However, when you click through to Google Checkout, the free option is missing. Google Checkout seems to see this option and discard it. Or does it?

In fact, this is Magento being helpful(?)

To cure this, you just need to edit /app/code/core/Mage/GoogleCheckout/Model/Api/Xml/Checkout.php

You should be able to create a local version of the file (/app/code/local/…) if you don’t wish to edit the core file.

You’re looking for the following loop:

for ($xml='', $i=1; $i< =3; $i++) {
  $allowSpecific = Mage::getStoreConfigFlag('google/checkout_shipping_flatrate/sallowspecific_'.$i, $this->getQuote()->getStoreId());
  $specificCountries = Mage::getStoreConfig('google/checkout_shipping_flatrate/specificcountry_'.$i, $this->getQuote()->getStoreId());
  $allowedAreasXml = $this->_getAllowedCountries($allowSpecific, $specificCountries);
 
  $title = Mage::getStoreConfig('google/checkout_shipping_flatrate/title_'.$i, $this->getQuote()->getStoreId());
  $price = Mage::getStoreConfig('google/checkout_shipping_flatrate/price_'.$i, $this->getQuote()->getStoreId());
  $price = number_format($price, 2, '.','');
  $price = (float) Mage::helper('tax')->getShippingPrice($price, false, false);
 
  if (empty($title)  ){# || $price < = 0) {
    continue;
  }
 
  $xml .= <<<EOT
  <{$nodeName} name="{$title}">
    <shipping -restrictions>
      <allowed -areas>
       {$allowedAreasXml}
      </allowed>
    </shipping>
    <price currency="{$this->getCurrency()}">{$price}</price>
 
  EOT;
}

The only bit you’re really interested in though, is:

if (empty($title) || $price < = 0) {
	continue;
}

Change this to:

if (empty($title)) {
	continue;
}

And there you go - a free delivery option that you create will appear.

echo Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load($catId)->getImageUrl();

However, by default, it doesn’t provide the facility to get the thumbnail category image. You’d expect to be able to use getThumbnailUrl(), but, you can’t.

In order to enable this functionality, you need to make some modifications to Magento.

The file you need to edit is /app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Model/Category.php. Due to the nature of Magento, you’d be best copying this to /app/code/local/Mage/Catalog/Model/Category.php before amending the file. Once copied, you can edit this new file.

Around line 481, you’ll find the getImageUrl function. Below this, we’re going to add a new function. This function is slightly modified from others I’ve seen, where you can pass it a parameter to get just the file name, or get the full path if you’d prefer.

 
/**
 * Retrieve thumbnail image URL
 *
 * @return string
 */
public function getThumbnailUrl($fullpath = false)
{
 
  $url = false;
 
  if ($image = $this->getThumbnail()) {
 
      if($fullpath == true)
      {
          $url = Mage::getBaseUrl('media').'catalog/category/'.$image;
      }
      else
     {
          $url = $image;
     }
  }
 
  return $url;
 
}

Upon restarting the box, mysql wouldn’t respond.

hq-lnx-001:~# /etc/init.d/mysql start
Starting MySQL database server: mysqld.
Checking for corrupt, not cleanly closed and upgrade needing tables..
/usr/bin/mysqladmin: connect to server at ‘localhost’ failed
error: ‘Access denied for user ‘debian-sys-maint’@'localhost’ (using password: YES)’
hq-lnx-001:~# ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user ‘debian-sys-maint’@'localhost’ (using password: YES)

debian-sys-maint is Debian’s user for interacting with MySQL. In order to rebuild it, you need to –skip-grant-tables. You can’t do this just running mysqld, you need to edit your my.cnf file.

hq-lnx-001:~# nano /etc/mysql/my.cnf

You can simply call the Mage Helper file checkout/cart.

If all you’re after is a total number, all you need is:

echo Mage::helper('checkout/cart')->getCart()->getItemsCount();

This code grabs the helper object, gets the current cart object, and then calls the Magento count function on that.

If you want to do something with the items, then you’ll need to return the items, rather than the counter. To do this, you need to look at the helper checkout/session instead.

Something along the lines of:

$items = Mage::getSingleton('checkout/session')->getQuote()->getAllItems();

If you wanted to get the total for the basket – so that it could be displayed elsewhere on your site, then you can get this from the checkout/cart class. Note, we don’t get this from the helper.

Simply call:

echo Mage::getSingleton('checkout/cart')->getQuote()->getGrandTotal();
// format the number - you couldn't probably use number_format, but use Magento's functions
echo $this->helper('checkout')->formatPrice(Mage::getSingleton('checkout/cart')->getQuote()->getGrandTotal());

The hot topics at Think Visibility for me this year were: security, psychology and edge rank.

It’s been interesting to see the change in the industry over the past two years or so – pushing social interaction into online and offline campaigns. With it, brings an interesting shift into knowing about the psychology behind decision making. This incorporated the latter two topics for me.

I really enjoyed the more technical talk about security in web applications by Glyn Wintle. Whilst aware of much of what he talked about, it was interesting to see that what he talked about was merely the tip of the ice berg of a fascinating topic.

