Magento Fun

Installing Stripe for magento 2

2020-03-18T11:34:00.001-07:00

On this occasion and in some future posts for brevity I will cut the extraneous text and just list the sequence of commands I had to follow / steps taken. I find when following other peoples' guides I get frustrated when the extra "fluff" distracts me from the few commands I need to enter. Explanations will be given where needed, but no fluff.

1. Download the plugin from https://stripe.com/docs/plugins/magento/install#download
I downloaded the composer version

2. Place the file in the same directory as your composer.json. Typically this is the root magento folder. Copy it by FTP or whatever.

3. SSH into the machine or if a dev instance using docker then docker exec -it <magento2dev> bin/bash to get to the console (I test using docker - I will document this later also, highly recommended).

4. Switch to the folder you put the file in and tar -xvf stripe-magento2-x.x.x.tgz

5. composer require stripe/stripe-php:^6

6. php bin/magento setup:upgrade
php bin/magento cache:flush
php bin/magento cache:clean

php bin/magento setup:di:compile
php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy
php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy

Then go to the backend and configure it from stores->configuration.

Starting and stopping magento batch duties.

2020-03-18T06:25:00.001-07:00

As we are learning about magento 2, we are becoming increasingly aware that many of the tasks that worked fine on magento 1 don't always seem to want to work on magento 2. Exporting CSV files, bulk editing items, it simply doesn't work, with messages telling you these actions are queued on various lists. Even if you have cron configured correctly it still doesn't work.

Well, this is a note to remember how to start services, I will add as I discover new issues and the corresponding services.

1. Export CSV doesn't start.

2. Bulk edit attributes product grid, doesn't start processing.

You need to start: bin/magento queue:consumer:start product_action_attribute.update

Magento 2 catalog page images taking too long to load and failing.

2019-11-12T04:59:00.003-08:00

If you've upgraded or cleared the image caches for magento 2, you may notice that every catalog page loads the images at a snail pace, and if you have any load balancers that restrict php processes (like hypernode does), it may not load more than say 9 images on the page before giving up and showing broken links.

The short version of why this is happening, is because after you clear the cached thumb/small/etc images, you are only left with base images at full size (at least as far as magento is concerned) and so every time it wants to display a smaller image, it has to reprocess it on the fly, this uses php code, and this is why we encounter problems, we're asking too much of magento and a server by using more than our share of php processes to convert every single image on the catalog page.

You can obviously minimise the issue by limiting the items per page to 9 or 12 or whatever, but this is a workaround not a solution.

As it happens, magento has thought about this and provided a function to "pre-warm" the image cache and generate all the necessary images in all sizes.

You should know that a) you need shell access and b) you need a while (on our server, 10k products took about 4 hours).

The function is as follows. You should really only be doing this if you are familiar with the magento binary.

/bin/magento catalog:images:resize

Pretty simple, when you know, and when it works.

Magento 2 - Attention! Something went wrong!

2019-05-09T05:30:00.001-07:00

Something went wrong with processing the default view and we have restored the filter to its original state.

So says the product grid in the backend of Magento 2 when you're innocently trying to edit stuff.
This is something to do with filtering although I don't entirely (yet) know how to trigger it.

The Fix:

Well, looking around, I found this page on stackexchange which has a couple of solutions, but for me the solution appears (because you never want to fully commit in magento 2!) to solve this.

Go to phpmyadmin, table admin_user, and figure out the user_id of the affected user by just looking at the table. Write that down.

Then go to table ui_bookmark and find the row for any other user_id, copy the contents of key config for namespace product_listing identifier current, into the same field of the affected user_id

Or to try to put it simply, copy across the contents of the config field from one that works for another user.

I feel like you ought to be able to just delete the line for the affected user_id too, as I notice they're not generated for pages you haven't looked at before, so it should regenerate it, but I felt that my way of copying the data would be safer without looking at how the code works.

This field contains a load of information on which fields were last sorted and filtered it seems. Resetting that with good data fixes this, without having to clear any caches or reindex.

Looks harder than it is, trust me.

Oh and don't forget to backup your database first!

