You can also customize the error message that will be shown to the users when they try to use the PO Box in their address.

Unlike other similar tools, this extension uses Magento’s own validation mechanism for increased compatibility and reliability; and therefore should not cause any issues at the checkout process.

Just recently I have switched one of my clients to move from a self managed colo environment to a fully managed hosting environment with one of the big hosting companies. Yes, they are a Magento hosting partner and even came to the Magento Imagine conference back in February 2011. To my surprise, when we received the server for our Magento site, it was delivered ‘stock’ with RedHat linux and LAMP installed. When I asked for optimization on the server, I was again surprised to know that they will not ‘adjust’ parameters for InnoDB without a full research, testing, or hiring a developer to do it – which of course means additional hosting cost at a relatively expensive hourly rate. So, a quick tip here: when you sign up for any Magento hosting verify ahead of time what you are getting, have the details be sent to you via emails so you have a record, and don’t let them oversell you…

Anyway, ‘nough ranting, here are the main parameters for optimizing MySQL InnoDB for Magento:


query_cache_size = 512M
query_cache_limit = 256M

tmp_table_size = 256M
key_buffer_size = 64M
read_buffer_size = 128M
read_rnd_buffer_size = 128M
bulk_insert_buffer_size = 64M
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 128M
myisam_max_sort_file_size = 128M
myisam_max_extra_sort_file_size = 128M
myisam_repair_threads = 2
myisam_recover

innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 256M
innodb_log_buffer_size = 128M
innodb_log_file_size = 128M
innodb_log_files_in_group = 2
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 0
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 512M
innodb_data_home_dir = /var/lib/mysql/
innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:256M:autoextend
innodb_autoextend_increment=32

Notice the above is adjusted for a DB dedicated server with 2GB of RAM. You can play with the parameters if depending on your particular situation.

X-Recruiting: If you’re reading this, maybe you should be working at Zappos instead. Check out jobs.zappos.com.

If you do not believe me, check for yourself… So simple yet clever!I got a kick out of this one, I hope you do to!

Here is the screenshot when I saw it:

So, all that is needed is to add this simple option at the command line when running mysqldump: –lock-tables=false. I just tried it on a live environment which receives more than 3K visitors daily and it worked great.

Happy Coding!

Structure

We are going to deliver three main levels of our extensions, mostly based on the complexity and the projection of its maintenance through the lifetime of its usage:

1. Free Extensions – these extensions will have limited functionality and be offered for free and the code will be released under the OSL 3.0 license.
2. Professional Extensions – these extensions will have more advanced and complete feature set and will be offered for a license fee which ties to a domain. These extensions will provide critical feature sets for those advanced merchants wishing to get ahead in the online eCommerce arena. The professional Magento Extensions will be released under the commercial license and their prices will range between $99-$999.
3. Enterprise Extensions – these extensions will provide serious integration to third party applications, systems, or services and will require ongoing maintenance and support. As a result we will need to charge on an ongoing basis and prices will vary.

Short History

Activo Extensions was a born as a result of seeing a pattern in what our ongoing clients are looking for. While we are involved with the local Magento developer groups and are well aware of what the core Magento team is focused on, we carefully choose areas of the shopping cart that needs serious enhancement but will not receive its full attention from the core team. Activo Extensions is headed by Oleg Baranovsky and Ron Peled (myself), both are veterans in the web development industry with over 10 years of experience each.

In the recent years we have built, launched, and managed dozens of successful eCommerce website, all on the popular Magento Commerce platform. Some of our customers have seen growth of 300% per year and reached yearly sales of over $10M. Hence, we find it only natural that we expand into the large space of extensions with the full intention to provide only the top quality of extensions and support that serious online merchants deserve.

Where Can I Find Activo Extensions?

Direct Website: extensions.activo.com
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Sign up to our Newsletter (enter email at the top right & submit)

Stay tuned as we will be rolling out several free and professional extensions in the next few weeks…

Happy Selling!

Since I manage and build around 15-25 massive Magento based websites at any given time and Magento isn’t a small application by any standard – with over 10,000 files in the Community Edition alone, I am stretching the scope of what TortoiseSVN and Subversion were designed to work with on the client side at least.

One of the things I noticed is that TortoiseSVN will constantly hog one of my cores to a full 100% and stay like this for a couple of hours. Additionally, while the core is spiking my SSD would be accessed and written to like crazy, I mean close to benchmarking status. Then it will relax and after a day or two this will repeat itself. Since I use a laptop with Intel  i7 with 4 cores there is not much impact on what I do, but the 100% spikes will warm my laptop and drain the battery rapidly. To fix this all I had to do is disable the caching mechanism that comes turned on by default in TortoiseSVN.

To turn off the cache in TortoiseSVN and avoid CPU and HD scratching spikes, follow these instructions:

1. Open the TortoiseSVN Settings Window:

2. Disable TortoiseSVN Icon Overlay Status Cache:

3. Disable TortoiseSVN Log Caching:

Done. Happy Coding!

What happens is that under the media folder, actually /media/catalog/product/ to be exact, Magento stores all product image files and files them according to the first and second letter of the file name. So, the file name football.gif for example will be under ./f/o/football.gif and the file tennis.gif will be filed under ./t/e/tennis.gif, etc. While this works great under Linux and can easily be stored in SVN with a simple SVN add and SVN Commit, it does not work for Windows based environment.

The reason it does not work on Windows is because in Windows, filenames and folder names are case insensitive, hence /media/catalog/product/a will collide with the folder /media/catalog/product/A (notice one is upper case and one is lower case). This is extremely frustrating as it means that I must ignore the media/catalog/product folder completely if I want to develop on Windows and deploy on Linux.

Another option I just found is to disable the case sensitivity in my SVN repo, but still I do not know how this will translate into real life scenario as I did not try it.

Aside from sticking to all linux dev environment or ignoring the entire /media/catalog/product folders, how are you handling this issue?

To fix this I followed the simple instructions given by Marius Ducea, a Linux Admin Blgger. In Short, the way to address this security issue is by disabling the TRACE HTTP method in Apache. You can do so by adding this directive in a general area of your /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file:

TraceEnable off

Then restart Apache to make sure that everything is working ok. Done.

What I have decided to do is add a simple check before we actual plant these tools inside the page, essentially check if this page is HTTPS and if YES – do not show these tools. Here is how to do so in your phtml files:

<?php if (!Mage::app()->getStore()->isCurrentlySecure()): ?>
  <script type="text/javascript">
    /* <![CDATA[ */
    //Your Third Party Code Here
    /* ]]> */
  </script>
<?php endif; ?>

Another less safer way to handle this is by dropping the ‘http::’ portion of the URLs. Yes, I mean you start the URLs from the ‘//www.thirdpartydomain.com/script.js’ which will then render the call from HTTP or HTTPS depending on what page you are on. However, careful with this one because many third party tools do not necessarily offer the HTTPS (Secure) option of their tools.

Happy Coding!