Installation

1. Install extension through Magento Connect.
2. Create var/log/ directory and make it world writable.
3. Log in to PayWay.
4. Go to Setup API -> Security. This page will provide you with the username and password to enter into the extension configuration.
   
5. Add the IP address for your server to the access list. (You can get this by making a test transaction and recording the rejected address shown in the error message.)
6. Go to Setup API -> Certificate.
   
7. Set “Choose your API Technology” to “PHP” and click “Go”.
8. Click “Download PHP Certificate” and save the file somewhere.
9. Upload this file to a location off the main Magento directory. By default the extension will look for the file var/certs/ccapi.pem but this is configurable.
10. Go to the Magento Admin Panel and to System -> Configuration -> Payment Methods.
    
11. Enter merchant ID, username and password into extension settings.
12. Ensure the extension is enabled and that the certificate setting has the correct pathname for the file you uploaded previously.

Usage

Usage is just like other credit card modules – the customer enters their credit card details during checkout. These details are then sent to the PayWay gateway and processed when the customer clicks “Place Order” at the end of checkout.

Hopefully this provides you with enough information to get it running on your site. If you have any problems or feedback, please leave a comment.

What I came up with was to get one of the core MySQL and retrieve the database connector from it. This connector is an instance of a Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract class.

$conn = Mage::getModel('Core/Mysql4_Config')->getReadConnection();
$conn->query("YOUR QUERY");

You can also use:

$conn = Mage::getModel('Core/Mysql4_Config')->getReadConnection();
$resultArray = $conn->fetchAll("YOUR QUERY");

Pretty simple really. I was worried that you’d only be able to read from the database since it specifies a “read connection” but there didn’t seem to be a corresponding getWriteConnection so I went with what I had. You can also recover database connection settings through the same connection with:

$config = Mage::getModel('Core/Mysql4_Config')->getReadConnection()->getConfig();

The ability to run arbitrary database queries is only really useful for tables you’ve defined yourself, or to make minor tweaks. Anything more advanced and you’d be advised to spend the time to learn how to achieve it through Magento objects as the interrelations of tables in the database is a dark magic that is quite capable of blowing your mind if you dig too deep.

Basically what was required was a simple form of an accordion menu where only the top-level categories will be visible initially but clicking on one will open up a submenu showing its children. It will also set that category as the current one and display the content for it.

Getting the basics up and running was fairly easy but I kept running into problems when I attempted to smooth out the rough edges. I ran into the old problem of Magento being very poorly documented, so trying to find out what avenues I could pursue took far longer than it should have. I also ran into a definite bug where there exist several functions for retrieving the parent of a category but they don’t actually work. I believe this stems from the fact that the parent_id values for categories are not entered into the database in the first place. Odd, and it shows that Magento really does have plenty of jagged edges.

I started out with this post on the Magento forums. That set up a vertical list of top-level categories but displays the rest of the menu in much the same manner as the horizontal one in the default Magento design – as a popup nested list. Not what I was looking for.

Because I only wanted the current category to show up I added in a condition to check whether or not a category was “active” before displaying its children. Doing this works but unfortunately I was using a call to $this->getCurrentChildren() to retrieve the children of the top-level active category. This works when you click on the top-level links – the children are displayed correctly on the loaded page – but doesn’t work when you navigate to one of the child categories, since obviously they are then set to the current category and will have different children to the top-level category.

I then came up with the simple idea of calling $_category->getParentCategory() and getting the children of that. This is when I ran into the aforementioned bug with the parent categories (see bug #5182) which meant it was impossible to use that way.

After thinking through (and trying out) a few crazy ideas like building my own tree of categories and querying it, or overriding the majority of the Magento catalog navigation classes, I eventually realised the answer was actually quite simple, at least for the two level system I required (I haven’t tried it for more levels). All I had to do was check if each top-level category was active and had children and, if so, display the children. This works since a parent category is still active if one of it’s children is active. (I assume this functionality was added to make it easier to set highlighting styles on these categories.)

