Blog: A Magento Developer's Life

In my blog posts, I often describe things I observe in my day-to-day life as a Magento freelancer or little tips and tricks that work well for me.

Running Magento on FrankenPHP

Chris / / last updated on
FrankenPHP is the new star in webserver heaven and as Magento developer of course I wanted to try this out with Magento 1 / OpenMage. It turned out that it was very easy to setup and the results were really promising in local development environment. I have never seen a faster Magento on localhost!

The Cheapest Magento Hosting for less than 10€

Chris / / last updated on
In this blog post I will show that it is totally possible to run a tiny Magento 1 or OpenMage instance for less than 10€ per month - and even with all used services from Europe. Should you do this for your production store? Well that's on another page, but first let's move on.

Optimize CSS Styles in Magento

Chris / / last updated on
Magento/OpenMage has a default feature to merge all CSS files into one which was implemented back in the old days to reduce HTTP requests and therewith improve the performance for the client. Nowadays with HTTP/2 (or even HTTP/3) the number of requests is not that important anymore (and on the contrary a certain number of parallel asset downloads should be preferred), but there are many other ways the CSS asset delivery can be improved in Magento. Let's see how!

Better SEO with Magento Layout XML

Chris / / last updated on
Over the years I have collected several useful layout XML code snippets that you can e.g. insert into individual Magento CMS pages or into your layout xml code in the local.xml file. This offers several chances to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) for your Magento store like noindex or canonicals.

Das perfekte Magento 1 Frontend für 2023

Chris / / last updated on / 2 comments
Im folgenden Blog-Post möchte ich die aus meiner Sicht wichtigsten Aspekte erläutern, warum für mich Magento 1 bzw. der Community-Nachfolger OpenMage nach wie vor eine absolut sinnvolle Lösung für Kunden sein kann. Außerdem zeige ich anhand meiner eigenen Website konkrete Implementierungsmöglichkeiten auf.

The 4 Most Important Tasks For Legacy Projects

Chris / / last updated on
In my daily work I regularly take over legacy projects from customers that have a relatively old code base and shall be upgraded in order to be compatible with latest software versions, PHP versions and so on. Within those projects I always use several techniques to quickly get to work but at the same time carefully try to not introduce new defects.

Magento Logging with ELK Stack

Chris / / last updated on
If you are maintaining several Magento instances or use features like AWS autoscaling, you have many different places to look for your Magento application logs. In these cases a central logging application is very helpful.
In this post we will examine how to use the ELK stack with Magento logs.

How to disable the Gift Message Extension in Magento 1?

Chris / / last updated on
While tweaking your Magento 1 online shop for performance you might have come into try to remove the default Mage_GiftMessage extension.
Unfortunately like many other default extensions, this module cannot be removed so easily because of some errorneous, hidden dependencies in other modules.
So let’s have a look what needs to be done in order to remove the default Magento Gift Message Extension.

How to remove Prototype in Magento?

Chris / / last updated on / 4 comments
As we all know Magento 1 was using latest technologies at the time it has been published more than 10 years ago in 2008. In the meantime, of course, used libraries and development patterns have been outdated, so is the case with Prototype. This post is about how to start to remove the Prototype library from Magento 1 or OpenMage.

Google Lighthouse Integration in Bitbucket Pipelines

Chris / / last updated on / 2 comments
I am a big fan of the possibilities that CI pipelines like Bitbucket Pipelines offer and I have already wrote an article about integrating Hugo with Bitbucket Pipelines.
In this post today I will create a Bitbucket Pipeline for Google Lighthouse checks to continuously monitor the important Google Lighthouse Score to improve performance and search results.

How to avoid duplicate content in Magento?

Chris / / last updated on

In the field of search engine optimization (SEO) everyone tries to write the content in best quality from a customer perspective and ultimately also for the search engine. One important aspect therein is to avoid duplicate content as this is a major problem for search engines.

In this post I will clarify what duplicate content is and show a common source of duplicate content in Magento.

Magento to OpenMage Migration

Chris / / last updated on
After the official end of life of Magento in last June, I recommended two ways of continuing with Magento 1 to my clients: either use MageOne to take care of providing security patches and updates for the latest Magento Open Source version 1.9.4.5. Or use the community-driven OpenMage fork of Magento. In this post we will see how I did the migration of my own website from Magento 1.9.4.5 to OpenMage.

Issue with PayPal Express and Customer Checkout Registration in Magento

Chris / / last updated on
Recently I discovered a bug in the core Magento 1 PayPal Express extension that leads to the user being redirected to the home page after PayPal checkout with no error message.
As the investigation was a rather lengthy process, I’ll tell you the details and of course the easy fix in this post here.
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