Magento

This is a follow up to our 2009 post, How to set up a Magento store for Australia. There are a few important things that need to be configured for compliance with ATO requirements and to ensure that Magento calculates taxes correctly. The following is an outline of the necessary configuration and settings you may need to consider when setting up Magento 2 for an Australian store.

Locale Settings

The first step is setting all necessary system configuration settings for Australia:

The Product Attributes index is an important part of Magento's category filtering system. This post provides an overview of what it is and how it works.

Layered navigation and the Product Attributes index

Magento's layered navigation allows customers to filter categories by whatever attributes you've set up. Customers can filter down to red t-shirts that come in size L, or only phones with more than 16GB of storage that fit into their budget. The issue with allowing this flexibility is that the product attribute data that's being filtered on is stored in Magento's EAV (entity-attribute-value) database tables. The EAV data model allows Magento to efficiently store a wide range attribute data for different types of products, but a downside is that it's harder to query than traditional flat database tables. To solve this problem, Magento uses the Product Attributes index.

The Is Anchor category setting and category product positions do not play well when combined together. You might think that marrying two simple category settings would result in a simple solution, but think twice before you do so or you might get a headache of Magento proportion! In this post we will attempt to demystify how Is Anchor works and how you can best make use of it.

How does category positioning work?

You probably know that sorting a category by the default "Best Value" criteria uses the Position field of the products in the category to determine its position in the category listing. This is a whole number value which can be set per product in a category to sort the products in ascending numeric order. Setting a higher position value for a product will move it closer to the bottom of the category list, after all products with the default position of 0.

DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service provided by Amazon, offering features like easy scalability, high availability and data durability. These properties make it well suited to being used as a Magento session storage engine. The AWS PHP SDK already includes a PHP session handler, so in theory it should be a simple matter of including the SDK and configuring Magento to use it. In practice, it wasn't quite this straightforward.

Magento will automatically resize product images based on dimensions specified in templates so that customers aren't downloading large source images when all they need is a small thumbnail. However, we've discovered an issue with recent versions of Magento which will sometimes cause a "Memory Limit has been reached" error when attempting to resize images through a PHP command line script.

This issue was introduced in Magento CE 1.8.0.0 and EE 1.13.0.0 versions, and will normally only occur with code that is run from the CLI. The default PHP CLI memory limit is often set to -1 so that there is no memory limit applied. Reviewing the relevant code we found that Magento was using the following method to determine if it had enough memory to resize images:

While developing the new Fontis Blog extension, we wanted to allow use of the same WYSIWYG editor tools that users have when creating Magento CMS pages or static blocks. Doing so is not very difficult, requiring only a few changes to add the Magento WYSIWYG to your own extensions.

The first step is tell Magento that it can load the TinyMCE WYSIWYG JavaScript file. This should be done in the layout, in the handle used for your page, like so:

While MYOB continues to extend its products into the cloud, it has created some confusion surrounding our M2M Sync software and support for the latest releases of the MYOB product line. In summary, M2M Sync is compatible with the AccountRight version 19 products, which are still supported by MYOB at this time. It is not compatible with the AccountRight 2011/2012 or 2013 products. However, please note that any current AccountRight subscription also includes access to the compatible version 19 software, so this may be installed instead for use with M2M Sync.

This week saw the inaugural Click Frenzy sale generate a huge amount of interest in Australian eCommerce, and we are proud to have been the developer responsible for delivering the website for the event based on a Magento platform.

The site stood up well after a challenging start on Tuesday evening, but there was a configuration issue with the webserver environment at one point which left a number of private application files exposed for some time. During this period the Magento directory was inadvertently left with directory listings on and without private directories and their contents protected from access. These private files being accessible did not result in a security breach of any kind, and there was never any sensitive personal data stored on any of the website's servers, but the cause of the disclosure does highlight a risk of Magento’s design. Currently, the entire application is designed to be located in the webserver’s document root (docroot). To address this risk and eliminate the possibility of a misconfiguration having this effect, the Magento application needs to be restructured to make it possible to relocate most parts outside of the docroot. This is an approach we’ll be adopting in future and which we document in this post. We also include an accompanying patch that we are releasing to the Magento community.

Since version 1.11, Magento Enterprise Edition releases have included a RMA feature to help manage this process. The system supports tracking requests from when they are first created by a customer, all the way through to resolution. This post will look at how to set up and administer RMA requests from the admin panel, and will also detail a few shortcomings that will hopefully be improved in future releases.

When editing a CMS page in Magento Enterprise Edition's admin panel, it's easy enough to make a mistake and accidentally remove a section of text or accidentally modify markup which may be a crucial part of the page's layout. While you may have back-ups to handle a situation like this, it can still be a time consuming process to retrieve and then restore the original content. However, using Magento's built-in version control system, you can conveniently restore your page to how it was at any time in the past, and also switch between different versions of a page with ease. In this post, we'll explain how this feature works and why you should use it.