With Christmas fast-approaching, most of the llamas and their families are heading to online stores to find gifts. You already know the reasons for wanting to shop online: awesome prices, free shipping, wider selection, and not paying sales tax. Possibly most importantly: the only way to do all of your shopping in pajamas!

Here at Classy Llama, we know eCommerce. Working with and building sites all day long gives us a pretty keen eye whenever we go to a site. We know what quality looks like. On the flip side of that, we also can tell when something isn’t right.

This past weekend when my wife plopped her laptop down beside me and asked me the question “Should I order from this site?” It prompted me to show her how I validate the occasional site that I go to that looks sketchy. This post aims to answer that question “How do I know if I can trust this site?”

Four Signs of a Funky eCommerce Site

1. Design & Content
2. SSL
3. Site Verification
4. BBB / Online Search

Design

One of the first indicators you should look for (and the first thing you’ll see) is the design and the content of the site. Sites that are scam sites don’t normally tend to expend much effort on the aesthetics of their site. While not all sites are ugly or contain any of these signs, these can be a big clue that the site you are on is not what it seems to be. This is not entirely comprehensive, but it can definitely point you in the right direction.

Consistently Bad English & Grammar

Do they use proper english? What about grammar? Sites that don’t pay attention to these very simple things are probably not paying attention to things like shipping your order or keeping your credit card information to themselves.

• “Discount Off 57%”
• “includes returning and exchanging goods that you are not happy”
• “company establish in 2002, and have large business”

Reviews That Don’t Add Up

Just because a site shows that a product has 5-stars doesn’t mean that those 5-stars are reviews. If you click on a product and don’t see reviews, chances are that those stars are just there to make you think those products have reviews.

Funny Site Statistics

On one particular site, I refreshed the page a couple of times and the “guest counter” would change every time the page refreshed. Not like a regular site, where the number might change slowly. This one changed wildly. I’ll go a step farther and say that, most likely, if the store you are on has a “who’s online” or “guest counter” it is probably fake.

Contact Information

Never, ever buy from a store that does not have contact information. If you can’t get a phone number, address, or some other piece of information that ties them to a specific place, chances are that they don’t exist!

SSL

SSL or Security Sockets Layer is a technology that is designed to make sure your information gets transmitted safely and securely. Never, ever buy from a site that does not use SSL. How can you tell if you are using SSL. Well, the fastest way is to look at the location: What are the first 7 or 8 characters?

http:// UNSECURE!

https:// Secure! https stands for “Security HTTP” and is what you should see after you’ve added a product to your cart, are viewing your cart, or are going anywhere through the checkout process.

If you are unfamiliar with SSL, you should take a look at Verisign’s Beginner’s Guide to SSL Certificates.

Recently, SSL vendors have added something called Extended Validation that shows a visible green bar at the top of your browser, noting that a site has gone through an “audited, rigorous authentication method.” These will also show you who the site is. A site with extended validation looks like this:

Extended Validation SSL

Whereas, a site with just plain ol’ SSL looks like this:

Regular SSL

Both of these are fine. For more information on SSL, check out the Beginner’s Guide to SSL Certificates.

Site Verification

One thing that truly signifies a “real-deal” site are working site verification logos. The site you are buying from should have them. If that do not, that could be a big sign that this site is not being very truthful with you. What do these verification logos look like? I invite you to take a look at Freedom Paper:

You’ll notice that there are four logos here. Now, alone, these logos don’t mean a thing. Anyone who wants to look legit can easily copy-and-paste these images and put them on their site. What you must be able to do is click on them. Try clicking on the GoDaddy.com Verified & Secured Logo. You’ll see this:

GoDaddy Verification

This is what is important. You should be able to click on every one of those. Sites that go the extra mile to comply and provide verifiable links are a sure sign that your data is safe and protected on those sites.

What Do Others Say?

Finally, don’t be afraid to search for the site by name. Using a major search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo!, look for complaints. You can also check out the Better Business Bureau or Ripoff Report to see if a site has complaints against it. Another site called Web of Trust is actually attempting to make the web safer by providing website “reputation” with a browser plugin so that you can see if a site has a good or bad reputation.

I want to note that just because a site has a complaint or two or five doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going to steal your money and run away. You can’t please everyone and some people will complain just because they can. Looking at reports and reviews of a site is another tool in your toolbox.

Putting It All Together

Well, can you trust a site? Chances are that a site can meet all of the criteria here, it’s legit. I personally have been bitten by site that met all four of these criteria. My credit card was stolen and used.

If any site you visit is missing just one of the criteria, browse cautiously. Some small stores may not have SSL because you pay via PayPal and they don’t need SSL since PayPal handles things securely. Give them a call.

