There are a number of benefits associated with doing this before making changes on a live environment:

• The ability to upgrade on the test server as updates become available.
• Test extensions from Magento Connect.
• Developing, testing and implementing new features.
• Get sign off from the client while still in a test environment.

I can then quite easily and efficiently role out these enhancements without fear of complication.

What is vital though is that search engines don’t crawl and index the test environments. This can be done quite easily from within the Magento Dashboard.

Navigate to Configuration -> Design -> HTML Head and set the Default Robots option to ‘NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW’. This should add a ‘NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW’ meta tag to your site.

From Wikipedia:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access.

Twitter has become an increasingly important tool for businesses today from a marketing aspect and it is important to validate your profile with your company branding. Its a great way to stay in contact with your customers and its significance should not be overlooked.

Don’t hesitate to contact me regarding your customisation options for your twitter account.

I have recently been importing a customers products into Magento with varying success. Hopefully this post will point you in the right direction to avoid many of the pitfalls I have discovered.

I have found that the best way to import your products into Magento is to manually create a single product in each category, export the csv file of products, edit the CSV for the new products and then import again.

Export

1. From the Admin Panel. ‘System’ -> ‘Import / Export’ -> ‘Profiles’.
2. Select ‘Export All Products’
3. Click ‘Run Profile’ from the left hand navigation
4. Click the button ‘Run Profile in Pop Up’
5. Download the export from your ‘\var\export\’ directory.

Import

1. After editing and inserting your products, save the file as something like ‘Import Products.csv
2. From the Admin Panel. ‘System’ -> ‘Import / Export’ -> ‘Profiles’.
3. Click ‘Import All Products’
4. Click ‘Upload File’ from the left hand navigation
5. Click ‘Browse’, select the file and then click ‘Save and Continue Edit’
6. Select ‘Run Profile’ from the left hand navigation and select the uploaded csv file from the select box. It will have been renamed.
7. Click the button ‘Run Profile in Pop Up’
8. Take note of any products that are skipped.

Notes

• If you have recently upgraded Magento, some of the field titles and values may have changed. For example, make sure the ’store’, ‘website’ and ‘type’ fields are lower case.
• Some fields are mandatory like ‘SKU’ and ‘weight’
• ‘tax_class_id’ and ‘visability’ fields are now uppercase
• Regarding images, even if you have the same image for the main image, small image and thumbnail, Magento appears to need different values in here. e.g. productimage1.jpg, productimage1-sm.jpg and productimage1-th.jpg

Hopefully this will clear up some of the issues with importing large quatities of products into Magento.

I am happy to offer this import service if requried on your install of Magento. Please contact me for a quote.

n.b. You do not need a MailChimp account to make use of this (but its recommended!)

From a client point of view, I have made a decision to include this with all my future client installs of Wordpress and have begun using this on EminentStyle.com.

From a technical standpoint, your hosting must support PHP5 for the plugin to work.

Analytics 360 - website stats in your WordPress Dashboard (courtesy of mailchimp.com)

Lifehacker also has a “Top 10 Firefox 3.5 Features” article on their site.

Apparently it is just about to ship so look out for an automatic update soon.

Though I am based in the UK, the service and value I got from Print 100 was excellent. If you need some designing, give me a shout.

The Google Webmaster Central channel has the following introduction.

This is the official YouTube channel for Google Webmaster Central, your one-stop shop for webmaster resources that will help you with your crawling and indexing questions, introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors.

I am impressed that Google is continuing in its effort to be more transparent and is becoming more SEO and developer friendly. This comes after Google making their ‘Beginners Guide to SEO’ available back in November last year, I talked about it here.

Here is the first video from Google’s Matt Cutts.

WordPress.tv is Your Visual Resource for All Things WordPress

Wordpress.tv is an excellent site and since virtually all the non e-commerce sites I create now are Wordpress based, this will become very handy.

Here are a couple of the most common things I get asked about.

Creating New Posts

Adding New Pages

Just a quick tip. I have just designed my new business cards and needed to ensure that the artwork was correctly set to the CMYK colour space needed by my printers.

There are two areas you need to check, ideally before you complete your work else there is probably gonna be some colour correction required.

1. ‘Edit’ -> ‘Color Settings’ and ensure your working spaces and color management settings are setup correctly. If you are not sure about this, contact your printers.
2. ‘Image’ -> ‘Mode’ ->’CMYK Color’.

Easy eh?

If you don’t spend a lot of time searching for or scouting players then it is probably not for you but those that do, it should make life much easier.

Installation

It doesn’t get much easier than this (requires Firefox 2.0+) :

1. Click on the drop downbox to the left of the search box in Firefox.
2. Click on the “Add SoccerManager” option.
3. Done.

Technical Bit

For those who are interested it is written in xml using the Open Search standard and is made available using the Firefox’s autodiscovery feature.