This is a blog post about Magento backups, how you can do them by default in Magento and how a new extension I have made called Cloud Backup will help to make them automatically and send them offsite to Amazon’s S3 storage service – increasing the chance you’ll have a recent backup if (when) bad things happen to your store or server. I’d like your help beta testing this new extension, and this post will hopefully convince you why that’s mutually beneficial for us. The extension is still pending on Magento Connect so give it a whirl, I’ll update this post with the link shortly, or for those that are particularly keen to test it, you can download the release directly and install it manually.
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Magento Backups: How To Ensure Your Data Is Safe with Magento Cloud Backup
Magento and Google Analytics – Use ‘First Touch’ Tracking To See How Your Customers First Visit Your Store
At the recent Auckland Magento Meetup I had the privilege of seeing Mark Hammersley’s presentation on email marketing – Mark’s a fascinating guy and a real expert, I highly recommend checking out his site. One of the things that came up during his presentation was the idea of first touch tracking your visits, particularly in the sense that if they first come to you because of an email, and you build a relationship with them and they eventually buy from you – knowing if it was an email and which one brought them to the store in the first place is very valuable information.
Magento does not track this out of the box and neither does Google Analytics, however with a simple customization it can be added to the store. This blog post will run through how I added it to two of our new World Wide Access stores, <plug> Cariboo Cribs – which sells cribs and cots to the UK and soon to the USA – and Dominion New Zealand – which sells high quality sheepskin coats and boots (think New Zealand made Ugg).</plug>
Structuring your Magento project for Engineering, not Hacking
This is a blog post about how I structure my Magento store development, and how that has been made easier thanks to the efforts of Colin Mollenhour and his script modman. Hopefully after reading this, you’re all inspired to go set up a similar project structure, because it gives a repeatable, hopefully less upgrade ruined Magento experience. Certainly if you’re not inspired, I’d like to hear about how you are structuring your projects – the more talk of this, the better the overall quality of Magento stores in the wild, I hope.
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Hi! I'm Ashley Schroder, a Software Engineer from New Zealand - these are my notes on Ecommerce Web Development, particularly Magento Development.
WordPress: Blank page after posting comments and Akismet
June 30, 2010 in Web Development with 2 Comments
Just a real real quickie related to WordPress here, not Magento. If you find adding comments in wordpress causes a blank page – try disabling akismet. If that fixes it, it probably means the domain you were using to test with in the comments field has been marked as spam by Akismet. WordPress serves up the blank page as a feature to prevent spam bots. No errors were logged though, so it made it a bit tricky to figure out what’s going on.
There are loads of other people with this problem, or variations of it online – googling around there semeed to be a lot of confusion – my sugegstion is to try disabling akismet first.
Other possible causes though I found and tried before getting to Akismet: Old theme with incorrect comment form on a newer version of wordpress – compare it to the default theme for your version of wordpress. Caching – try disabling your cache if you use one.
Hope that saves someone some time. Magento content coming soon, promise…