However, if a site has 2 or more of these signs then I’d highly advise not purchasing from that site and finding a site that does take these things seriously.

Conclusion

I hope you found these tips helpful. If you have any more please leave them in the comments below. Shop safe and Merry Christmas!

Yesterday was all about X.commerce and the community at large, but today we focused solely on Magento.

During the first session, we got to hear from Dmitry Soroka about what the Magento 2 roadmap looks like. Magento is putting a lot of effort into making Magento 2 a real upgrade from Magento 1: making it faster, more scalable, more expandable, more flexible, and more awesome in general. Here are some of the highlights:

• Backwards Compatibility is broken – Normally developers love backwards compatibility because it makes our lives easier: we don’t have to update code every time a new version comes out. However, this time around, Magento has decided to forgo it. This is actually a very good key decision. Now, they have the chance to fix some important architecture problems that would be much harder or impossible to solve while maintaining backwards compatibility. This will result in extensions working better inside the system and minimize conflicts that are common in the current version of Magento.
• Multiple DB support – Magento 2 will support Oracle, MySQL, MSSQL and PostgreSQL out of the box. In fact, Magento Enterprise 1.11 has this functionality already. Now, it will make it into the core of the community edition. For larger enterprise users, the ability to run Magento inside of their existing infrastructure can potentially save time and money by allowing Magento to speak to those databases directly instead of having to integrate with modules or other middleware.
• Performance – They’ve already benchmarked a 20% performance increase over Magento 1. There is a lot of room to grow and it’s a big focus. It’s safe to say that Magento 2 will have a noticeable performance gain over Magento 1.
• Developer Tools & Documentation – They’ve been able to redesign and update several core pieces of Magento as well as developer tools. Documentation is another big thing. They’ve already released documentation for Magento 2 on their Confluence Wiki and are working to make their processes, tools, and methods open & transparent. This is apparent in how they are approaching the testing for Magento 2. (See below!) This is a huge boon to us developers and will help us to continue to write quality code.
• Theme & Design updates – It looks like they are planning on taking some of the design functionality that Magento Go offers and including it straight into Magento’s core. Making simply design modifications very accessible to store owners. They’re also making the advanced theme functionality better by removing a lot of the limitations that are placed on theme developers during the implementation process. This means that making smaller theme modifications are much easier to do and could make it worthwhile to do, for instance, seasonal designs while still keeping your primary theme untouched.

We’re excited about what Magento 2 has to offer and were elated to be able to download and begin to play with the Magento 2 code that was released today.

One of the key things that is driving the quality code coming from the core team are the tools that they use to test and validate what they are writing. We heard from Anton Makarenko (Sr. PHP Developer on the Core Team @ Magento) about the unit testing capabilities that are being added to Magento 2.

We won’t bore you with all of the technical details, but suffice it to say that they are taking great lengths to ensure that bugs don’t creep into Magento 2 during development and that the tools that they are using are going to be made available to the community for improvement and use. They’ve done a lot of the work solving the technical problems of testing Magento and are giving us the ability to do the same thing for our own extensions and code.

So when is Magento 2 coming out? Well, there is no official roadmap yet, but the word on the street is that in Q3 2012, we’ll see the first alpha release and some time in Q4 2012 will be the final release.

That about wraps it up! We had a wonderful time at the Innovate Developers Conference and look forward to coming back next year.

[By the way, if you haven't already, you should check out our blog post about the Skype Extension we wrote for Alfred that allows to send Skype messages with Alfred.]

Alfred has featured our Skype Extension on their new support site as one of their team picks.

I received this sweet email from Anna Manasova, the Community and Marketing Director for Alfred:

Hi Kevin,

Just wanted to drop you a quick line and say thanks for creating a brilliant Alfred extension. We’ve now launched a new support site for Alfred and with it a section showcasing some of the best user-created extensions (including yours!). I use Skype everyday so yours is very useful.

You can find our extension on the “Every Day Useful” extension page.

Good golly, what a day! So much ground was covered today. It would be really hard to talk about every single thing that happened today, but we’d like to share we you some cool & interesting highlights from the first day of the Innovate Developers Conference.

This conference is not just a Magento or a PayPal conference. We’ve got developers, vendors and users from across the whole X.commerce sphere: eBay, PayPal, Magento, X.commerce, marketing, SEO… you name it. Truly a huge cross-section of individuals and companies. It has been amazing getting to meet with people from across the globe to share ideas and discuss all sorts of topics.

Of course, the main reason we came here is to learn about the newly released X.commerce platform. Operating system. Fabric. No really, fabric. What is it, and what does it mean for you?