A great aspect of this conference is its downtime between talks, and before and after the conference. Everyone is so approachable, and everybody at the conference has a different background. People attend from various backgrounds – internal seo staff, seo agencies, freelancers, CEOs, speakers etc, and this means there is always an interesting conversation to have. The previous two visits I’d had to Think Visibility I kept myself to myself, but this time I was determined to say hello to people, and hope I didn’t come across as someone who didn’t know too much!

This SEO conference is well worth attending and great that its so local (Leeds), and not in London!

Oh yeah, also, there was Robot Wars.

The next Think Visibility conference planned for March 2012.

apache2-ssl-certificate failed to work though, so what have they done with it?

Well, they’ve moved it. If you’re setting up SSL for the first time, a nice workaround is:

# mkdir /etc/apache2/ssl
# /usr/sbin/make-ssl-cert /usr/share/ssl-cert/ssleay.cnf /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem

You can get a list of all users who have cron scheduled tasks by running the following command:

[root@server ~]# ls -l /var/spool/cron

This allows you to see the users, although if you’ve got a general idea, then looking in /etc/passwd would give you an idea too.

So, the cronjob might be running as any of these users. Usually to get your crontab you can just run:

[root@server ~]# crontab -l

Or to edit it:

[root@server ~]# crontab -e

As root, you get the chance to tell crontab which user you’d like to view. Like this:

[root@server ~]#crontab -u username -l

After chopping out all other includes and HTML/CSS that wasn’t needed for the tabs to display, I narrowed it down to the “stylish select” jQuery plugin (http://plugins.jquery.com/project/stylish-select-box) that had been installed on the site. As this was an inherited site, I didn’t know where (or even if) the plugin was being actively used on the site, so I couldn’t just disable it.

The issue was that this plugin was redefining the “indexOf” function. In order to create a “global” version of the function, the developer has created their own. Since this function is then used in other function calls by other plugins/scripts etc, it was breaking them.

Simply modifying the function and re-referencing the function calls within the plugin was enough.

The modified function looks like this:

Array.prototype.indexOfNew = function (obj, start) {
  for (var i = (start || 0); i < this.length; i++) {
    if (this[i] == obj) {
      return i;
    }
  }
}

Then, just update any function calls within the plugin to “indexOfNew”. That cures the issue.

A few of the comments got me a little confused – talking about security etc. I guess it all depends with distribution you have, how much you want to take advantage of new functionality (5.3 has A LOT – and the difference between PHP 4 and PHP 5 is VAST). I recently set up a new server for work, and it came with Red Hat Enterprise 5. RHEL 5 is a nice bit of kit, from a trusted source, but it only ships with PHP 5.1.6. Some people seem to see this as a big security risk, but what they don’t seem to be aware of is that Red Hat backport all security patches. I believe this probably covers Fedora Core and CentOS too. Version 5.1 of PHP is the supported version with the updating system.

If you want to go off on an adventure and install 5.2 or 5.3 then you need to make sure that you can maintain the same level of support that your distro is already offering, or, you need to find a host who is willing to do the work. Just asking your host to update your PHP could become dangerous if they then don’t upgrade it when new security patches become available. It’s something that needs to be monitored and supported.

It’s interesting to note that most major distributions still don’t ship with THE LATEST revision of PHP. Debian, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, etc.

A couple of things have changed in WP3.1, such as the Super Admin now being called “Network Admin” and being located in the top right corner.

It’s a great guide and quickly gets you up and running with a quick blog network all in folders or subdomains and I can’t improve on it.

What I did want to talk about though was getting your blog network running on multiple IPs and more importantly, multiple domains. I didn’t think this was possible. After all, WordPress says, subdomains or folders. Those are the only two options. However, enter the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin.

Once you’ve installed the plugin, you’re pretty much set. Just add a line to the config:

define( 'SUNRISE', 'on' );

and make sure you copy the sunrise.php file into the root of wp-content from your plugins folder.

Once you add a new subdomain / folder you can access the dashboard of the site and add a domain mapping, such as this example from an internal network (it was easier to configure the multiple IPs on our linux box and domain controller):

Now that you’ve added the domain mapping, you can continue to add more and more sites following the same system. This means that you manage all of them from one central place but they can appear on different domains on different IPs.

As far as your linux set up to achieve this goes, just make sure that all the IPs and sites all point to the same folder, like this:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

<virtualhost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/var/www/somesite/"
    ServerName maindomain.co.uk
    ServerAlias *.maindomain.co.uk
    ServerAlias somecooldomain.com www.somecooldomain.com
    ServerAlias anotherawesomedomain.com www.anotherawesomedomain.com
</virtualhost>

In the example above, Apache has a virtual host listening on all IPs on the server. All are then routed through to the same document root if it matches one of the domains. This means you can just point your domain’s A record at an IP on the server and it should work. If you’re using a control panel for your server, you might have a little more work to do to set this up. CPanel has a nifty trick whereby you can alter the vhost.conf and then run

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/apache_conf_distiller --update
/usr/local/cpanel/bin/build_apache_conf

So, you can change the Virtualhost definition and then add the additional domains as parked domains on the primary one through the control panel you’re already used to.

Depending on your server setup, openbase_dir shouldn’t catch you out, but in case it does, you can disable this as part of your config file too.