Here’s my modified vert_nav.phtml file:

<div class="vertical-nav-container box base-mini">
	<div class="vertical-nav">
		<div class="head">
		<h4>< ?php echo $this->__('Navigation') ?></h4>
		</div>
		<ul id="nav_vert">
		< ?php foreach ($this->getStoreCategories() as $_category): ?>
			< ?php $open = $this->isCategoryActive($_category) && $_category->hasChildren(); ?>
			<li><a href="<?=$this->getCategoryUrl($_category);?>"< ?php if($open) { echo ' class="open"'; } ?>>< ?=$_category->getName();?></a>
			< ?php if ($open): ?>
        		<ul>
				< ?php foreach ($_category->getChildren() as $child): ?>
					< ?php $childCat = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load($child); ?>
					<li><a href="<?=$this->getCategoryUrl($childCat);?>">< ?=$childCat->getName();?></a></li>
				< ?php endforeach; ?>
				</ul>
			< ?php endif; ?>
			</li>
		< ?php endforeach ?>
		</ul>
	</div>
</div>

Originally I also tried to use $_category->getAllChildren() as this sounded more like what I wanted but this returned nothing so I went with what I have above, which works. It would be nice if there was a method that directly returned the children as category objects, rather than having to load them as an extra step – if such a method exists I didn’t find it so let me know if it is in there!

Everything else is roughly the same as the other vertical navigation tutorial. You’ll need to tweak your CSS to achieve a nicer nesting effect. I used left margins to indent the child category links.

Here are some images from the final product:

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.

Download: en_AU_10

It should install like any other translation. Hopefully I can get this uploaded to the official list soon enough.

One interesting thing that came up while doing the translation was how powerful the shell (bash) was for assisting me in finding places to correct words. I ended up using the following code to find misspellings in all the CSV files:

cat *.csv | cut -d ',' -f 2 | aspell -l en_AU list | sort | uniq

Basically it will output all the text in the files into a single stream which gets piped into cut to extract the second column (the text that needs to be translated) which is then sent to aspell for spell checking. The output from aspell is then sorted and duplicate words removed. You therefore end up with a nice list of the words that are wrong – or at least that aspell thinks are wrong – which you can put into grep to find exact lines locations:

grep -in word *.csv

This will find all the occurrences of “word” in all of the CSV files and print output which tells you the file where it was found and the line numbers. For example:

Mage_FileName.csv:25:"This is a line where word appears."

Since some of the lines can get quite long, which are then wrapped, and can make it harder to read, I like to cut off the output of the line itself:

grep -in word *.csv | cut -d ':' -f 1,2

The only problem with using aspell is that it doesn’t actually have a dictionary for Australian English! Thus I had to use grep (in a similar method to above) to hunt down words that needed changing. The ones I found are: catalog, color, honor, initialise, authorise (etc), initialization (etc), canceled, and check (=> cheque). The good thing about using aspell is that it does pick up words that are simply misspelt – so the Australian translation is currently more correct than the US English version! Running the same commands over the en_US version will pick up a few spelling mistakes that can be corrected.

I hope this could help someone in doing their own translation – I’m often amazed at how much effort is discarded by a few simple shell commands.

Finally, please let me know if you find any problems with the translation I have created. I’m interested in feedback on any grammatical issues and whether we should have things like Province => Territory.

Simple tip here on how to enable the “English (Australia)” locale in Magento: simply go to app/etc/config.xml and, under config->global->locale->allow->codes add in the text <en_AU/>. Your config file should have something similar to the following:

<config>
    <global>
        <locale>
            <allow>
                <codes>
                    <en_AU/>

You can even do this before installation to allow the selection of the Australian locale during the install process.

I haven’t tried it out myself as I watch all my videos on my desktop, which is more than capable of handling HD H.264 videos, even with inefficient decoding. Someone give it a go and let me know if it works!

Two that I’ve found are TimeVault and the newer FlyBack, which makes no excuse about being a lame Time Machine clone … without the actual clone part since it’s not nearly as nice looking.

Of course, if you don’t go in for all this pretentious GUI crap, you can also use tools which do the same thing but are designed to run as simple daemons. Some popular ones are Dirvish and rsnapshot. If you want to get really fancy and space efficient you can even go for something like rdiff-backup, which only stores the change deltas of older versions of files.

Personally I store all my important work in a Subversion repository since I normally do development work with it anyway. It’s not very space efficient but a lot more powerful.

What backup system do you use? If you’re a Linux user, did I miss any good ones?