Well, the X.commerce fabric is essentially a platform-independent intermediary that allows you to write one integration for your service/cart/application/etc and then allows you to provide that service or consume other services from anyone else who also talks to the fabric. Perhaps the easiest analogy is to languages. Right now, each cart/service/API speaks own language. In order for your cart to “talk” to Mailchimp (for instance) you must “teach” it to speak that the Mailchimp “language” by writing a module for it to “translate”. With X.commerce, though, you let your service (say, Mailchimp, again) to “speak” X.commerce and you teach your cart to “speak” X.commerce and the two will be able to talk to each other. Not just that, but any other cart that can “speak” X.commerce can also “speak” with Mailchimp, since it speaks X.commerce.

Another angle: let’s say you run a small business and you use Magento Go for your website. And, for the sake of the example, you use three services to help you: Mailchimp (for E-mail), Kenshoo (for advertising), and Shopon (for social). You decide to go with Magento Enterprise. Instead of having to find 3 modules that implement each of these integrations separately, you can use the built-in X.commerce fabric that is a part of Magento Enterprise to talk to these services automatically. No extra time involved. They’ll just work. That’s the power of X.commerce. (It’s explained in more detail, here.) Note that the platform/fabric itself is not generally available yet, but you can download the Developer Package now.

It’s worthwhile to note that although Magento and GSI Commerce are both a part of the X.commerce Magento really stole the show! All but one of the demos of X.commerce were done on Magento Enterprise. Lots of Magento love today!

What else? We heard about Magento and X.commerce. The X.commerce team has learned a lot from the Magento team. There will be a version of the X.commerce fabric available for Magento when it becomes generally available. We heard about the growth of the industry and how eCommerce will be a 10 trillion (yes, trillion) dollar industry by 2013. Magento unveiled their revamped Magento Connect 2, which easily links Magento store owners with extensions. Magento U, Magento’s training unit, will now offer courses online. Finally, Magento 2 was announced to be released in 2012 and a certified module program (which certifies modules for Enterprise) was also talked about.

As we were leaving tonight, the X.commerce folks formed a human fabric. It went all the way from Moscone West to Moscone North. It was quite a site!

Well, that about wraps it up for today. We’re pretty beat from all of the excitement. Check back tomorrow for more news and highlights from day 2.

On Tuesday, a few of us llamas will be heading over to San Francisco to attend to the Innovate Developer’s Conference. We’re really excited to be a part of this conference for a couple of reasons.

First and foremost, we’re enthusiastic about the potential the X.commerce platforms brings to the Magento and eCommerce communities. It is a very ambitious end-to-end, multi-channel platform that aims to make the constantly changing and evolving world of eCommerce easy to access. On top of that, it’s open source! We’ll be watching this story unfold and can’t wait to see the fruit: what makes it into Magento and what features and services will be born out of this platform that can help us more effectively serve our customers and make them more successful.

Secondly, we are glad to hear that Magento’s Developer Certification will enter beta at Innovate. As you may have heard, our own David Alger was one of many on their Certification Advisory Board. We can’t wait to take the test!

Thirdly, it will be great to meet and visit with our friends from Magento and the greater Magento community. It’s not very often that we get to spend any amount of time with so many others in the eCommerce industry.

We’ll be updating our blog as time allows while at Innovate. You can follow along on the X.commerce blog or watching the #innovate tag on twitter.

This post outlines some of our thoughts about the state of the Magento module community, and an idea for how Magento can improve the quality of that community.

Here at Classy Llama Studios we create our own Magento modules every day and have high standards for any module that we write.  These standards include having properly commented code, adhering to Zend programming standards, and having both the code and functionality of the module reviewed before it is released.  Magento is great because, instead of having to write every module that we use, there are numerous other quality development companies whose modules we can draw from for sites that we develop.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of modules out there that are not quality.  Issues with modules that we encounter include poorly written code, SQL vulnerabilities, improper code domain separation, and improper utilization of the Magento Application functionalities.  Some of these modules do not even work.

This abundance of modules often leaves us with a challenging question. Do we recommend this module to our client? If we do, we often have to prepare our clients for the possibility of hours of development, in addition to the module cost, that may be required to make the module safe and functional.  The other option is that we have to take a loss to bring the module to the level necessary for use on our customers’ eCommerce platform.  We love our customers and so it is painful for us to have to make either of these choices when the customer is already paying for the module. Because of this, we have been asking ourselves if there is some sort of solution to the problem of poorly coded modules.

