I actually knew about that, but, as anyone who manages WordPress sites knows, you can’t change your username once set. For a while, I didn’t worry about it, but this seemed to be the last little vulnerability I needed to address on the list, so I decided to tackle it.

Fortunately, I was able to find a solution by searching the web. Auroral is a blog in the UK, and they spell it out quite easily. You can view their solution, or, for expediency of time, here’s the solution:

1. Using phpMyAdmin, or whatever database tool you prefer (I use NaviCat), log into your database.
2. Find your [wp]_users table ([wp] would be whatever prefix you used when you set up your database).
3. Find the row in the table where admin is the value in the user_login column.
4. Change admin to whatever value you prefer. Your new name must not contain spaces.
5. Change the value in the user_nicename column to match the same value.
6. Commit these changes.
7. Find the [wp]_sitemeta table.
   
8. Find the row with site_admins for the meta-data value. You should see something that looks like this:

   a:1:{i:0;s:5:"admin";}

9. Change admin to your new administrator name — the same you entered in step 4, above.
10. Change the 5 to the count of characters in your new administrator name. For example, if your new user name is “cooldude,” then the count would be 8. Therefore, this value should read:

    a:1:{i:0;s:8:"cooldude";}

11. Commit this change.

Of course, test and re-test.

Like most authors and artists, I like to think I have a thick skin when it comes to critiques of my work. I’d also like to say I don’t read reviews, but that would not be true, of course. Mastering Magento is the first book I wrote for a major publisher.

I’ve written several self-published books, as well as numerous articles, blog posts and columns, but Mastering Magento represents a new turn in my career as an e-commerce expert. So, naturally I’ve been curious to know how well its been received by folks who have plunked down good money. While sales of the Mastering Magento book have been a good indicator of its acceptance, I know how reviews can also help or hurt future sales.

And, of course, if I intend to improve as an author, I want to learn from this experience.

At the risk of appearing self-laudatory — and no one ever said I didn’t enjoy applause — here are some snippets of reviews I have found online. Most have been favorable; some have not. This is not a complete list, to be sure.

Favorable Reviews

Book really did amaze me with the tips and chapters it contained. From looking at the table of contents I was not really interested and I had thought, yet another book covering the basics and not really telling something useful that you cannot learn in a day or two. Yet I was wrong. This book is really a good reference for Magento. You will probably read it on occasion when you wonder how a thing can be done. Book really covers the pains and problems endured during setting up a new Magento site so the author’s experience will help you overcome your own problems. It’s good because it really feels like “Ok, that’s enough pain, I should write a book about my experiences and I will get lots of thanks from others” Anyone who think about opening a Magento shop should at least check this out.

Amazon Reader Review

When you are using Magento and have never used e-commerce software before, you have probably no idea where to start. “Mastering Magento” can make this first step way easier.

Amazon Reader Review

This books gives you a very good overview of the current Magento community edition. It doesn’t waste time explaining obvious basics but rather focuses on Magentos concepts for building a shopping website.
I was able to setup a working Magento installation within 2 days with the help of this book. Very well worth reading.

Safari Books Online Review

This books walks you through how to customize your Magento store for better performance, tuning your Magento installation and step-by-step guides for making your store run faster or to improve your conversion.

Amazon Reader Review

I would say that Mastering Magento is the ultimate guidebook to Magento so far.

Amazon Reader Review

… the text gives very detailed explanations of many features it has, of interest to anyone writing or designing an e-commerce website.

Amazon Reader Review

Mastering Magento is that owner’s manual for Magento that you have been looking for. It is more like a guide book for admins, developers and designers that a tutorial for beginners. It is a book you will turn to when you need the question to something specific.

Blog Review

From planning your Magento installation through advanced techniques designed to make your store as successful as possible, this book is a roadmap for managing your Magento store.

Tuts+ Premium

Book really did amaze me with the tips and chapters it contained.

Blog Review

It seems to cover all the main areas and it has a really lifesaver section which is the pre-launch checklist.
Also very useful if you’re teaching a junior developer/designer and you need a deeper introduction to Magento.

