TJ Gamble

Over the last year, I have been slowly migrating many of my ecommerce clients to Magento from CRE Loaded or OSCommerce. The big issue was trying to get thousands of products, orders, and customers over into the new system without having to spend countless hours manually transferring them. A few months ago I was recommended the Cart2Cart Service at shopping-cart-migration.com by Joey Bacon (who had used it on a previous project).

I’ve used the Cart2Cart service on 4 transfers thus far and I’ll be using on on all of my future conversions as well. The service has had a few bugs on my past transfers, but it gets everything about 99% right and I just have to go back through and tweak a few things like the product attributes. With this service, transferring over 3 or 4 hundred products, a few thousand orders and customers can be done in one lazy day instead of a week of hard work. The transfers I have done start at around $100 and move up from there depending on the size of your sites.

$100 to save a weeks work? Sounds great to me.

If you are using Magento Community Edition for your e-commerce platform, then you should be aware of how slow and resource intensive it can be. A few months ago, we launched PromedPersonalCare.com and have been working on feature enhancements and improvements ever since. The client has sent products to be imported, and they have been steadily working on organizing and streamlining their product listings. The site quickly grew to over 20,000 products and with more features and data added it soon became apparent that the website had become slower than we would like for it to be. We looked at many options for performance enhancements but settled on Tiny Brick’s Lightspeed and Speed booster modules.

Tiny Brick’s website is heavily customized with Ajax, so I had a little problem placing my order in Firefox. However, their live customer support was top notch and we quickly got my issues resolved. Downloading and installing the modules were unbelievably simple and configuring it and “punching holes” through the caching for some of our custom features wasn’t much more complicated. The performance improvements were immediately noticeable. The site went from taking 7 or 8 seconds to load in my browser to between 1-2 seconds.

If you are a developer and are building Magento sites for customers, I highly recommend that you just go ahead and build in the $500 fee for this module as well as installation costs into your estimates and make it mandatory to have it installed because it is well worth it, especially if they are on your server. I wish that I had been requiring this module for all of my Magento sites, but I will not make that mistake again.

Time has been tight over the last few months since I teamed up with Joey Bacon and Nick McCormack to start building a new social network and recommendation engine for beer lovers. I have been slowly tinkering with the backend and working out the kinks as time permits. We have made a lot of progress lately in a short time frame and we are rapidly approaching beta status on the site.

If you love beer and want a social experience to help you discover new brews be sure to go over to Brewzle.com and add your name to the list!

Don’t you just hate it when you find a craigslist ad that you want to respond to and the only contact information is the craigslist email address for that ad? You load that up into your email system, send your reply and then…. nothing. No reply, no auto response, nothing. Maybe you hear back eventually, maybe you don’t. You don’t know if they got your email, if they were overloaded with email and missed it, if it went to spam, you have no clue.

It would be nice if they had some sort of messaging system like ebay where you can log in to your account and see the messages that were sent and what listings the messages applied to. This little bit of comfort would make me feel much more confident that the person on the other end of that ad actually received the message I sent.

One of the features I need for the site I am developing using SocialEngine is the ability to have urls like the following:

http://www.SITENAME.com/MODULE/OBJECT-KEY

This could be useful for numerous things like /user/tjgamble pulling up a profile.  As expected, I found no documentation or examples on how to do this in SocialEngine, so I looked at the last Zend Framework code I wrote that did precisely this. In Zend, simply add the following to your Bootstrap.php file and the route is setup:

$fc = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
$router = $fc->getRouter();
 
$router->addRoute('CONTROLLER', new Zend_Controller_Router_Route('/CONTROLLER/:urlKey',array(
'controller' => 'CONTROLLER',
'action' => 'index'
)));

This code passes anything after the controller name to the index action as a parameter named “urlKey”.  To access this urlKey, you simply need the following code in your controller:

$urlKey = $this->getRequest()->getParam("urlKey");

Accomplishing this in SocialEngine is very similar.  Each module has it’s own Bootstrap.php.  However, you must add a function in this bootstrap to get it to pickup your route.  Add the following to your module’s Bootstrap.php:

protected function _initRouter()
{
$fc = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
$router = $fc->getRouter();
 
$router->addRoute('MODULE_NAME', new Zend_Controller_Router_Route('MODULE_NAME/:urlKey',array(
'module' => 'MODULE_NAME',
'controller' => 'index',
'action' => 'index'
)));
 
return $router;
}

The primary difference in this code and the previous example is the fact that the module uses the module name instead of controller name and you have the module parameter when creating the route.

Save this bootstrap, ,upload it, and you can retrieve the urlKey in your controller using the same method as if you were using the Zend Framework directly.

I have been tinkering with Social Engine for a project I am developing.  The great thing about using a platform like Social Engine is the fact that it takes care of the vast majority of features that will be on a social network site, and frees me up to focus on the fun part of my project:  the code that differentiates the site I am working on.