Update:

It kept happening. Digging a bit further it seems it's being caused or partly caused by having "sku" to "Null" on some values in the catalog_product_entity table.

props to this site for figuring that out somehow

If you go into phpmyadmin, load up catalog_product_entity, and sort based on sku column, you might (probably will!) see some values of SKU with "Null".

The reason this happened is because in magento 1 at least, if you duplicate a product, it creates a duplicate with blank SKU. If you then save it and don't enter an SKU, or don't save it, I think you get these null sku products.

Hmm.

Magento 2 fun!

2019-05-09T05:04:00.000-07:00

Well, I wouldn't really call it fun, honestly.
It's now May 2019, Magento 2 was released, or perhaps we should say it escaped, several years ago, so I thought it must be ready for production, surely.

Well, depends on your opinion I guess.

Anyway - this blog is getting revived - because it needs to be. Here goes.

Woop.

Editing Magento's Checkout Success Page - A Great Tip (Stop the page from clearing on refresh!)

2013-08-06T02:45:00.001-07:00

Here's a great tip I picked up. On checkout completion, the page shows once with "Checkout Success" etc.

However, when you press F5 or refresh, you get dumped to an empty cart and have to go through the whole thing again.

But you can stop this.

Go to:

app\code\core\Mage\Checkout\controllers\OnepageController.php

and comment out line 227:

//$session->clear();

Now, next time you go through checkout, you can refresh the page as much as you like, and get all your CSS layout, xml, etc all sorted in one go.

Fantastic.

Don't forget to change it back though!!

Adding a CMS static block into nearly any page (example: cms block on contact us page)

2013-06-11T20:58:00.000-07:00

Easier than it sounds, this. It only works with phtml files, I think.

1) Go to your backend, cms -> static blocks. Create a block with the content you wish to display and the important bit, NOTE the Identifier, that's the key we use to call the block.
In this example I created a block and called it "contactusblock".

2) Open the phtml file, in this case app\design\frontend\<yourname>\default\template\contacts\form.phtml

Add:

<?php echo $this->getLayout()->createBlock('cms/block')->setBlockId('contactusblock')->toHtml() ?>

anywhere you like in the phtml file.

Clear any caches, etc.

Good to go.

Help! My magento checkout button stopped working

2013-03-20T10:36:00.001-07:00

This is a short but weird one.

I had a problem where the site worked perfectly up to the checkout button. Which would do nothing. Nothing at all.

After pulling my hair out, I realised the cause.

In the database, in table "core_config_data", the secure website url had a single carriage return after it.

Would have saved me hours of work if someone had posted that online. So here I am, posting it.

Enjoy!

Using magento on a dev or test server, with proper domain names instead of IP addresses. Virtual Host setup guide.

2013-03-20T07:15:00.000-07:00

There are times when you need to run magento on a local dev server or WAMP installation or just anywhere, and you don't want an IP address, but instead you want to use a proper domain name.

For example I came across a particularly ridiculous problem with a module's licence; the module would only work on the root domain, and any subdomains of that. For example it worked on www.rubbishmodule.com and shop.rubbishmodule.com but if you moved your site to a dev server, eg 192.168.1.100/rubbishmodule/ it no longer worked.

Something had to be done. And it was easier than I thought. The process is:

1) Set up apache to use "Name based virtual hosting"
2) Edit the necessary files on magento
3) Setup hosts file on pc, or a trick, the router

1. Apache

Apache is a cleverpants. You can use two types of routing to "fake" a web domain on a dev server or any other server running apache. I won't go into it, because you're likely to only ever need Name Based variety.

So - easy peasy. Open up your httpd.conf. On CentOS, it's probably in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. Remember you need to be superuser or you'll be frustrated when you can't save the file ;)

Scroll to the bottom.

Find and uncomment:

# Use name-based virtual hosting.
NameVirtualHost *.80

Add below somewhere:

<VirtualHost *.80>
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/ <- this is the absolute path to your dev website root
ServerName test.rubbishmodule.com <- this is the web domain you want to "fake"
ErrorLog /var/www/rubbishmodule_error_log <- this can be anywhere
CustomLog /var/www/rubbismodule_access_log <- likewise.
</VirtualHost>

That's that. You can add as many entries as you like, thats how name based works, apache will just route to the right DocumentRoot for the ServerName you've given. Genius.