Blog Review

The book is well written, concise and most importantly accurate. All information given on theming and configuration settings follow the Magento best practice guidelines that I have become accustomed to. Though its audience is not as defined as previous Magento editions released by Packt, ‘Mastering Magento’ definitely suits beginner web designers/developers and merchants overall. If you fall into either of those categories I would recommend this book.

Blog Review

This book covers every chapter in-depth. You can get your hands dirty on code, server setup and a lot of Magento Admin tuning. Each section will also give you an explanation of the elements involved such as catalog fields, scope, attribute sets and more concepts.

Blog Review

Mastering Magento is the perfect companion guide for both newcomers and experienced Magento users. Designers, developers and store owners alike will have a better understanding of how Magento works, and how to take advantage of Magento’s immense power to create online stores that help you sell.

Blog Review

Because all parts of Magento to properly dealt with, I can definitely recommend this book. This recommendation applies to the administrator, developer and designer of the Magento installation.

Blog Review (in Dutch)

 

Not-So-Favorable Reviews

I’d like to say Mastering Magento has not had a bad review, but, sadly, I can’t claim a perfect score. The only negative ones I have found so far are posted on Amazon. No bad blog reviews or from other booksellers to date.

The book was well written and had some high points but as a whole I was left disappointed.

Amazon Reader Review

There is no depth to any of the topics of discussion in this book.

Amazon Reader Review

Its full of how to use the CMS but barely scratches the surface when it comes to actually coding for magento.

Amazon Reader Review

Ouch. Oh, well. Time to go apply some more skin-thickener, learn from the critics and dive into my next book.

Have you purchased Mastering Magento? If so, post a review here, on Amazon or on your own website. Let me know and I’ll include it in this list. And, thanks for buying the book!

Ranking well in the search engines is hugely valuable for any business but it is absolutely essential for an online business. If you are not at the top of the search engines for your keywords, you are missing out on vital sales. Ranking an e-commerce site though is easier said than done as often they have dynamic URLs, duplicate content issues and they are light on content.

Although the core principles of ranking any website are the same, certain websites lend themselves better to SEO than others. A news site for example is rich in unique content, is updated daily with new stories and rarely has duplicate content issues as each story is different. Unfortunately though, the same cannot be said about ecommerce sites. Ecommerce sites by their very nature lack content as they are usually mostly image based and several products are often placed in more than one category leading to duplicate content issues.

What does this post cover?

In this post I will cover the 3 main points:

1. How to organize your site to avoid duplicate content issues
2. How to create landing pages
3. How to encourage unique and user generated content that will encourage conversions

Don’t get hit by Google Panda!

Unique content is key when ranking sites these days especially after the Google Panda update was introduced back in February 2011. If your site has lots of duplicate content, you will struggle to get your web pages indexed in Google and will risk getting hit with a penalty and therefore it is imperative to set up measures to avoid it. Make sure your website copy if up to the mark!

Site Structure

Most of the problems with ranking ecommerce sites can be resolved with a good site structure. The important thing with the site structure is to maintain organisation but also to make it searchable. This is done in 3 simple steps:

1. Categorise products
2. Create category pages with content giving an overview of the products
3. Makes search engine friendly URLS

It is no good building a good site structure though if your URLs are not readable. A lot of ecommerce sites dynamically generate URLs causing unfriendly query strings like field₁=value₁&field₁=value₂&field₁=value₃… which cannot be read by the search engines. It is important to change these URLs to make them search friendly. Make sure you separate the words with a hyphen or an underscore to make them readable e.g. domainname.com/search-engine-friendly-url.

Category URL

A good category URL would be domainname.com/category-url

Product URL

The product URL very much depends on your site as to which approach to take. While it makes sense to have a URL like domainname.com/category-name/product-name, this is not always best as you are inviting duplicate content issues as products are often put into more than one category causing pages to have exactly the same content. While you can get around this with canonical tags (I will explain these later), this approach just invites duplicate content issues.

A better approach is to not include the category name in the product URL and instead have a URL like domainname.com/product-113944. Notice the number next to the product name. It is important to add a unique product number next to the product name to protect against similar product names.

