First sign that something was wrong was when I went into the backend and tried to edit a product. Magento threw an error saying that it couldn’t find app/design/adminhtml/base/default/template/media/uploader.phmtl. As you can see, Magento is looking for the file as though it is a frontend template. The ‘base’ package does not exist for adminhtml.

Instead of being smart and checking to see if the uploader.phtml file was where it should be, we dug into trying to find why Magento was looking for the file in base/default instead of default/default. Finally we decided to take a look at the template file and discovered that the media folder didn’t even exist on the server.

After putting the files up on the server, it worked fine. But, the interesting thing to note is that if Magento cannot find an adminhtml file, it will fall back looking for it in app/design/adminhtml/base/default/. That shouldn’t happen with adminhtml templates.

I recently setup a Google Apps account and am starting to use it for email and calendar. I tried for over an hour last night to try and get my calendar working and it just won’t work. I’ve tried using the url above, and I’ve also tried using this url that some other people suggested: https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/[your Google Calendar ID]/user. This still doesn’t work for me either.

It seems that there are numerous other people out there that are having the same issue, but I haven’t found an answer yet. If anyone knows how to fix this problem, please let me know!

This isn’t a slam against my friend at all. Finding answers to questions about Magento can be quite a challenge at times. I have spent plenty of time unable to find what I was looking for. So, I figured it would be good to at least post the strategies that I use when scouring Google for answers.

• Always start your search with “magento”
• Think about your question in terms that others will call it.  There are plenty of forum posts and blog articles out there to find.  If you are using the wrong/different terminology, you may not find what you are looking for
• Try different variations of your question/terminology.  As I stated above, the ‘standard’ terminology for something might be different than how you are thinking about it (If you can’t find it on the first 3 pages, the chance of you finding it after that diminish significantly.  Time to try a different search).
• Sometimes the use of Magento’s module names can be helpful.  If you are trying to figure out how to program something in the admin, try including ‘adminhtml’.  The more specific your keywords are, the better quality the results will be.

Please comment and add to the list if you have some good strategies!

I decided that it was time to start keeping track of what missing functionality in Magento is most wanted. I created a new page (which you should see in the navigation under the header of the site) to start keeping track.

Check out the magento functionality wish list page and post a comment with your most desired functionality requests. I’ll keep a tally and update the table accordingly. It should be interesting to see what makes it to the top of the list. If enough of you get involved, this could end up being a good resource for module developers, and perhaps maybe even Magento themselves.

If you want to add the shipping method to a column in your admin sales order grid, create a module to override app/code/core/Mage/Adminhtml/Block/Sales/Order/Grid.php and add the following code to the _prepareColumns() method wherever you want the column to be:

$this->addColumn('shipping_description', array(
    'header' => Mage::helper('sales')->__('Shipping Method'),
    'index' => 'shipping_description',
));

I am working on a module right now that is supposed to email me the details of any errors that happen in Magento (errors that throw the Magento error screen, and output a trace of the error). Getting the error itself is quite easy. The file for that is /app/code/core/Mage/Core/functions.php, with the method mageCoreErrorHandler(). What I can’t figure out is how to get the trace of the error. That seems to be output from this file: /errors/process.php, which I don’t believe able to be overridden by any custom modules.

If any of you have any ideas, please let me know. Otherwise, when I figure it out, I’ll post the solution.

With the launch of the new website also comes the launch of a new RSS feed. For those of you who are subscribed to my old feed, please be sure to update it to the new. The link is now in the right sidebar, but here it is as well: http://feeds.feedburner.com/prattski

One thing that you’ll notice if you export your customers out of Magento is that it combines the street1 and street2 columns into one for the shipping and billing addresses. The columns are called ‘billing_street_full’ and ‘shipping_street_full’.

If you then want to import addresses, this would seem like a hassle. The good news is that you don’t have to use that column for importing. Magento will gladly accept 2 columns for the street address if you just name them correctly. So, remove the ‘…_street_full’ columns, and add ‘billing_street1′ and ‘billing_street2′ and the same for shipping and you’ll be good to go.

New Look

I know.. it’s the out-of-the-box WordPress 3 theme. I’m going to keep it this way for now because it’s simple, clean, and I am not a designer at all. Until they start making some nice wordpress 3 themes, I’ll just be sticking with this. I’ll try to clean it up a little bit and add my own flare when I get around to it.

New Domain

My Magento forum username, my IRC username, etc. has always been Prattski. It’s just a nickname I’ve had for a long time. It was available, and much better than ‘devzone’ over at my other ‘pratthost.com’ domain.

Fresh Start

I am starting to do a lot more freelance now, so I plan on continuing the blog, but adding more to it as well. I just wanted a fresh start for my new domain name, and a fresh start with wordpress 3. All of my old posts should be here. If you notice anything that needs a little attention, please let me know!

I just imported a ton of products for new website that I’m working on, and it turns out that the client misnamed a bunch of images, causing Magento to ignore the image import for those ones. I don’t want to scour through the website and the CSV (and the client wouldn’t want to pay us to do that either), so I figured if I could just come up with a list of SKUs for products missing an image, I could hand it off to them so they could correct everything.

This isn’t foolproof, but it does the job. This query will give you a list of SKUs where there is no record in the database for that product’s ‘image’ attribute (the main large product image).

SELECT `sku` FROM `catalog_product_entity` AS a LEFT JOIN `catalog_product_entity_varchar` AS b ON a.entity_id = b.entity_id AND b.attribute_id = 74 WHERE b.entity_id IS NULL