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I’m writing a full series on setting up your Mac for Magnto ecommerce development, I should probably start with the first step – installing MAMP on a Leopard Mac, even if it’s a quite basic and hopefully self evident.

Maybe one of the less obvious things is that you do not need MAMP pro to get virtual hosting set up in Apache on a Mac, but it will require you to work with Apache config files as described in my post on setting up virtual hosts in apache on MAMP.

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When developing and testing a production Magento store locally it’s easy and convenient to set up an exact replica of the production environment. This can be achieved using Apache virtual hosting and your operating system hosts file.

This post will walk you through setting up a local testing Magento install for MAMP Leopard to include a virtual hosting configuration and how to configure your operating system to send requests for  your production site to your local testing environment.

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There is a lot going on when Magento actually sends a cart to Google Checkout, even more so if you are using Merchant calculated shipping. As a result lots of things can go wrong, with the merchant calculated shipping callback or with the actual server to server posting of the cart contents.

To help you with diagnosing problems I thought I’d shared my top 3 methods for finding out what is going wrong when Magento and Google Checkout are not communicating properly.

1) The Intergration Console

The first and most obvious place to try is the Google Checkout Intergration Console. As you can see in the screenshot below the console is hidden away in the Tools tab of the main seller dashboard. You’ll find it at the bottom of the left menu.

The Intergration Console is tucked away in the tools tab at the bottom of the left menu.

If the Google callbacks have failed or incorrect XML has been sent to Google you will find a report of the errors here. It is a good idea to keep an eye on the timestamps as you do not want to wind up chasing an old problem. It’s also good to periodically check this console while in production, just in case something starts to go wrong. I found when I upgraded to the latest Magento that the HTTPS callback was failing, but I hadn’t found it during development because I do not use SSL in development environments.

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I have been helping out with some sales reporting lately which has meant I have been using the order and transaction CSV downloads Google Checkout offers.

I found one feature of Google Checkout strangely lacking on the usability front. The payout and transaction download only allows you to specify a single day rather than a date range, so if you wanted a month of data you would have to run the report 30 times and aggregate the data in your own spreadsheet: no thanks Google!

Google Checkout Transaction download only offers a single day.

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Just one more quick note on the Magento upgrade to 1.2.0.1. The new full text search functionality uses an index that does not get built when you upgrade. You will need to manually rebuild it in the UI to get your store search working.

To do the rebuild you access the Cache Management page (System > Cache Management). You will see a new button at the bottom labeled ‘Rebuild’ – press it and depending on how many products you have the index will rebuild in a few seconds or minutes.

Once rebuilt it works well, enjoy!