PHP | Richard Castera

Posts Tagged ‘PHP’

Magento, News, PHP, Web Resources | 1 Comment | July 30, 2010

Magento – Add Static Block to CMS Page

Static blocks are a great way to add sections of HTML to your CMS or Catalog pages. I’m going to show you how to add a static block to a CMS page.

It’s a 2 step process and a very simple one. First, create your static block by going to CMS->Static Blocks. You will use the identifier of your static block to reference it on the CMS page. Edit the CMS page you would like this block to appear in, and add this code in the location where you would like it to show up:

{{block type="cms/block" block_id="home-page-promo"}}

Magento, PHP | 2 Comments | June 11, 2010

Magento – Get the Total Price of items currently in the Cart

Ever wanted to get the total price of items in your Magento cart? Here you go:

<?php echo $this->helper('checkout')->formatPrice(Mage::getSingleton('checkout/cart')->getQuote()->getGrandTotal()); ?>

Magento, PHP | 3 Comments | June 8, 2010

Magento – Contact Form Not Submitting Bug

Since the new release of Magento, people have been encountering a lot of problems. One of them in particular, seem to be the contact form. The error is, “Unable to submit your request. Please, try again later.” If you’re on Magento 1.4 and get this error when submitting the contact form, that’s because your template (theme) is not fully compatible with 1.4. Your Magento theme is overriding the form.phtml file with its own version, which doesn’t have the new line in it. Here’s what you’ll need to do to quickly fix this error:

Open this file in your theme folder:

app/design/frontend/default/YOUR_THEME/template/contacts/form.phtml

And add the following hidden field somewhere before the submit button:

<input type="text" name="hideit" id="hideit" value="" style="display:none !important;" />

Magento, My Thoughts, News, PHP, Web Resources | No Comments | May 17, 2010

Magento extensions and modern e-commerce

For an online retailer, choosing an e-commerce software platform is one of the most important decisions. Depending on the size of the business, the key requirements could vary from robustness and scalability critical for large retailers to the need for simplicity and flexibility for small store owners. Perhaps it is the ability to effortlessly meet the diverse needs of disparate audiences that has made Magento one of the fastest growing e-commerce applications globally. Already, the Magento e-commerce suite has carried out over US$25 billion in transactions via the 30,000+ merchants who rely on this platform, including some from the Internet Retailer Top 500 list. No wonder then that the platform continues to receive international acclaim, most recently from well known research organization Forrester Research which highlighted Magento as ‘unique’ among various e-commerce technology providers.

One of the key contributors to Magento’s rising popularity as the platform of choice is its ‘flexibility’ and the control that it puts in the hands of the online merchant. Unlike some of the other ‘closed’ or even open source e-commerce platforms, Magento does not place restrictions on business flows and processes. With over 1700 Magento extensions already available (and counting..), technology complements the business rather than business being shaped by the limits posed by technology.

Possibilities galore with Magento extensions

As the e-commerce and online marketing landscape evolves at frenetic pace, resulting in newer business models and novel marketing opportunities, online store owners need their technology to be as dynamic or risk being left behind. This is where the continuously expanding range of Magento extensions becomes invaluable.

Developers continue to enrich the application with powerful add-ons to fulfill even the not-so-obvious requirements of store owners. Presenting irrefutable proof of the value of the open source paradigm in e-commerce, these extensions help automate and optimize different business processes.

Characteristics of truly valuable Magento extensions

While new add-ons for the different Magento modules become available very regularly, some fundamental and seemingly obvious characteristics differentiate the really valuable extensions from the just OK ones. If you are looking for extensions for your business, run this simple 4-factor test.

Usefulness: An extension has to either help contribute to greater sales (revenues), build long-term customer engagement or improve operational efficiencies and effectiveness. Does the extension offer the features and functionality that will help you address your unique business needs or problems?
Cost-effectiveness: Is the price you pay for the add-on worth the value you expect to generate from using the extension?
Customizability: Can you customize your extension easily both in terms of front-end design as well as functionality to suit your specific needs?
User-friendliness: Is the extension easy to configure and use so that a store owner can focus on the business side of things? It should ultimately help save time, not add more work.