Do you really want to spend countless hours perfecting “likes”, user groups, or interaction between your users?   I had much rather work on some cool new technology than recoding something that has been done a thousand times.

The down side to Social Engine is that there appears to be very little documentation about how to write your own modules.  They provide a SDK that generates the module outline for you, but after that you are on your own.

Luckily for me, I have a little experience with the Zend Framework, and if you are stuck on how to do something in particular with Social Engine, look to the Zend Framework documentation for clues.

I was in Greenville, SC on March 11th when the new iPad 2 came out. I wasn’t planning on participating in the frenzy and getting one on the first day, but my wife wanted to go shopping anyway so I swung by the Haywood Mall and the local Apple Store.

I arrived at noon and the line was only about 50 people long, so I left and got lunch and took the wife shopping at a different store. We made it back around 2:00 and the line had reached about 75 people so I figured I would go stake out my spot. It was proven the right move as by 3:30 the line was twice as long.

I had been standing for 5+ hours the previous day at a concert, so my legs were already exhausted. The 4 hour wait was made easier by having some people to talk to in the line. The Apple Store Employees came out at about 4:45 and started going through the line and giving you a card for the type of iPad you wanted. This was smart and seemed to speed things up as most people had to make the decision quickly and didn’t loiter in the store asking silly questions.

Once in the store, it went quickly and the iPad was ordered and activated. I went with the 64G wifi version as I can tether it to my jail-broken phone and don’t care for the extra expense of another data plan (my phone bill is already ridiculous) .

I did not own an original iPad, so I am still testing it’s usefulness. However, after only having a few hours to play with it, I can assure you it is a fun toy. The jury is still out on it as a productive work tool.

SUGGESTION: If Apple wanted to make a few extra dollars, they should sell those cheap portable camping-style chairs with an apple logo on them. They would sell thousands of them at each one of these launch events.

It has been quite some time since I have been posting on my site. I am going to try to get to it more often. We have been extremely busy and have neglected things like blog posting. I have been collaborating with some others on a new site that I am super-excited about. Hopefully we will have a working demo soon and can start inviting people to join and beta test. The site is Brewzle.com and is THE social network for beer lovers! If you are into beer, expecially craft beer, go to the site and sign up. We’ll be randomly sending out invites in the future.

It seems as though on every Magento site we do, it is necessary to do a custom home page layout.  I keep finding myself going back to my notes on this, so I thought this information might be useful to others.

1. Create a new layout file in your themes folder:  app/design/frontend/default/THEME/template/page/homepage.phtml.  For now, just paste the contents from 1column.phtml into this file.  You can customize it later.   Upload this file.
2. Edit the following file:  app/code/local/Mage/Page/etc/config.xml.  If you don’t have this file, copy it from app/code/core/Mage/Page/etc/config.xml.  You don’t want to edit the file inside of core because this will break your site if you ever upgrade.  Edit the site, and add the following right after the tag “</three_columns>”:

   <homepage module="page" translate="label">
   <label>Homepage</label>
   <template>page/homepage.phtml</template>
   <layout_handle>page_homepage</layout_handle>
   </homepage>

   Save and upload this file.

3. In the following file:  app/design/frontend/default/THEME/layout/page.xml, just after the code “</page_three_columns>” add the following:

   
   <page_homepage translate="label">
   <label>Homepage</label>
   <reference name="root">
   <action method="setTemplate"><template>page/homepage.phtml</template></action>
   <!-- Mark root page block that template is applied -->
   <action method="setIsHandle"><applied>1</applied></action>
   </reference>
   </page_homepage>

4. In the following file:  app/etc/modules/Mage_All.xml  find the lines that read:

   
   <Mage_Page>
   <active>true</active>
   <codePool>core</codePool>
   <depends>
   <Mage_Core/>
   </depends>
   </Mage_Page>

   and edit them to read:

   
   <Mage_Page>
   <active>true</active>
   <codePool>local</codePool>
   <depends>
   <Mage_Core/>
   </depends>
   </Mage_Page>

   Save and upload this file.

5. Now login to the admin and choose this layout for the page you want to use it.

I have been using Quickbooks for managing my business finances for years.  I don’t really do anything advanced with it, but I went with the best at the time.  However, I now on a mac and the mac version is not as nice as the PC version from what I hear.  That, plus I am looking for an online system (for many reasons).  A friend recently recommended Freshbooks (http://www.freshbooks.com).  I was a little apprehensive at paying $20 per month for something (I like paying up front and not being charged monthly).  However, I bit the bullet and registered last week.  After almost a week of use, I have to say I love it!  The time entry tool makes all the difference.  Updates that I used to not even worry about (5 minute updates that take 15 minutes to log) are now getting billed and I estimate that I have made over $250 in less than a week that I would have not normally billed for.  It is actually fun to do these small updates and watch the hours pile up!

I say give it a try if you haven’t already!