Beth France – Managing Director of Timeless Toys Ltd.

Treat your kids at Timeless Toys

John Harding – SteelBox Safes

Check out SteelBox Safes

Carl Stott – Managing Director

Take a look at National Money Helpline

You rock!!! – Adam Bernard

Check out Adam’s WordPress website

Wow his photos are something else. After reading about him, he creates these highly elaborate staged photos, creating surreal atmospheric scenes in middle America. Some with a slight touch of sci-fi. I’d love to find somewhere that sells prints of this work.

It’s actually not as complex as you might think to quickly speed up magento without having to do any massive code changes. Other than the obvious stuff like:

• Host on a dedicated server (if your using a shared server)
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to host your assets (Images / CSS / Javascript)
• Use a heavyweight memory caching system like Memcache
• Use CSS Sprites for all the smaller images across the site

There are some much simpler things to do. First off you are best off installing something like YSlow so you can actually measure / monitor your site performance rather than guessing. After you’ve installed YSlow you can run a page analysis and get a more detailed idea of what need to be improved.

Try doing the follow to improve the speed:

1. Go to your Magento store admin, then go to: System > Cache Management and make sure you have everything enabled.
2. Still in your store admin to go: System > Configuration > Developer (right at the bottom). Depending on what version of Magento you are using you should see 2 panels (Javascript Settings & CSS Settings) in these panels turn “Merge JavaScript Files” & “Merge CSS Files” to YES.

   This will merge all your header javascript files and css files into 1 respective file for each, thus reducing the amount of requests. This is especially good for the js files as Magento is built around the Zend PHP Framework so its bloated with the Prototype / Scriptaculous js libraries.

   Because you are merging files here, on the odd occasion this can cause some slight hiccups, so do give your site a once over after doing this

3. Copy off your .htaccess file from root level of your server. You can do this via an FTP application. Once open, there are a few things you can uncomment to speed things up.

   Find the follow snippets of code and uncomment so they appear as they do in the boxes below. This will enable GZIP compression. You can read more about it here.

   ## enable resulting html compression
    
   php_flag zlib.output_compression on

   ## enable apache served files compression
   ## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#gzip
    
   # Insert filter on all content
   ###SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
   # Insert filter on selected content types only
   AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript
    
   # Netscape 4.x has some problems...
   BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
    
   # Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
   BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip
    
   # MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
   BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
    
   # Don't compress images
    SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
    
   # Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
   Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

4. Enable Header expires, so your browser will cache assets for a set period of time before flushing them. Items will automatically re-cache if you edit / clear your browser cache.

   ## Add default Expires header
   ## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#expires
    
   ExpiresActive On
   ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"

5. Enable ETags, ETags allows caches to be more efficient, and saves bandwidth. Further reading can be found here.

   ## If running in cluster environment, uncomment this
   ## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#etags
    
   FileETag none

Just doing those 5 simple steps will greatly improve the speed of your Magento store. Be sure to make a backup of your .htaccess before making any changes (just in-case).

The Magento breakdown below will give you a comprehensive guide on the features we can add to your online store:

Site Management

• Control multiple websites and stores from one Administration Panel with ability to share as much or as little information as needed
• Multi-Lingual
• Support for localisation
• Support for multiple currencies
• Administration Permission System Roles and Users
• Web Services API for easy integration between Magento and any third-party application
• Flexible tax rate management with support for US and International markets
• Fully 100% customisable design using templates
• Customer Groups
• One-Click Upgrades
• Content Management System for Informational Pages

Mobile Commerce

• iPhone Optimised

Marketing Promotions and Tools

• Flexible Coupons (pricing rules) with ability to restrict to stores, customer groups, time period, products, and categories. For example: Percent Discount | Fixed Amount Discount | Free
  Shipping | Buy x, get y free. | Buy x, get y with percent or fixed amount discount | Buy x, get free shipping on order | Buy x, get percent discount | Buy x, get fixed amount discount.
• Catalog Promotional Pricing by percentage or fixed amount with ability to restrict to stores, categories, products
• Free Shipping Option
• Multi-Tier Pricing for quantity discounts
• Bundled Products
• Customer Group-specific pricing and group-specific tier pricing
• Landing Page Tool for Campaigns
• Search Engine Friendly URL’s
• URL Rewrites
• Recently Viewed Products
• Recently Compared Items
• New Items Promotional Tool
• Up-sells in Shopping Cart
• Cross-sells on product pages
• Send to a Friend for all visitors, or registered users only
• Send Wish list to a Friend by Email or RSS
• RSS Feeds for New Products, New Specials and New Tags
• Auto-generated Site Map
• Google Site Map
• Polls
• Newsletter Management

International Support

• Multi-Lingual
• Support for Multiple Currencies
• Tax rate support
• Localisation
• Configurable List of Allowed Countries for:
• Site Registration
• Shipping Destination Addresses with ability to specify per shipping method
• Billing Addresses with ability to specify per payment method

Search Engine Optimisation

• 100% Search Engine Friendly
• Google Site Map
• URL Rewrites give full control of URL’s
• Meta-information for products and categories
• Auto-generated Site Map for display on site
• Auto-Generated Popular Search Terms Page

Checkout

• One-Page Checkout
• SSL security support for orders on both front-end and back-end
• Shipping to multiple addresses in one order
• Checkout without account/Guest Checkout
• Shopping Cart with tax and shipping estimates
• Checkout with account to use address book
• Option to create account at beginning of checkout
• Accept gift messages per order and per item
• Saved Shopping Carts with configurable expiration time

