Recently I’ve found the time to read some very interesting books that I can really recommend – both from an entertaining as well as from a knowledge perspective: The Lean Startup I think I don’t have to write much about this book. Everybody interested in getting to know the lean principle should definitely read this. […]
Available Magento Code Sniffer rulesets
Basically I recommend following the PSR-2 standard for Coding Style Guidelines in Magento projects. Verifying your coding styles makes sense in any case – whether you are working in a large team of developers or as a freelancer for several clients. Agreeing to one common coding standard and following the rules improves readability and comparability. […]
A collection of my daily RSS feeds
In this blog post I want to share with you a short list of my daily RSS feeds that I find very useful to stay up-to-date in different categories: E-Commerce etailment Exciting Commerce shopanbieter Carpathia konversionsKRAFT Handelskraft Kassenzone shopbetreiber-blog.de Freelancer Freiberufler Blog Twinfield Magento Webguys Alan Storm Eschrade Gordon Lesti Alan Kent PHP Coder On […]
The Magento totals sort order hell
Yesterday I had an interesting problem in a Magento community installation of one of my clients: After the deinstallation of the Unirgy_GiftCert extension the total values subtotal, tax and grand_total were totally messed up. That means sums without tax were shown as grand_total and subtotal whereas it was configured totally different. After some debugging action […]
How to reduce spam messages sent via Magento contact form without using Captchas
A lot of my clients complain about the fact that they receive lots of spam messages via the Magento contact and review forms. Basically in most of these cases I recommend using professional services like Akismet and an appropriate Magento extension which effectively reduce the amount of spam messages to a minimum. (I don’t want […]
Magento 1.9: Downloadable Products cannot be created (German localization)
In Magento 1.9 there is a JavaScript error on the product page in the backend that prohibits adding links to downloadable products when using the default German localization that ships with this Magento version. The root cause for this problem is the file app/locale/de_DE/Mage_Media.csv which somehow contains an additional line break at the end of […]
Customer feedback is priceless
Today I got a really nice present from one of my Magento Extension customers:Thanks very much for that – these little things remind me why I like being part of the Magento ecosystem and why you should improve caring about your customers every single day. Thanks again! Of course if you have any questions regarding […]
Some Magento Extension recommendations
I am often asked by my clients what Magento Extensions I can recommend for their shop. Thats why I created a (probably incomplete) list of Magento extensions that I regularly use in my Magento projects: Extension Category My comments WYSIWYG Editor Redactor Administration, Must-Have Mage Setup Administration, Must-Have quickly adapt your Magento Store to German […]
Some overseen Magento performance tipps
Disable Mage_Reports logging for simple page views (use external analytics tools instead) Disable unused (core) modules, e.g. Mage_Poll, Mage_Tag, Mage_Rss, Mage_Wishlist, Mage_XmlConnect, Find_Feed, Mage_Authorizenet (Pay attention to all side effects, e.g. when deactivating Mage_Wishlist the customer detail view in admin won’t work any longer in CE 1.7) Disable Magento file logging in production (or at […]
A totally different recommendation engine for Magento
A few weeks ago we released the first version of our new Recolize Recommendation Engine extension for Magento. We – that is the company Recolize that I founded together with Michael Stork and Anja Lange in the beginning of this year. Since the mid of last year we have put enormous efforts into building an […]