Oh. You need to restart apache too. Usually
service httpd restart
will do the trick. Google it if you're stuck here.

But it won't work until you do steps 2 and 3...

2. Magento

You need to go into phpmyadmin and browse the core_config_data table. Find the entry for web/unsecure/base_url
It's a big table, but its there.
Change the data to http://test.rubbishmodule.com/
DONT forget the trailing forward slash. If you do, all manner of naughty breaks loose

Now clear /var/cache and /var/session folders in your magento root

3. Hosts

Now you need to tell your PC where to find this server. This is by editing your hosts file. Plenty on this if you google it, but the basics are in Windows:

open c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Go to the bottom
Add in
192.168.1.100 test.rubbishmodule.com <- ip of your dev server, your fake domain

Bingo. All works.

Now, as an extra, if you have a dd-wrt router, you can do this on the router, so every PC can see the test site!

Go to Services -> Services -> DNSMasq: http://192.168.1.1/Services.asp


address=/test.rubbishmodule.com/192.168.1.100

Magento multiple stores and per store pricing, including tier pricing. Yes, it's all possible!

2012-05-05T12:17:00.001-07:00

All you need to do is change one flag:

system -> configuration -> catalog -> catalog and change price > price scope to "website".

Then you can set prices per store, and tier prices per store.

Magic

Multiple Stores on Magento 1.6+ (possibly 1.4+) and with CPANEL and shared hosting

2012-05-05T10:39:00.001-07:00

Right, most of the guides out there on multi store setup in magento are a bit techy, plus they also tend to assume that you have, and want, to mess about with stuff like virtual hosts.
Well none of that is necessary.

I have two domain names registered, lets call them http://www.fantastic.co.uk and http://www.rubbish.co.uk
(those arent my domains, dont follow the links!)

So my magento store is all set up with the default store of fantastic.co.uk and working nicely.

Now I want to add a new website for rubbish.co.uk, and only have my rubbish products on show. lol.

This is how you do it.

1) point rubbish.co.uk at your DNS server for the same as fantastic.co.uk. Exactly the same.

2) go to cpanel for fantastic.co.uk and go to addon domains. Add rubbish.co.uk and set the username to anything. but importantly, set the document root to your magento root folder. This may be public_html, it may be public_html/magento. This is very important to get right.

3) Note that you may have to wait for rubbish.co.uk to propagate before it works. This can take up to 48 hours. Go do stuff. Read an entire book or something.

4) Go to magento backend. Go to catalog-> categories and add a new root category, call it what you like. I called mine rubbish. Make sure it's active, anchor, etc.

5) Go to system -> manage stores. Add a new website, store and store view in that order. Remember the "code" you enter though for website, you'll need that soon. Point the store to your new root category.

6) Go to system -> configuration. Choose website scope for "rubbish" in the drop down combo box. Thats the one in grey (the top level for "rubbish"). Go to Configuration-> general-> web on the left side, and change these (untick and enter your own url):

Unsecure Base URL: http://www.rubbish.co.uk
Secure Base URL: https://www.rubbish.co.uk
Use Secure URLs in Frontend: NO (you cant have 2 ssl certs on one hosting account*)
(later you can come back and change also CMS home page, but thats for later)

*well, you can in theory, but I have yet to find a host that will entertain theory.

Now save this. Oh, its IMPERATIVE that you include the www above. Otherwise it doesnt work.

7) now we need to redirect any traffic that DOESNT include the www. Go to cpanel and go to REDIRECTS. Add "rubbish.co.uk", leave the / box blank, and set "redirects to " to "http://www.rubbish.co.uk". Important: set the radio button to "Do not redirect www" and leave wildcard blank. Save this.

8) phew. Now to see any products, you need to:
- add some products/categories to that root category you created in step 4. You also need to go to the products themselves, and in the Websites tab, enable them for rubbish.co.uk.

9) clear all magento caches, reindex all files.

