Several times now I have had issues with the Magento admin panel not working as expected. In almost all of these cases the solution has been to simply upload all the core code files again, overwriting what’s there. This is about as brute force an approach as I can imagine – using a hammer instead of a surgeon’s knife if you will – but it seems to do the job in most instances. I recommend doing this as one of your first troubleshooting steps.
Archive for the ‘Tips’ Category
On Monday I released the Fontis Westpac PayWay payment gateway integration extension. Since the set up for this extension is bit more involved than some of the others I thought I’d post some more detailed instructions on how to get it up and running.
As part of a larger modification I have been working on I decided to use straight database queries from inside Magento rather than try and find out (and spend time debugging) what the proper “Magento way” to achieve the same thing was. After a bit of investigation I came up with what I think will be most generally useful and should work from almost anywhere in a Magento system.
Yesterday at work I spent far too much time working on getting an accordion vertical navigation working in a new Magento design. In the interest of public education, here’s a walkthrough of how I went about getting this to work.
Today I discovered a problem with the way Magento allows you to upload images to attach to products: whenever I attempted to do so my entire browser would crash. (I’m using Firefox 2 on Linux.) Booting into Windows and using IE7 didn’t suffer from this problem so it was clearly an issue with Firefox. Looking into it a bit further, Magento uses Flash/Flex to allow file uploads so this is likely the root cause of the issue.
Upgrading to the latest version of Flash – 9.0.124.0 at the time I wrote this – solves the problem and allows image uploads. So if you’re having issues with getting this feature to work in Firefox I’d suggest upgrading Flash as the first thing to try.
The last few months I have been keen to move my existing version control activities over to Bazaar, away from Subversion. Today that desire was rather firmly set in stone when I discovered that Bazaar doesn’t create a .bzr directory under every subdirectory in the tree like Subversion does with its .svn directories. This makes things so much easier to work with when you have to, say, upgrade your version of WordPress and you need to use FTP to transfer the files. Clearly you don’t want to transfer your VCS data as well so previously I had resorted to creating a sync script that disregarded the unwanted directories. So, thank you Bazaar for making my life that little bit easier!