The answer we came up with is twofold.  For now, we can buy most of our modules from the great companies who have earned our trust up to this point; these companies include AheadWorks, Unirgy, and WebShopApps. This alleviates the problem but it does not come close to eliminating it.  We know that there are other developers who write quality modules.  We simply don’t know who they are until we have worked with and reviewed their modules.  We think that Magento itself is the solution to this dilemma.

Even though Magento has had explosive growth since the release of Magento 1.0, it has only been three and a half years since its release.  Since then, Magento has gone through dramatic transitions and upgrades turning it into a much more streamlined and powerful system with numerous features and a massive community.  With eBay’s acquisition of Magento, its future looks even brighter.  Since Magento is so young, however, there are certain features and programs that they have not had or taken the time to develop.  We believe that the development of a Magento module certification would be a great step for the company and the community at large.  Magento has over 4800 modules in Magneto Connect, and we realize that reviewing every one of them would be a massive undertaking, so we think that it should be something that Magento would be best able to facilitate on a voluntary basis.  When Magento certifies a module, that module would receive special recognition and be more accessible to developers and store owners. This would take the burden of code review and repair off individual development companies or users purchasing the modules and put it back on the original developers of the module.  While this could take time to implement, we think that it is an endeavor from which the entire Magento community would benefit.

We’ve communicated this idea to Magento.  Here is a snippet of what we’ve told them: … There are many poor quality developers and modules, and the current system doesn’t provide a system of being able to determine which modules are good, and which are not.  The current Magento Connect is much like the Android Marketplace – thousands of apps, with only a portion of them being high quality.  While we would not like to see the same level of curation as the iOS Marketplace, we would like to see more attention being paid to ensuring that quality modules are promoted, and poor-quality modules are being demoted…

We sincerely hope that Magento does this, but regardless of what they do, we love the platform and will continue to support the company and the community to the best of our ability.  We believe that Magento truly is the eCommerce “Platform for Growth” and that it’s many features, programs, modules, developers, store owners, and fans make it a wonderful and enjoyable platform to work with every day.

The latest batch of Wiz updates includes some useful stuff for developers as well as some administrative features. Included in this bundle of Wizzy goodness is the ability to output any table output in csv, pipe, or tab delimited output. This makes it very easy to utilize Wiz with other commands (or potentially feed information from Wiz back into itself!)

Here is a complete list of the changes in 0.9.5:

1. The internal configuration system was rewritten to look more like Magento’s own configuration system — using XML files. This isn’t really used heavily yet, but we’ve got some stuff coming in the next few months that will take full advantage of this.
2. You can now toggle the following “developer” flags from the CLI:
   1. Allow Symlinks (For templates, 1.5.1.0+)
   2. Logging
   3. JS Merging
   4. CSS Merging
   5. Profiler
3. You can view all of the above configuration values as well with the devel-config command.
4. Get a list of all registered event listeners.
5. Get a list of all Models registered in the system and module rewrites.
6. Scriptable output. Output tabular data in csv, pipe-delimieted, or tab-delimited formats.

If you just want to get going:
Browse on Github
Website / Download

Be sure to read over the Readme file on Github for more information about the added commands!

The Good Stuff

Okay, so the configuration system isn’t a huge deal… but it does open up more potential for 3rd party developers to write plugins that need to store things: usernames, passwords, etc. without having to provide their own storage mechanism. Let’s get to the really exciting stuff!

Developer Configuration

$ wiz devel-config
+---------------------------------+-------+
| Path                            | Value |
+---------------------------------+-------+
| dev/debug/profiler              | No    |
| dev/js/merge_files              | No    |
| dev/css/merge_css_files         | No    |
| dev/log/active                  | No    |
| dev/debug/template_hints        | No    |
| dev/debug/template_hints_blocks | No    |
| dev/template/allow_symlink      | No    |
+---------------------------------+-------+

You can now flip off/on or view the status of each of these independently. Each of these work the same way devel-showhints works.

Developer Helpers

One of the things I’m curious about sometimes is to see what modules are listening to what events. Well, now with a new command, you can see that:

wiz devel-listeners give you a list of the events and the modules and their model/method that is responding to that event.

Often times, I want to know what overrides have been performed by other modules. Now I can see a total picture of what modules provide what models:

As you can see, all of the standard models are shown, but you can also see what overrides are performed by all of the modules on the system.

Scriptable Table Output

Finally, of the coolest thing (in my opinion) is the scriptable output. Wiz has a pretty decent table output system that makes it fairly easy for your eyes. However, getting that data out of the table took me far too much time. Enter --batch.