Product description

Product descriptions are one of the few opportunities you have to add content to your site. Make sure that you take time to write your own, unique product descriptions. If you pinch product descriptions from the manufacturers, not only would the product descriptions be the same as the manufacturer, it will be the same as all of the other websites that pinch manufacturers’ product descriptions. By pinching product descriptions, you are missing an opportunity to add unique content and are inviting site penalties!

Meta tags

Meta tags are an important element in onsite SEO and are a great opportunity to optimise your site.

H1 tags

It is best practise to have your page title in H1 tags in all websites. For ease, it’s a good idea to configure your CMS system to automatically configure your product name as the H1 tag for that page.

Meta Title

Meta titles are one of the most important aspects when it comes to onsite SEO. It is important though that these are unique for every page. Doing this across thousands of pages is impossible if you have to do it manually. It is therefore a good idea to set up auto-generated meta titles that include the product name and a simple call to action.

Meta description

Meta descriptions don’t actually have any bearing on rankings but they do have a big influence on click through rates. Like meta titles, it’s important to make sure your descriptions tag are unique for each page. Again, setup auto-generated meta description based on the product name and category.

Canonical Tags

If you end up with duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, you can notify the search engine of the orginal page and avoid any possible duplicate content issues by adding canonical tags to both pages. You do this simply by adding the following code before the closing head tag, referencing the original page:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/correct-page” />

Customer reviews

Customer reviews really are a must for ecommerce sites. One of the biggest difficulties when it comes to ranking an ecommerce site is the lack of unique content and customer reviews are a great way of producing unique content. Customer reviews are also a great way of getting feedback about your products which is vital information for your business.

Often though getting reviews from customers is easier said than done. Some great tips to encourage reviews are:

• Set up auto-generated emails to be sent out a couple of weeks after purchases asking for a review with a nice hyper-link leading them to the review section
• Offer incentives like discounts for those that write a review which again can easily be automated

You can also customise your review system so that it only displays when there are reviews to show avoiding ugly “there are no reviews on this product yet” messages

Reviews are also great at making your ad stand out in the search engine result page (SERPs) which will help with click through rates (CTR). To do this though you need to make sure you are marking up the reviews with rich snippet microdata.

Q&A Content

As mentioned before, ecommerce sites are invariably light in unique content so any opportunity to generate content should be taken. Integrating a question and answer feature for products does just this and it will help to improve conversion rates. Product Q & As are also good for long tail searches as they are bound to cover additional terms that otherwise are not covered.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs help to improve the user experience but they are also a great way of building internal links. A must for ecommerce sites!

Image Search

Most people forget that there are multiple ways of searching. While contextual search is the most popular, image search is often used too. As ecommerce sites are predominantly image based, why not make use of this and optimise your images to encourage image search as well?

You optimise images by:

1. Using descriptive file names like ecommerce-image.png
2. Adding alternate text tags to the html code that describe the image and include your keywords (you can set this up to be the same as your product name)
3. Submitting image sitemap to Google and Bing web master tools

Local Search

Including company details such as the company address and contact telephone number not only improves your trust signals and encourages conversions, it helps to improve your local search ranking.

Summary

Great onsite SEO is about careful planning. Most of the things mentioned above you will have seen before however applying them to your site can often be tricky unless you know what you’re doing. Certain website platforms make it easier to optimise your site though most can be modified.

Make sure you put in the ground work and get your onsite SEO right!

Predictions for the 2012 Online Holiday Shopping Season

Forrester, a global research and advisory firm, expects online sales to grow 15% over 2011. And predicts $68.4 billion for sales produced in November and December.

The National Retail Federation, through it’s Shop.org division, predicts a 12% increase for an estimated $96 billion in sales.

Records Set

comScore reports that from November 1 – December 16, 2012, $35 billion has been spent online. This marks a 13% increase over the same period last year.

What Shoppers Expect

Online shoppers are still looking for free shipping. Twenty-seven percent of online shoppers actually add items to their cart in order to meet the minimum free shipping requirement.