10) go to magento root folder, and open index.php for editing. Add this line at the bottom before "/* Store or website code */" (line 74 for me)

if ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == "www.rubbish.co.uk"){
$_SERVER["MAGE_RUN_CODE"] = "rubbish"; <--this is the code you made up in step 5
$_SERVER["MAGE_RUN_TYPE"] = "website";
}

Then you should see your website when you type in either http://www.rubbish.co.uk or http://rubbish.co.uk.

SSL, getSkinUrl and ARGGGH broken padlock or missing images in chrome/ie! Solution...

2012-04-30T16:22:00.005-07:00

As above. The issue is, that when using getSkinUrl in Magento to plonk an image anywhere, if you also use SSL, on the https:// versions of the page, you sometimes (not always!) get a NON secure image.

i.e. and chrome dont like this one bit. They'll warn the customer that you're totally unsafe, and shouldn't be trusted. Hmm. A bit extreme, to say the least.

The solution is, well, the reason first. getSkinUrl seems to be caching the images in question. So the solution is to tell it to refresh that image.
I can't say I understand this 100%, but I took it from here (in the comments):

file to edit:
app/code/local/Mage/Catalog/Block/Navigation.php
(if you dont have the above, copy it from app/code/core - NEVER edit core files, always copy them over to app/code/local)

line to add (in magento 1.6 at least!) :

public function getCacheKeyInfo()
{
$shortCacheId = array(
'CATALOG_NAVIGATION',
Mage::app()->getStore()->getId(),
Mage::getDesign()->getPackageName(),
Mage::getDesign()->getTheme('template'),
Mage::getSingleton('customer/session')->getCustomerGroupId(),
'template' => $this->getTemplate(),
'name' => $this->getNameInLayout(),
$this->getCurrenCategoryKey(),
$this->getSkinUrl()
);
$cacheId = $shortCacheId;

$shortCacheId = array_values($shortCacheId);
$shortCacheId = implode('|', $shortCacheId);
$shortCacheId = md5($shortCacheId);

$cacheId['category_path'] = $this->getCurrenCategoryKey();
$cacheId['short_cache_id'] = $shortCacheId;

return $cacheId;
}

How to kill a cron job that's hanging around

2012-03-04T03:43:00.000-08:00

If like me, you have your magento on a server, you might find that you're constantly nagged by "excessive resouce usage: " messages from lfd/csf firewall.

Or you may just notice that cron jobs aren't finishing.

To kill them you need two things
1) SSH access under the same user as the cron job is running (usually just your cpanel username)
2) the process ID (PID)

Then it's simple

$ Kill -9 PID

All done.

Course, you shouldnt kill active processes. Kill -9 is very harsh, and can cause problems if the cron job was actually half way through doing something. Better to wait maybe a day or so before killing processes!

Show an image in any .phtml file with a RELATIVE link, i.e. not hardcoded!

2012-02-07T13:33:00.000-08:00

Thing about magento you learn pretty soon in...

...how you code stuff is VERY dependent on where you're putting the code.

This works in .phtml files. Or I guess, any files where php will be parsed. Maybe.

<img src="<?php echo $this->getSkinUrl('images/btn_trash.gif') ?>" alt="" />

Of course, the image is in your skin/frontend/<yourtemplate>/images/ folder

nice, neat way of making your site not break if you move it ;)

Another way of doing a bog standard link

2012-02-06T16:43:00.001-08:00

Sometimes an <a> tag isn't appropriate.

You can also use:

onClick="location.href='index.html'"

inside any other tag.

example

awesome.

Search boxes anywhere!

2012-02-05T15:07:00.001-08:00

A quickie:

<?=$this->getLayout()->getBlock('top.search')->toHtml()?>

will put a search box anywhere you want!

Backing up your Magento DB. Go Take a Dump. Literally

2012-02-05T05:50:00.000-08:00

Pun intended.

Cpanel db backup, mysql export, they're all rubbish with large databases (i.e. >10mb). I don't know why they bother.

To do it properly, you *need* ssh access to the server, or some other shell access. If you dont have it, get it. Seriously.