The –batch argument takes the model list we show above and transforms it into:

"Model Name","PHP Class"
varien/*,Varien_*
core/*,Mage_Core_Model_*
core_resource/*,Mage_Core_Model_Resource_*
eav/*,Mage_Eav_Model_*
eav_resource/*,Mage_Eav_Model_Resource_*
page/*,Mage_Page_Model_*
install/*,Mage_Install_Model_*
install_resource/*,Mage_Install_Model_Resource_*
admin/*,Mage_Admin_Model_*

The –batch argument can take one of three arguments: csv, pipe, or tab. csv is the default (as you can see above). Pipe replaces the commas with “|”s and tabs… well, you get the idea. Now you can take your Wiz output and pipe it through grep, cut, etc. or output straight to CSV and load it up into Excel/Numbers/OpenOffice/etc.

Enjoy!

Get Wiz

Browse on Github
Website / Download

We’ve been doing a ton of work on documentation around llamaville lately, and since many of us working here are programmer types, most of our doc systems are configured to use the Markdown markup language (link) for writing richly formatted content. This is great, with one small problem – our project management system doesn’t currently support Markdown. It uses a WYSIWYG editor, or can take straight HTML input.

I strongly dislike WYSIWYG editors, as they are slow and difficult to work with in my experience, and writing HTML directly is also time consuming and laborious. Life has ben rough, until last night when I stumbled across a little gem of a program: Pandoc by John McFarlane (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/).

Pandoc is a beautiful little markup converter that can convert just about any common markup language to just about any other common markup language.

What this means is that I can take HTML input, convert it to Markdown for editing, and then convert the Markdown back to HTML for upload and input. This streamlines my editing process significantly, and makes my life as a documenter and scope write so much easier. In my experience so far, it has done a beautiful job with everything I’ve thrown at it, even gracefully taking some pretty ugly HTML and making beautiful, clean Markdown out of it.

Following is a sample command I use to grab HTML content from my clipboard, reformat it as Markdown, and spit it out in TextMate, my editor of choice:

# pbpaste | pandoc -f html -t markdown | mate

This would, of course, work for any format supported by Pandoc, which includes the popular Textile among other languages.

Cheers!

~Rob

P.S. I’m also evaluating a slick little Markdown editor I found called Macchiato. Check it out: http://getmacchiato.com/

It has been a while, but Wiz has not been forgotten!

The latest update, 0.9.3-beta, brings the following new features and improvements:

1. Indexing functions and information are now available.
2. Caching now supports clearing and viewing invalidated caches.
3. Caching now has more options to clear all of the various Magento caches.
4. Errors setting up admin users on linux systems should be resolved.
5. Adding Admin users should now work for every version and configuration. The SQL method for creating users was removed in favor of using the admin user model.

Enjoy!

Browse on Github
Website / Download

As you’ve heard by now, eBay will be closing on a 100% acquisition of Magento in the third quarter of 2011.  This should not surprise anyone too much considering eBay took a substantial stake in Magento with a $20-something million investment in February with the string attached that Magento develop Magento Go to compete with the entry-level eCommerce market, equipping eBay to offer a plug-and-play SaaS eCommerce solution to their millions of eCommerce customers using PayPal.  Add in the fact that eBay is a huge player in the eCommerce world, and it makes sense they would want to create a comprehensive offering by blending together their eBay and PayPal offerings with an eCommerce platform offering.

So, it makes sense.  Now the real question:  What does the future of Magento look like?  I’m going to stick my neck out here and take a guess based on my conversations with Magento insiders yesterday, my knowledge of Magento’s market position development since it’s inception, and eBay’s current position.  First, let’s take a look back and see what eBay has been doing up to this point to build this X.Commerce “operating system.”  First, PayPal purchased a 49% stake of Magento back in February, and Magento then builds a hosted SaaS version of its software, Magento Go, to service the lowest end of the market.  Then eBay acquires GSI Commerce, a company that services the highest end of the eCommerce market, for $2.4 billion.  Shortly before this, eBay announced that they would be bringing together their eBay and PayPal developers to one conference in October, 2011 to begin the process of collaboration and unity.  And earlier this week, eBay has now completed their conquest and purchases Magento, which services the mid-sized eCommerce market.  While there are still certainly more acquisitions to be had, eBay has positioned itself to effectively service eCommerce merchants of all sizes.

That’s all easy stuff, though.  The real question is, how is eBay going to bring all of this together under one roof?  Will their be one software platform to rule them all?  Or will eBay keep them segregated.  I believe that eBay must keep the GSI Commerce side of the business separate from the Magento and Magento Go side of the business.  If nothing else, for this simple reason:  Magento is open-source and PHP-based.  GSI is proprietary and Java-based.  Combining two completely different platforms would be very challenging, and if they did combine them, they would nearly certainly have to maintain Magento’s open-source nature to retain the development community’s buy-in, which is a leading reason for Magento’s massive success.