See What Our Clients Are Doing

Everett Stunz, an online retailer offering luxurious bath and linen products, is offering 20% off during the month of December and free shipping for orders over $99.

Aviation Logs, an online supplier of aviation products including headsets and apparel, is offering up to 40% off through December 23rd.

Obol, the original crispy bowl, is offering free shipping for orders over $35.

Let us Know

Let us know what you are doing this holiday season to increase sales and traffic to your online store.

Already, people are starting to buzz about Magento 2, which, from initial looks, appears to be a giant leap forward for the world’s most dominant open source e-commerce platform. As a Magento mavens, we’re keeping my eye on the development process, and plan to discuss various insights over the coming weeks.

Magento 2 is Needed

While Magento 1.x has certainly become the 800 lb gorilla among open source e-commerce platforms — particularly after eBay bought Magento earlier this year — it remains one of the most daunting platforms with which to work. It’s architecture can be criticized for being bloated and a performance hog. Designers who are familiar with php or MVC cringe when asked to work on a Magento project because the design process is not as convenient as other platforms.

Yet anyone who thought Magento was listening certainly is foolish. Any company as driven as Magento certainly wasn’t about to site back and wait for someone else to take over the lead. There are some strong competitors, of course. OpenCart remains popular, particularly for small etailers. And the hosted providers, such as BigCommerce and Volusion give Magento Go a run for the money. In fact, I suspect — although I have no hard facts — that BigCommerce is leading the pack in that class.

Having wrestled with Magento over the past few years, I’ve often said, “Magento would be great, if it…” more times than I care to count. Not, that’s not to say that Magento is a bad choice for an e-commerce platform. Nothing can beat the number of features, especially when it comes to managing multi-stores, languages and currencies. But, it could be made an easier behemoth to manage.

Magento 2 Goals

Keeping with the open source mantra, Magento 2 development is hosted at github, which gives us all an inside peak to the evolution of the next Magento. In fact, Magento is leveraging input from the Magento community to help with the development process.

There is also a wiki for Magento 2, which begins by outlining the goals for Magento 2:

1. Clear Processes and Transparency. Throughout the development process, the Magento 2 team is committing to provide the public (us nosy developers) a clear development roadmap, a public code repository (i.e., github) and system health reports (not sure what system needs reporting, but we’ll take that as a good thing to have).
2. Improved Product Quality. Magento has suffered, I think, from a rush to get improvements to the marketplace. While I was writing Mastering Magento, I was working with version 1.5. Before we finish editing the book — within a span of about 8 months from start to publication — Magento moved quickly through 1.6 and into 1.7. The boards at the Magento website continue to fill with the frustrations of users who run into bugs that are many times difficult to pin down. Undoubtedly, Magento understands that having a product with higher quality could translate into larger revenues (just look at how Apple can command higher prices due to the high quality of their products). To meet this goal, Magento is requiring a) that QA methods be clearly determined, b) that QA be faster and more streamlined, c) that the Magento code fully meet the requirements and intentions as specified, and d) that upgrading Magento won’t be a nightmare (my interpretation). I’m especially hopeful about item “d,” as upgrading from any 1.x to a higher 1.x most often meant simply starting over; upgrading was never pretty or straightforward.
3. Improved Product Performance and Scalability. With Magento 1.x, you basically had the Community version for single-server installations, or a huge price jump to Enterprise for larger, scaled installations. While the particulars listed for this goal don’t reveal any future difference between Community and Enterprise (or what versions will be offered at all), we can hope that creating a Magento that could scale and run efficiently on shared or virtual hosting environments would be the outcome. And what a glorious outcome that would be!
4. Improved Product Security. Magento, like most platforms, have been subject to vulnerabilities, whether by code or omission. In this goal, Magento states a strong commitment to ensuring the code will survive any test against the Top 10 application vulnerabilities as provided by the Open Web Application Security Project.
5. Truly Modular Product. Oh, Magento tempts us with this one! I cannot count the number of times extensions have conflicted with one another, or with other modules within Magento. Nothing spoils the prospect of adding a wonderful new functionality to an online store than to be faced with constructing hacks or uninstalling code that has intertwined itself fatally into your installation (always test code on a staging installation first!).
6. Improved Web API. Another of Magento 1.x’s inherent weaknesses, although improved with later versions. By extending the functionality of the core API, more and more third party services and applications will be able to integrate. Yea!
7. Support of Different DBMS’s. One of the criticisms of Magento, especially from large-scale competitors, is that Magento runs on MySQL instead of more industrial database workhorses, such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server. Magento 2 is committed to optimizing the code to be compatible with MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Postgre SQL. According to the goal, other databases could also be integrated without tearing the code apart.
8. Simplified Customization Process. This vaguely titled goal, I’m suspecting, will introduce new tools for customizing a Magento store without the complexity of layout XML files, static block declarations, and copying numerous files within the Magento installation just to add or adjust a design feature. We’ll see.
9. Improved Multiple Languages Support. I think Magento’s current multiple language integration is quite spectacular, in that you can localize Magento without necessarily digging into any code. It’s really a quite elegant solution. That said, there is more than can be done to make Magento a truly global platform.
10. Decreased Learning Curve. If you read into this goal, it’s not necessarily suggesting that Magento will be easier to learn. It is suggesting that documentation will be better and more aimed at helping new Magento users understand the platform better. Will that lessen the need for Magento books by outside authors (such as myself)? Maybe, but I doubt it. There are lots of platforms and applications with fairly decent documentation that still spawn libraries of third-party guides. This goal does, though, show that Magento understands that their current online documentation is, in my opinion, virtually useless.

