Sep 18, 2008 · 1 minute read
Asides
I ordered a new phone yesterday – a Nokia E71 – and my desire for it to arrive seems to grow by the hour. The lure of mobile email, not to mention a good phone, is practically killing me. Full review/rant once it is in my impatient little fingers.
Sep 10, 2008 · 2 minute read
GeneralTips
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. Installation Install extension through Magento Connect. Create var/log/ directory and make it world writable. Log in to PayWay. Go to Setup API -> Security. This page will provide you with the username and password to enter into the extension configuration.
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Sep 1, 2008 · 1 minute read
Asides
Shortly after the first anniversary of Magento, I noticed today that it's been a year since I signed up for an account on the Magento site. Go figure!
Aug 18, 2008 · 1 minute read
General
The latest version (0.8) of the Fontis Australia Extension has been uploaded to Magento Connect. From my testing, there wasn't anything that needed to be changed for compatibility with 1.1 – the minor changes were just functionality tweaks. When using the Australia Post shipping module please keep in mind the following: Remember to set the product weight unit accordingly. Shipping is limited to items under 20kg. This is a limitation of the Australia Post service itself.
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Jun 18, 2008 · 2 minute read
Tips
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. What I came up with was to get one of the core MySQL and retrieve the database connector from it.
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Jun 14, 2008 · 4 minute read
FeaturedTips
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. 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.
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Jun 3, 2008 · 1 minute read
Tips
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.
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May 6, 2008 · 3 minute read
General
The latest version of the Australia extension, 0.6.0 in my arbitrary number scheme, was uploaded to Magento Connect this morning. The major change for this version was the inclusion of a Paymate payment method. There were also numerous bug fixes and minor improvements. Paymate integration is proving to be quite interesting for a couple of reasons. There's the usual problem working with more advanced Magento modules where it's difficult to find any decent documentation and you're forced to crawl through code and use trial-and-error to work things out.
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Apr 29, 2008 · 1 minute read
ReviewsTips
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.
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Apr 23, 2008 · 1 minute read
Asides
A few quick links for some retro-style gaming: OpenTyrian, an SDL port of the classic Tyrian game, and ProtoRPG, a web-based RPG using Prototype and Script.aculo.us.