What I do think is more possible is that Magento, Magento Go, and GSI will be rebranded under the X.Commerce flag in some way, but not immediately.  I am very confident eBay doesn’t want to make one ring to rule them all.  Rather, they’re building a ring shop, so if you want a ring, you know where to go:  X.Commerce.

If you ever need custom layout handles in your local.xml, it’s fairly simple. In this example the observer method will make a new handle for for categories that have children or not, but you can just modify the method to make whatever handles you desire. (I realized after creating this there’s already a handle for anchored categories with no subcategories, catalog_category_layered_nochildren)

First add this to your config.xml in yourcustommodule:

<config>
<frontend>
        <events>
            <controller_action_layout_load_before>
                <observers>
                    <yourcustomtheme_observer>
                        <class>yourcustomtheme/observer</class>
                        <method>addHandles</method>
                    </yourcustomtheme_observer>
                </observers>
            </controller_action_layout_load_before>
        </events>
</frontend>
</config>

Then add this method to your observer:

 
class YourPackage_YourCustomTheme_Model_Observer extends CLS_Core_Model_Abstract
{
    public function addHandles($observer) {
        $category = Mage::registry('current_category');
        if ($category instanceof Mage_Catalog_Model_Category) {
            $update = Mage::getSingleton('core/layout')->getUpdate();
            $fertilility = (count($category->getChildrenCategories()->getData())) ? 'parent' : 'nochildren';
            $update->addHandle('catalog_category_' . $fertilility);
        }
        return $this;
    }
}

The initial flow of love for Wiz was greatly appreciated!  I’m not certain how many people actually have downloaded and are using Wiz today.  We may never know fully…  But the buzz that was generated was definitely invigorating!

We have recently rolled Wiz out to our entire team here at Classy Llama.  No doubt within the next few weeks we will see more features being added as our people put it through the hoops.  Enough about that.  Let’s get on with it!

Specifying a scope code

By default, Wiz will execute your commands running inside of the admin scope.  This is great for practically everything, however using the 301-urlskumap to generate a CSV of SKUs to URLs caused issues when running inside of the admin.  Now all you have to do is:

wiz 301-urlskumap --store [code]

And it will execute inside of the store's scope, giving you the proper rewritten URLs.  If you leave out the code, it will use the default store.  --website is also available.

Adding EE Admin Users with AdminGWS

Creating admin users on Magento Enterprise and Magento Professional is technically the same.  The both use SHA256 to store passwords instead of MD5.  And they both share the same database structure for users.  However, EE has an additional module called Enterprise_AdminGWS.  This is important because this module actually modifies the structure of the role table to include GWS (Global, Website, Store) level permissions.  Wiz will now check for and properly adapt to the presence of this module.

Log cleaning

One of the comments on the initial post mentioned tying into the Magento provided shell commands.  This is the first part of that excellent idea.  The one curious thing about this conversion is that the --days argument is not present.  Interestingly enough, although Magento provides this option in their shell script it does not work properly.  It ignore it completely and uses what is in the config.

Roadmap

We currently have only one driving force behind where Wiz development time gets spent: feature requests.  You are more than welcome to submit a feature request/issue on the Wiz Github page.  Here is what is being planned and worked on for future releases:

• Indexing control (in the same vein as cache control).
• Compiler functionality.
• Status (lists version, modules, module versions, number of products, categories, etc.) in a report format.
• Auto-updating from within Wiz.
• Module creation and modification.

As always, your feedback is welcomed and greatly appreciated!

If you have not started using Wiz yet, go get it!

In case we forget, the guys in suite 104 (the “creative” side of Classy Llama Studios) lovingly decided to give us a play-by-play walkthrough of bathroom usage.  Apparently, they were enduring some unpleasant olfactory feedback, and needed to set things straight… This is what resulted:

Step One: Feel welcome. Step Two: Flush... wait, isn't there something missing here?

Don't you hate it when users "forget" to do this?

So, since American humans read from top-left to bottom-right, I need to shut the door (why is it still open?), turn on the fan, and then wash my hands... now the door and the fan switch are soiled. Great!

Finally! After you've touched everything in the entire bathroom!

Standard illogical creative thinking: First, give a blanket statement to do shut the door and turn on the fan NO MATTER WHAT. Then reiterate it, but narrowly qualified. At least they didn't say p**p.

P.S.  No, I will not be receiving a reward for this post!