What’s Next?

With my curiosity piqued, I’m off to dig around the repository to see what they’ve come up with so far. Look for my discoveries and impressions in future installments.

Packt Publishing, the company responsible for bringing my book, “Mastering Magento,” to the market, has announced that they are celebrating the publication of their 1,000th title. This is a pretty remarkable feat considering the company started publishing books only 8 years ago.

Anyone who’s worked with open source software, such as Magento, WordPress, OpenCart, JQuery and others is undoubtedly familiar with one or more Packt titles. I have several Packt books on my office bookshelf. The appeal of Packt titles is the clarity of the writing, layout and examples.

Special Packt Offer

To mark this milestone, Packt is offering a free eBook download to anyone already registered at www.packtpub.com, or who registers before September 30, 2012. That’s not a bad deal, considering the vast choice of titles available. This could be a great opportunity for programmers, designers and webmasters to pick up that one extra book they’ve thought about buying, but just haven’t yet done so.

The library will be open for one free download for a whole week! Go to www.packtpub.com now to register.

An Open Source Contributor

Packt Publishing is also an avid contributor to the Open Source community, having contributed over $400,000 to open source developers and projects. The company regularly hosts surveys on preferred open source projects.

As a proponent of niche marketing, it’s interesting that a company has been so successful aiming at a sub-section of the computer marketplace. But that’s why they are so successful: by concentrating on open source software, the company is better able to develop titles in a manner that produces books of special quality. Packt editors (and I do speak from experience here) understand how to guide authors toward producing books appealing to the open source audience.

As an author of a Packt title, I’m excited to see the firm succeed. The more resources we, as web engineers, have at our disposal — especially in this rapidly evolving industry — the better we can serve our clients and our projects.

Congratulations, Packt.

As e-commerce specialists, we’re often asked which e-commerce platform we prefer. My answer is the evasive “it depends.” 

If you were hoping this article would reveal the one, true Holy Grail of e-commerce platforms, it’s not — at least not for all people. The choice of which e-commerce platform to use for a particular online store is one that is unique to your situation. There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution, but the choice of a platform doesn’t have to be a lengthy decision, either.