Once you're in the shell:

~> # mysqldump -u [your cpanel login] -p [FULL_dbname] > backup.sql

Then you have yourself a proper reliable sql file.

Remember to turn off the foreign key check before you import!

Oh no! Easy tabs messes up my product view page!

2012-02-05T02:12:00.000-08:00

Now, this one can be a little infuriating.

After installing the awesome easy tabs plugin
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/magento-easytabs.html

You suddenly find that any mods you've previously done to your product view page disappear.

Like say, a lightbox mod.

Oh no!

Simple answer: easy tabs uses this file:

app\design\frontend\yourtemplate\default\template\easytabs\catalogproductview.phtml

instead of what you would have been using before:

app\design\frontend\yourtemplate\default\template\catalog\product\view.phtml.

So there you go. Copy your code across.

Jquery and Magento

2012-02-03T02:15:00.000-08:00

OK, a quick one. Magento and Jquery can work together very well, but there's a couple of things you have to do.

1) Jquery, make sure you have the latest version

2) prototype.js (part of magento) has to also be the latest version [on magento 1.6 it's v1.7 of prototype which IS the latest version. woop.]

Once you have the latest Jquery (1.6 at time of writing I think?) - open the file, and add:
jQuery.noConflict();

right down at the bottom.

I believe that the order you call scripts may be important - so if you still have gripes, try to make sure the <script> tag for jquery is ABOVE the one for prototype.

What's My Base URL? How to use a relative path on an image or file in magento!

2012-02-02T11:32:00.000-08:00

Simple question really. Lets say you have an image file in:

/home/you/magento/media/myimage.jpg

Now, http://www.you.com points to magento/

But we all know that absolute links like
<img src="http://www.you.com/media/myimage.jpg">
are naughty

so you really want to say is

<img src="<?php echo Mage::getBaseUrl(Mage_Core_Model_Store::URL_TYPE_WEB);?>media/myimage.jpg">

And I just gave it away.

So here's the lowdown for an html file in magento.

Mage::getBaseUrl is the magento root folder.

Mage::getSkinUrl and Mage::getImageUrl should also work, to the skin and mediaimages folders respectively.

(note the "should" - I havent tried them yet!)

Note this only works in html files, for the scripty type files you would use something else, like
$this->getSkinUrl()

Or thats what I'm guessing.

Fun when copying magento installs to local WAMP installation

2012-02-02T03:23:00.000-08:00

Here we go again. All I want to do is some quick mods to the skin on a magento installation, so I install WAMP locally on my PC.

I do an sql dump and as usual I create a db in WAMP and go to import.

c:\wamp\bin\mysql\mysqlx.xx.xx\bin> mysql -u root <dbname>
mysql>
mysql> source <filename.sql>;

So it's failing again. It always fails. What now?
Foreign keys. Of course. Error 150. Foreign Key Constraints.
So I paste this into the top:

SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT=@@CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT;
SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS=@@CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS;
SET @OLD_COLLATION_CONNECTION=@@COLLATION_CONNECTION;
SET NAMES utf8;
SET @OLD_UNIQUE_CHECKS=@@UNIQUE_CHECKS, UNIQUE_CHECKS=0;
SET @OLD_FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=@@FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS, FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;
SET @OLD_SQL_MODE=@@SQL_MODE, SQL_MODE='NO_AUTO_VALUE_ON_ZERO';
SET @OLD_SQL_NOTES=@@SQL_NOTES, SQL_NOTES=0;

pretty standard fare.

Still not working. Why?

Try all sorts. Still not working.

Well guess what 2 hours has taught me. Don't use source.

This is how you import a magento sql dump:

c:\wamp\bin\mysql\mysqlx.xx.xx\bin> mysql -u root [dbname] < [filename.sql]

Then it actually uses the disable foreign key thing !!!

Why it ignores it using source I don't know.

So - great, then we get this:

ERROR 2006 (HY000) at line 6027: MySQL Server has gone away.

Fantastic.

Well the solution to this is to increase the max_allowed_packet to 10M (from 1M) in my.ini (right click your WAMP icon and go to it that way)

Worked. Finally.

Hopefully this will save someone else 2 hours of work.