We at Classy Llama value public contributions from our team members.  We have an open blog policy where anyone on the team can post on our blog about anything they believe is noteworthy and relevant.  Over the past 3 years, we’ve averaged about one post per month.  We noticed that our blog represents fully half of our site traffic, albeit less quality traffic, but we like big traffic numbers because it makes us feel better about ourselves, so we decided it would be awesome if we increased our average number of blog posts per month.

So… we did what any reasonable, balanced agency would do:  We offered chocolate to team members for blog articles.  And since we are Classy Llamas (as opposed to the spitting, filthy, despicable kind), we naturally put up a professionally hand-drawn cardboard sign hung by a telephone cord in the main meeting area in our offices.

The results?  Five blog posts in one week.  And they range in quality from good to great.  I have to admit, I felt like a Wiz after implementing this reward system.  And I was like, “OMG! This could be more successful than Facebook Mail.”  And then I stopped saying silly things and said, “Square things make me angry.”

After having this strange internal chat about it, a deep forboding overtook me.  It dawned on me that, in an effort to produce more meaningless traffic to our site, we may accidentally forget to get any work done!  Had I made the greatest mistake ever to be made in history?!  Time will tell.  For now, I’ll eat my Turkish Delight and be blissfully unaware of the impending doom it is certainly causing.

The only question that remains:  Will I give myself another dozen delicious Ferrero Rocher for THIS article?  After all, it’s the ONLY REASON I WROTE IT!  Mwahahahahahahah!

There is a lot of functionality in Magento that is hard to get to or tedious to work with.  There are so many tasks that developers, designers, and administrators do on a daily basis that require time-consuming trips to the Magento backend.  If you happen to want to do more than one of those operations, you end up having do each of those tasks one after the other… if only there was a better way!

It is my pleasure to announce Wiz: a command-line interface tool for working with Magento installations.  It was built to make your work (and subsequently your life) much easier!

Wiz has a whole bunch of great features, but here are some you’re sure to like:

• Create an admin user (tested in CE & PE)
• Toggle template hints
• Enable/disable module names
• Enable/disable module output
• Run xpath queries over the global config
• Enable/disable/clear caches
• … and more!

Wiz is a work in progress and hasn’t been thoroughly tested with every Magento version out there.  However, we’ve been using it with Professional and Community Edition installations without any major problems.

Things planned for future releases:

• Templates for building modules
• Better support for stores and configuration scopes
• More useful utilities like reindexing, cron runs, etc.

Your feedback and bug reports are welcome!

Update: Some screenshots for the curious…

List all modules, versions, and their statuses without going through the backend.

Create an admin user without having to touch the database.

Effortlessly clear, enable, & disable Magento caches.

Enable and disable template hints. Great for theme/skin development.

Dropping easily into MySQL shell for a Magento install.

Listen up Magento fans! (Yes, Mr. or Mrs. Potential-client-considering-Classy-Llama’s-proficiency, that means you, too.)

If you thought Classy Llama Studios was just “in it for the short term” or simply “out to make a buck” then think again! We are, in fact, all about impacting the globe and everyone in it. To that end, we use Magento as our e-commerce platform of choice. But! We don’t stop with just using the platform: we find ways to make it, and its use, even better.

That’s why we’re sending Erik Hansen, our Director of Technology (and one of our top llamas), over to bright and sunny California to speak at the incredible Magento Imagine eCommerce conference!

Erik’s slice of the seminar, called “Best Practices for Magento Debugging”, will  provide a whirlwind tour covering the ideal Magento environment configuration, debug steps for common development problems, and tips on debugging with an Eclipse-based editor. (For those of you readers not interested in the guts of the workshop or the innards of Magento, let’s just say that we really know our stuff.)

For you Llama-like techies who may be attending this near-earth-shattering event, upon completion of Erik’s workshop, you’ll be able to:

• Customize your Magento installation to provide you with rich debug data for errors and exceptions
• Uncover the cause of mysterious issues plaguing a Magento site
• Debug more effectively using an Eclipse-based editor

We hope you’ll go…and if you’re able to make it to the conference, please stop by and say “Hi!” to Erik for all of us lonely llamas not in California with you.

Today I was faced with an interesting task. I needed to update an attribute on as many as several thousand products at once within a reasonable amount of time. My first thought was to load a collection of products and then save that collection. Under the hood, saving a collection simply loops through all models in that collection and calls the save method on the model.

I started in this direction when I tested my code, Magento threw the following error:

exception ‘Zend_Db_Statement_Exception’ with message ‘SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1048 Column ‘value’ cannot be null’

After consulting with one of the other developers here, I realized that because a collection does not load entire products but only a subset of the products’ attributes. I tried loading every single product and saving it but this turned out to be painfully slow. It would have taken hours to save just a few hundred products. Clearly, this was unacceptable.

