When JOINs fail to work
Any developer, junior or senior, should know and understand the basic rules of database normalization since they are the foundation of relational DBMS. Edgar Codd introduced the concept in 1970 and since then, most of the architectures have been following his rules. However, for high-traffic websites, sometime de-normalized is better than normalized, resulting in faster […]
Hardening OpenX
There are times when your website or application might get hacked. The usual reasons include weak passwords, outdated software or poor code (especially on validating user input). The same apply to OpenX – your ad server can be hacked due to an outdated version of OpenX, weak passwords, insecure server settings or a combinations of […]
Installing Memcache Server for PHP on Windows
Memcached is a free open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system. It is currently used by a lot of websites, including Flickr, Twitter, Youtube, Digg and WordPress. I’ve been using memcached on a few production servers, but never thought it could come in handy on a Windows development machine – in fact I didn’t […]
Workaround for attribute store labels not being displayed in Magento
Here’s a quick workaround for a rather strange issue – sometimes, calling $attribute->getStoreLabel() returns null, although everything looks fine in the admin and in the database. It might be something that is slipping my mind, or it might be a bug, not really sure. However, I had to deal with it and come up with […]
Prototype 1.6, Event.stop and IE9 – Quick patch
For those of you using Prototype 1.6 (or Magento prior 1.6), you might wonder why event.stop() or Event.stop(event) doesn’t work in Internet Explorer 9. Here’s a quick explanation: IE 9 makes major changes to the event system. We had to rewrite the event code in 1.7 to support it. You can either (a) upgrade to […]
Strange Prototype’s Class.create behavior
A few more months and it would’ve been a year since the last post. Worry not, this blog hasn’t died – and just to make sure I don’t forget what I want to write, I’ve already prepare a few articles. So stay tuned! But enough with the intro and let’s see what this article is […]
Patching the Magento USPS module
Since their last update on Jan 3rd, 2011 USPS has stopped working on all of my Magento distro’s. The reason for that is a change in USPS’ response XML values. Magento has its part of blame here, first for not patching it immediately (which again shows how much they care about the CE users) and […]
Anatomy of a Magento extension
Magento Commerce has been on the OSS “market” for a while now and I see more and more developers, designers and of course store owners migrating their ecommerce sites to Magento or installing it for their new stores. I’ve been coding on Magento since its beta 0.6 version, actually my first integration was based on […]
Adding Customer Comments as Order Status Comments using Magento & OneStepCheckout
A few days ago I got an email from someone asking me about adding the default customer comments in OneStepCheckout (www.onestepcheckout.com) as regular order comments. I thought I’d share this quick & simple hack with everyone, so here’s what you have to d
Introducing Magento CSS & JS Minifier
As the title says, I’m glad to announce my first public Magento extension (not yet added in the Connect repository). During my 3 years experience with Magento, I’ve worked on a lot of custom extensions, improvements & fixes, but most of them were client-specific, plus they weren’t designed to have a backend interface (with a […]
