Simple and effective way to force your site’s homepage to redirect from HTTPS to HTTP. This is now needed since all major modern browsers like FireFox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer will prefer the secure (HTTPS) URL when users type the domain name in the address bar.
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This is not a long and detailed article on how sophisticated they are, instead this article is short and surprising. If you are doing work in the eCommerce world, you may have heard of the huge acquisition of Zappos.com…
Read moreHey all Magento administrators or developers out there, just a short tip here on how to avoid locking tables when you perform a full mysqldump on a live server. This does not apply for any shared hosting, but only the more advanced dedicated hosting (VPS/cloud or not). When you perform a mysqldump on a live environment, the default behaviour is to lock the entire set of tables until the dump is complete, even if it takes 1 minute or less, it means that during that minute, users will not be able to checkout, or admins may not be able to perform any transactions in the back end.
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I’m excited to announce a new division of Activo was recently born: Magento Extensions. This new division will focus on the various magento extensions which we have working on in the past 3 years. Essentially, every single piece of code that we have developed or delivered to our clients was written properly by extending Magento via their extensions mechanism. Some (not all) of these functionalists were developed further to easily integrate with other websites and hence allow a wide variety of online merchants to enjoy these advanced features.
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One of the tools I swear by is Subversion, since I use Windows as my default development OS, it is only natural that TortoiseSVN is pretty much installed on any environment I work on. The only downside I can tell to TortoiseSVN is it’s poorly designed cache mechanism that does not scale well with large sets of files.
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Last week I tried to add the media folder of a large catalog Magento website. Initially everything worked well, however eventually I started having severe issues on my local development environment. The issue is largely related to the File Name Case Sensitivity within SVN and how file names behave differently between Linux and Windows. I am just sharing my observation and I do not have a complete answer to this issue as of yet, maybe you can help here…
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If you are running a multi-million dollar eCommerce site you may want to make sure that the HTTP TRACE method is disabled. By default this method is enabled in Apache, and if enabled it allows for Cross Site Tracing Issue and potentially giving the option to a hacker to steal your cookie information from a specific website so later they can impose as you.
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This is an issue that comes up more often these days because more and more third party magento extensions simply throw in the jQuery library in the admin panel, even just for simple JS functionality that is fully supported in Prototype. I guess in the sake of a ‘working’ extension everything is compromised, right? well, ok. I guess so. but there is always a better way to doing things. Here is a little example that can make including the jQuery library in the Magento Admin Panel a little less painful and make your extension play nice with other third party extensions.
Read moreA few updates from within Activo and a few updates in the internet and eCommerce world.
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If you are responsible for marketing in a web development firm you will eventually come across this difference: Magento has Extensions and WordPress has Plugins. Two questions come to mind: Why? and What is the difference anyway? Honestly it does not matter much, however let’s review some assumptions, facts, and even one fun fact…
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