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Magento, Google XML Sitemaps and my Magento Speed Test

March 31, 2011 in Magento, Magento Speed Test, Web Development with 2 Comments

My Magento performance testing tool Magento Speed Test uses a Google sitemap.xml to determine which urls should be tested. Having only just released the latest version I have been keeping an eye on the testing over the last few days and have noticed a few tests that never got results. This sometimes happens because of a mistake by me, but more often it’s because people find creative ways to muck up their sitemap.xml, and so the test then runs on no urls, and thus – no results. Here are some tips to check for problems.

After I sighed publicly about the various issues with sitemaps I was seeing a few internet friends asked for some more information, so here is a guide to a good sitemap.xml for performance testing Magento – I’ll do my best to keep updating this as I find more issues.
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Magento Development and Deployment: Setting up a Modman based Magento project on Magento 1.5

February 27, 2011 in Magento, Magento Installation, MAMP, Web Development with 12 Comments

As I had noted earlier this week, I have not had a lot of Magento development time lately, so today I thought I’d spend a bit of time setting up a Magento 1.5 development environment on my Mac. This post will take you through the steps to set up Magento development with Eclipse for editing/debugging and SVN for version control, with deployment being managed by Modman. This relates to the project structure I described in my presentation at Magento Imagine, with the exception that I won’t go into detail about setting up a separate extensions repository, as that is probably more relevant to developers who build and release extensions than developers working on a single Magento project.

What this guide assumes:

  • Mac development environment with MAMP
  • Linux production environment
  • SVN for version control, but Git can work too.
  • Modman for deployment. Written by Colin Mollenhour

What we will cover:

  • Installing SVN, Magento and Modman.
  • Getting a free SVN repository.
  • Setting up a Magento store development project with version controlled extensions, templates/themes, locale and emails.
  • Development and deployment of changes to Production.

We have a lot to get through, so let’s not delay.

Step 1: Install Magento Locally

We’ll zap through a commandline install. We’ll be installing into your web server doc root. If you would like help setting that up I wrote a guide to installing MAMP on a Mac (a long time ago) and also (extra for experts) a guide to setting up virtual hosts on MAMP too.

#In your ~/Downloads directory or some where suitable
wget http://www.magentocommerce.com/downloads/assets/1.5.0.1/magento-1.5.0.1.tar.gz
tar xzf magento-1.5.0.1.tar.gz
# I keep all of my Magento development versions in a web folder within ~/Documents
mv magento ~/Documents/web/magento/1.5.0.1

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Magento Imagine 2011 Presentation Notes and Links: Engineering your Magento Store

February 9, 2011 in Magento, Web Development with 0 Comments

Just finished my presentation at Magento Imagine 2011 and wanted to drop a quick post with the links to various tools I mentioned and my slides on Engineering your Magento Store.

Thanks to everyone who asked interesting questions, glad to hear others are exploring this area of Magento store maintenance too.

You can get my slides here, I’ll have about 20 hours of flying to do this weekend so I’ll try to write up a more step-by-step guide as a blog post too. You may also find this blog post from last year interesting, if this project structure/deployment topic is relevant.

Update: I didn’t get the follow up written on the flight, but better late than never, check out my full step-by-step starter guide to Magento development and deployment with SVN and Modman here.

Links:
Modman deployment tool by Colin Mollenhour .
The cool-kid’s SCM, GIT.
The one I use, SVN.
Bug in Magento 1.4.2 that you should know about.

A Recipe to avoid having your Twitter, Facebook, CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet account stolen at an Airport or Conference

February 4, 2011 in Web Development with 5 Comments

This week I’m heading to LA for the Magento Imagine conference. It should be a really diverse conference, with developers, marketers and all manner of other ecommerce industry experts brought together by a common interest in Magento. I’ll be presenting a short tech talk during the Developer UnConference section, which is billed as a developer only techy session – sounds like fun! I’ll be running through some Magento Engineering tips, for project setup, development and deployment in a repeatable way.

I have a fairly grueling trip to get there and amidst all this insecure wifi in the air at Sydney airport I thought I’d jot down a quick how-to for fellow travelers/conference goers to avoid having their Twitter or Facebook account hacked by a 10 year old with a Mac book.

Follow the recipe below for secure web browsing at airports on the way and while you’re at the Magento Imagine conference.
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Creating a Runkeeper RSS Feed – the hack way.

January 25, 2011 in Web Development with 9 Comments

I’ve started using RunKeeper since getting a GPS tracker for my running. I wanted an RSS feed along with plenty of others, so here’s a really trashy little hack to get one, until the good folks at Runkeeper make one for you.

This requires a free service called Feed43 – it’s just the first such html to rss service I found, so it may not be the best, I’d be open to suggestions of better ones. I thought it made the sometimes annoying process of scraping HTML quite painless.

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