Epitomizing the above characteristics is the portfolio of extensions from aheadWorks, one of the largest Magento extensions development companies. The company’s range of free and paid-for add-ons, covers every aspect of the e-commerce process – back-end store administration, user experience, marketing and other operational aspects of the business.

Below, we briefly touch upon some of the most well-received Magento add-ons developed by the company:

(more…)

Apache, PHP | No Comments | May 4, 2010

Enable curl with XAMPP

cURL is disabled by default in your XAMPP installation. To enable it, you have to modify the php.ini files in your XAMPP folder. Follow the steps below to get it up and running.

Locate the following files:

C:\Program Files\xampp\apache\bin\php.ini
C:\Program Files\xampp\php\php.ini
C:\Program Files\xampp\php\php4\php.ini

Uncomment the following line on your php.ini file by removing the semicolon.
```
;extension=php_curl.dll
```
Restart your Apache server.
Check your phpinfo if curl was properly enabled.

Apache, MySQL, PHP, Web Resources | 2 Comments | April 4, 2010

How to setup a local web server on your computer using XAMPP

Web development work should always be done locally. When developing a website, all the development work should be done on a local LAMP Stack environment installed on your computer. That way, the production time is greatly reduced and you can fully test your work before launching.

When you are completely done developing your project, the migration to the live server is seamless. Here are the simple steps to install a local server on your PC to easily develop websites.

This article applies to the installation on Windows 98, NT, 2000, 2003, XP and Vista, of Apache, MySQL, PHP + PEAR, Perl, mod_php, mod_perl, mod_ssl, OpenSSL, phpMyAdmin, Webalizer, Mercury Mail Transport System for Win32 and NetWare Systems v3.32, Ming, JpGraph, FileZilla FTP Server, mcrypt, eAccelerator, SQLite, and WEB-DAV + mod_auth_mysql.

Installing XAMPP on your computer

First, download XAMPP for Windows Installer
Then run the installer on your computer and make sure that your Windows firewall unblocks Apache.
Run the Apache administrator.
Open your browser and go to http://127.0.0.1 – If all went well, a screen will appear where you can choose your language.
Go to http://127.0.0.1/security/xamppsecurity.php and setup a password (it ill be used for your databases), and click on “Password Changing”.

Congratulations! You’re done! Now put your website’s files in a new directory under C:\xampp\htdocs\ (if you installed xampp in C:\xampp). For example: C:\xampp\htdocs\myproject\; and setup your databases using PHPMyAdmin located here http://127.0.0.1/phpmyadmin/.

Configuring Mod Rewrite

To finalize your installation, and make your development work much easier, go through the following steps to enable Mod Rewrite. This enables you to use fancy permalinks without the index.php appendage.

Navigate to C:\xampp\apache\conf\httpd.conf
Open up httpd.conf in notepad and look for this line:
```
#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
```

Uncomment it so that it reads:

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

Next, search for AllowOverride None and change it to AllowOverride All.
Restart Apache by typing services.msc in either the command prompt or Start Search prompt in Vista.

Personalized Domain for your Local Environment

I’ve set my local environment to mimic my live environment as much as possible. For example, to access the local environment for my blog, I type this in my browser (http://richardcastera.dev). Here is how to set that up for each project:

Navigate to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\ and open the host file in a notepad editor. Make sure the following lines are written in the file:
```
127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost
```
Now add the following line to access your website locally via the URL myproject.dev (or any other URL you’d like):
```
127.0.0.1    myproject.dev
```

Finally, open the file C:\xampp\apache\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf in a notepad editor, and add the following lines:

      NameVirtualHost *:80
      <VirtualHost *:80>
      DocumentRoot “C:/xampp/htdocs”
      ServerName localhost
      </VirtualHost>
      <VirtualHost *:80>
      ServerName myproject.dev
      ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
      DocumentRoot “C:\xampp\htdocs\myproject”
      </VirtualHost>

That’s it! Hope you enjoyed the post!

PHP, Wordpress | No Comments | February 25, 2010

WordPress – Disable Auto Save

WordPress’s Auto-Save feature is a really nice but there are some drawbacks… this feature increases your database usage. So for those of you that are on really bad shared hosting accounts or just want to turn it off, here’s a quick way of doing it.

Open and insert the following line in your wp-config.php file.

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

Another method is to remove all of the entries from the database from time to time. You can do tun this query to do it::

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";

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Richard Castera