Shipping

• Integrated for real-time shipping rates
• Shipping to multiple addresses in one order
• On-site order tracking from customer accounts
• Multiple shipments per order
• Ability to specify allowed destination countries per method
• Flat rate shipping per order
• Flat rate shipping per item
• Free Shipping
• Table rates for weight and destination
• Table rates for product sub-totals and destination
• Table rates for number of items and destination

Payment

• Configurable to authorise and charge, or authorise only and charge on creation of invoices
• Integrated with multiple PayPal gateways
  (Website Payments Standard, Website Payments Pro (Express and Direct), Website Payments Pro UK (Express and Direct), and PayPal PayFlow Pro)
• Integrated with Authorize.net
• Integrated with Google Checkout (Level 2)
• Saved Credit Card method for offline payments
• Accept Checks/Money Orders
• Accept Purchase Orders

Order Management

• View, edit, create and fulfil orders from admin panel
• Create one or multiple invoices, shipments and credit memos per order to allow for split fulfilment
• Print invoices and packing slips
• Call Center (phone) order creation
  (Includes ability to create new customer, or select existing customer and view shopping cart, wishlist, last ordered items, and compared products list, as well as select addresses, give discounts and assign custom prices)
• Create re-orders for customers from administration panel
• Email Notifications of Orders
• RSS feed of New Orders

Customer Service

• Contact Us form
• Feature-rich Customer Accounts
• Order History with Status Updates
• Order Tracking from Account
• Forgot Password Email from front-end and administration panel
• Order and Account Update Emails
• Customizable Order Emails
• Create and Edit Orders from the Admin Panel

Customer Accounts

• Order status and history
• Re-orders from account
• Recently ordered items
• Address Book with unlimited addresses
• Default Billing and Shipping addresses
• Wishlist with ability to add comments
• Email or Send RSS feed of Wishlist
• Newsletter Subscription management
• Product Reviews submitted
• Product Tags submitted
• Account Dashboard for overview of: recent orders, personal information, newsletter subscription status, primary billing address, primary shipping address, shopping cart, wishlist, recently ordered items, recently reviews and recent tags

Catalog Management

• Inventory Management with Backordered items, Minimum and Maximum quantities
• Batch Import and Export of catalog
• Batch Updates to products in admin panel
• Simple, Configurable (e.g. size, colour, etc.), Bundled and Grouped Products
• Virtual Products
• Customer Personalised Products – upload text for embroidery, monogramming, etc
• Tax Rates per location, customer group and product type
• Attribute Sets for quick product creation of different item types
• Create Store-specific attributes on the fly
• Media Manager with automatic image resizing and watermarking
• Advanced Pricing Rules and support for Special Prices
• Search Results rewrites and redirects
• Approve, Edit and Delete Product Tags
• Approve, Edit and Delete Product Reviews
• RSS feed for Low Inventory Alerts

Catalog Browsing

• Layered / Faceted Navigation for filtering of products
• Static Block tool to create category landing pages
• Ability to assign designs on category and product level (unique design per product/category)
• Configurable search with auto-suggested terms
• Recently viewed products
• Product comparisons
• Recently compared products
• Cross-sells, Up-sells and Related Items
• Popular Search Terms Cloud
• Filter by Product Tags
• Product Reviews
• Product listing in grid or list format
• Breadcrumbs

Product Browsing

• Multiple Images Per Product
• Product Image Zoom-in Capability
• Product Reviews
• Related Products
• Stock Availability
• Multi-Tier Pricing Upsell
• Product Option Selection
• Grouped Products View
• Add to Wishlist
• Send to a Friend with Email

Analytics and Reporting

• Integrated with Google Analytics
• Admin Dashboard for Report Overview
• Sales Report
• RSS feed for New Orders
• Tax Report
• Abandoned Shopping Cart Report
• Best Viewed Products Report
• Best Purchased Products Report
• Low Stock Report
• Search Terms Report
• Product Reviews Report
• RSS feed for New Reviews
• Tags Report
• RSS feed for New Tags
• Coupon Usage Report
• Total Sales Invoiced
• Total Sales Refunded
• Best Customers Report by Total and Number of Orders

I hope this thorough breakdown helps you learn a little more about Magento websites and how powerful a Magento build can be for your website and business.

The scenario is you have a list of posts on a page and you’re not able to add a class to the last item in the list (say to remove a separating border).

One option would be to to use the pseudo css class :last-child in your css e.g:

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.post:last-child{border-bottom:none;}

This would then remove the border on the last post div, which is a nice simple fix. The only downside is that :last-child doesn’t work in IE7+8 (surprise surprise).

So here is a nice simple jQuery fix to the problem.

First off we’ll call the jQuery:

You can choose to download the file from the jQuery site, or you can use this one hosted on Google.

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<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

Then include this piece of javascript in your head section:

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<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery(document).ready(function () {
	jQuery('.post:last').addClass('last');
});
</script>

This tells the div class ‘post’ to add class ‘last’. All you have to do is replace ‘post’ with the name of the css class you want ‘last’ adding to.

Hey presto your last item will now look like this:

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<div class="post last">

This will now allow you to add this in your css file

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.post.last{border-bottom:none;}

Thus removing the border off the very last div