When I talk to clients — or when we’re planning our own online e-commerce ventures — I focus on 5 key questions:

1. Do you have any experience with a particular platform? Some clients have tried other platforms, or they’re using one now but want to expand or improve on what they have. From a technical point of view, if a client has experience with BigCommerce, for example, the move to something like Magento could be quite a change. On the other hand, if they’re used to working with open source platforms, Magento or OpenCart could be viable alternatives.
   One of the most challenging aspects of starting a new online store is learning how to actually manage an online store. Which leads me to question number 2:
2. What is your capacity for learning a new system? I’m not asking how intelligent the client is; I’m trying to find out what time and staff resources are available for adapting to a particular platform. Some require more learning than others.
   So why not always recommend the easier-to-use e-commerce system? Because:
3. Are there certain e-commerce features that are important to you? In a general sense, the simpler a platform, the fewer the features. That’s not to say a platform can’t be made user-friendly; it is to say that the more features and flexibility in a platform, the more complex the system must be. For instance, if you want to manage multiple stores under one back-end, your choices are more limited to platforms that contain the complexity needed to pull this off. Alternatively, if you’re only selling a few products and you’re more focused on content, then a simpler approach, such as WooCommerce with WordPress might well fit the bill.
   Once you formulate what features (social media, complex product configurations, multiple stores, flexible shipping rules, etc.) are important:
4. What staff resources are available? Running an e-commerce store takes time and effort to be successful. You don’t have to hire a huge staff if you’re just starting out, but you do need to understand the time required to load your products, process orders, market online and update content. If you currently have a brick-and-mortar store, you also cannot assume you have enough staff to handle your online business. They’re probably busy with their current duties. While they may be able to take online duties, as well, you may need to add to your staff.
   Of course, staff resources add to your budget, which is why I ask:
5. What is your budget? Yes, we have to talk about money. Everyone wants to know “how much,” yet that is such a hard question to answer. We’ve pretty much stopped quoting “package” pricing for e-commerce configurations, as we never hit the budget exactly. Sometimes we’re below; sometimes, we’re above. More times than not any budget overages are due to unknowns that pop-up: the client needs photos adjusted or a logo re-designed (e.g., they can’t locate whomever created their logo and we need it web-ready), product import data is poor or not formatted correctly, products turn out to be more complex (e.g., configurable products, complex attributes) than first thought, or the client wants additional features not originally specified. We’ve seen all of these in our projects.

So how do we begin to compare platforms based on these questions?

Comparison Criteria

If we take the five questions above and quantify them on a scale of 1 to 5, we can compare our four favorite platforms accordingly:

• Experience. One means little prior experience with online platforms is necessary; “5″ means you should have prior experience in order to fully realize the platform’s potential.
• Learning. If a platform demands a long learning curve, we rank it a “5.” Alternatively, a “1″ is fairly easy to learn.
• Features. The more features a platform “out-of-the-box” has, the higher the ranking. I also include a related ranking for expandability: an asterisk (*) means the platform has good expandability and/or a great number of add-ons that increase its feature set.
• Resources. If a platform seems suited to the individual online entrepreneur, it gets a “1.” If I feel the store owner will need a broader skill set than most might personally have, the platform ranks higher.
• Budget. This is a comparative ranking of relative development and implementation costs, with “1″ being the lowest and “5″ being the highest.

These rankings are purely subjective, of course, based on our experience. Others will rank these differently, but this is how I see it.

One other note: I like all these platforms, but for different purposes. All can be used to sell a variety of different product types. Arguments could be made that one if more “SEO friendly” than another. For me, the selection boils down to one simple question: which platform is best suited to my client?

And that is, by its very nature, the most subjective question of them all.

First Quarter E-Commerce Sales

The US Census Bureau reports that for the first quarter of 2012, e-commerce sales increased 3.1 percent over the fourth quarter of 2011. The total sales reported was $53.2 billion.

Graphic provided by US Census Bureau

As the chart above illustrates, e-commerce sales have been steadily increasing from 2003 to 2012.

You can view the entire report at the US Census Bureau website.

Second Quarter E-Commerce Sales

ComScore, a company who measures the digital world and business analytics, reports that the online retail sales for the second quarter reached $43.2 billion. This is a 15% increase over the same quarter last year. Another indicator that online sales are growing.

According to the ComScore report, the top-performing online categories were: digital content and subscriptions, consumer electronics, flowers, greetings and gifts, computer hardware, and apparel and accessories.

