localhost with the number. If you have already installed Magento using localhost then it will keep writing out links to localhost, even after you have changed to using the IP address, you will need to change the base_url values in the core_config_data table, you can run a query like this to find the right config values to change:

SELECT * FROM core_config_data WHERE value LIKE "%localhost%";

This should identfy two config values that will need to update with a query like:

UPDATE core_config_data SET value="http://127.0.0.1/" WHERE path IN ('web/unsecure/base_url','web/secure/base_url') ;

I’m going to assume you know to put the right value into that query, and not use the example one I have provided!

After changing that value you should delete your var/cache contents, and then refresh the page. Now you should have Magento running on an IP address, not a hostname with no dots in it. Of course you could always set up a fake domain name like www.testing.com by using a Virtual Hosting setup like I describe in my post on how to configure a MAMP Virtual host.

Solution 2: Timezone differences between server and client

One other, less likely problem, is that the cookie is being set, but expiring immediately. To check this you can inspect the cookies your browser is holding, and check if there is one there from Magento. If there is then check both the timezone your magento installation is using , and the one you have set locally, perhaps your local time is not set properly?

Hopefully one of these two solutions will get you back on track and able to log in to your newly installed Magento. Feel free to post problems or suggest other solutons in the comments below. I’m always more than happy to update my posts with helpful tips from readers.