Recently, one of our clients could not get their product categories to appear in the order set in the Magento Catalog > Manage Categories screen. No matter how they dragged and dropped the categories, the ones near the top would not display as intended on the front end.

How Magento Orders Categories

Categories are displayed in navigation menus based on a field titled “position” in the catalog_category_entity data table. By default, the order is displayed in ascending order. There are other ways of adding code to display categories alphabetically, but by default, the order shown is determined by the position value.

So, why would changing the order under Manage Categories not work?

What I Observed

When working in the Manage Categories menu, the client and I were focused on manipulating the top 2-3 categories, as those were the ones most important to him at the time. We could change their order, but even after re-indexing the Flat Catalog, the front end would still not display the correct order.

Furthermore, after returning to the Manage Categories page, the category order reverted back to the order it was before we changed it to our liking.

While at first I thought there might be some answer to this among the thousands of Magento-related posts (perhaps we were just missing some step in the process), no one seemed to have experienced this same phenomenon (therefore, this post may have little or no value to anyone). Some had proposed coding changes to sort categories by name; others had modified code in some places to sort by position. However, I knew Magento, by default, already sorted categories by position.

So, I had to try to find a solution myself.

Discovering the Problem

Since display order is determined by the value in the “position” field, I decided to start there to see if anything looked amiss.

I looked at the data in the catalog_category_entity table for all categories at level “2″ (root catalogs are level “1″), with the same root catalog path, in this case “1/3″ for Website 1, Root Catalog 3 (the client has 3 root catalogs in their multi-store set-up), I found the position values for the top categories to be: 0,0,0,0,3,4,5,7,11,12,14,17,19,20,21,28,33 when sorting the results by position in ascending order.

How they got this way is not clear, but they were surely not in a clean numerical sequence. Since the first four categories all had the position value of “0,” this could well explain why, even when re-ordering, the frontend order was not the same. My suspicion is that when re-ordering categories, Magento tried to re-set the position order, but not by simply clearing out the existing positions at that level and inserting a fresh set of incremental values; it must have some dependence on the values around the category being moved, since moving a category did not, in and of itself, recalibrate the position values.

Re-setting the Category Order

I manually changed the position values to 1,2,3,4, etc. in the data table, and re-indexed the Flat Catalog. It worked. The frontend (and backend) category order was as designated by the position field.

Under Manage Categories I did some tests of dragging and dropping categories into various positions and viewing the results in the data table. Everything seemed fine.

I’m still not sure how the order got out of whack in the first place. Our client is using Magnetic One to manage his Magento store; there could be something in how it interacts with the data tables that upset the order, but I’m not sure (I have read posts where others caution against using third-party management tools due to Magento’s complexity: few will get it right). It may have been a harried client, dragging categories without waiting for Magento to fully finish the first process. Whatever the reason, I did get it fixed. For now.

After months of diligent work, my book, Mastering Magento, is scheduled for publication next month from Packt Publishing, one of the world’s largest publishers of computer-related books. This Magento book is aimed at all levels of users, especially Magento users who want to truly understand the power of the Magento platform.

While suffering through the trials and tribulations of learning Magento, I found that there was a great lack of a concise Owner’s Manual for Magento users. While the Magento website has some documentation — and there are lots of online blogs with helpful advice — there remained a void. A void I decided to try to fill.

Mastering Magento by Bret Williams

Although I have been successful in selling my book Managing Multiple Stores in Magento at 10 Cent Books, I really wanted to partner with a large, reputable publisher to bring a complete Magento guide to the marketplace.

Last year, I contacted Packt Publishing, one of the world’s leading publishers of computer-related books, and pitched the idea of Mastering Magento. They were excited, as they, like me, know the Magento user base is huge. And while Packt publishes several books relating to Magento, most applied to older versions and none were what I would consider a definitive guide to Magento.

After laboring for months, the Magento book has been officially announced on the Packt website. Visitors can already pre-order the book, which is due for release sometime in May. I’m working with the talented editorial and technical staff at Packt on final proofing now, so the publication is eminent.

I noticed the book is also for pre-sale now at Amazon, as well.