I started brainstorming and I realized that I could use the same methods that are used by the mass product attributes update page uses. After looking into this method, I realized that I could only send one value per attribute update. To get around this limitation, I set up an array keyed using the new attribute value with a value of an array of all products that had that specific value. This array was fed through a loop and the update attributes method was called for every value. This turned out to be very fast and it simplified the process enormously.

The following code is what I ended up using to update the attributes.

// $products is a collection of products that need to be updated
// $productArray contains an array with the following format:
// array('productId' => 'value to add')
foreach ($products as $product) {
    $newPopularity = $product->getPopularity() + $productArray[$product->getId()];
    $productData[$newPopularity][] = $product->getId();
}
foreach ($productData as $popularityValue => $pidArray) {
    Mage::getSingleton('catalog/product_action')
        ->updateAttributes($pidArray, array('popularity' => $popularityValue), 0);
}

There is a previous blog post about saving product attributes here. I ran a comparison on the two methods for a 1162 product collection. Using this method it took 6.233485 sec vs 8.680476 sec using the individual save method. Although this method is quicker, the disparity between the two methods is proportional to the number of values that are the same. So a collection with 2000 ranging over 5 values will be helped a lot more than a collection of 2000 with 1000 values.

• This module is built on Magento 1.4.1.1. It should work on most versions of Magento.

We’re big fans of Google services around here, using Google Apps hosted services for all of our email and document handling.

Recently, I’ve spent some time working over my Gmail/Apple Mail/iPhone integration to try to get a seamless, realtime through the cloud system for keeping everything in sync. Doing this can be a bit tricky, because Google’s concept of labels doesn’t always play nicely with folders in other mail clients, but with a bit of tweaking and changing settings, you can get a nice system running.

First thing to do is set up Apple Mail using IMAP. Make sure that IMAP is enabled in your Gmail settings:

Then launch Apple Mail and configure your email account using IMAP by following the directions Google has posted here: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=12806

Once your account is set up in Mail, to get a good integration you’ll need to do some tweaking. First, switch to the Mailbox Behaviors pane of your Mail settings and adjust your settings to match ones shown here:

This will ensure that every message you create also gets stored on the Gmail servers. Also, since Gmail provides a ton of space, there is no need to ever delete anything – which will make sure that all your messages are always available for reference.

Next, load up Gmail in your web client and browse to “Settings” and click on the “Labs” tab. Browse through the list of Labs extensions to locate the “Advanced IMAP Controls” Labs feature. Enable this feature, and click save changes.

Now, go to the “Labels” tab in the settings. You’ll see a new option by each of your Gmail labels to “Show in IMAP”. I recommend unchecking “All Mail” and “Starred” so that they will not get synced to Apple Mail over IMAP.

These two Gmail labels are actually used by the system for specific purposes, and if you sync them via IMAP, it will give you inaccurate unread message counts in Apple Mail at times, as well as showing duplicate results in Smart Mailboxes and search results. By leaving these out of the sync, you’ll get a much cleaner integration.

The final step to tie everything together nicely takes place in Apple Mail. Locate the IMAP folders in the left hand sidebar of Mail, and expand the folder list under your IMAP account. You should see a list of all your Gmail labels, with the name of your account represented as a folder with brackets at the top (e.g. [Gmail]). Expand this folder to find a list of the Gmail default labels that are being synced. To get a nice seamless integration, you need to map Apple Mail to use these default Gmail labels instead of its own custom labels for storing sent message, trash, etc. To do this, select the label to map (e.g. “Sent Mail”) and then choose from the “Mailbox” menu “Use This Mailbox For” and select the appropriate option in Apple Mail where the Gmail label will be mapped. This will cause Apple Mail to put everything in the correct locations on Google, and prevent you from having two folders with sent messages, deleted messages, etc. I will note that I’ve not had much luck binding the Google “Spam” folder to the Apple Mail “Junk” folder. For some reason this doesn’t seem to want to stick.

At this point, you should have a nice integration between Apple Mail and Gmail. Adding an iPhone to the mix is relatively simple. Just choose whether to use IMAP on your phone (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=77702) or Google Sync to get instant notifications with push email (http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138740&topic=14252). The iPhone maps itself to the Google default folders automatically, so all the work is done for you.

Once you’ve completed all of this, you should have a complete, seamless solution where changes made anywhere, whether on your iPhone, the web, or your computer via Apple Mail are updated and synced in real time, over the air, and in a consistent fashion. Enjoy your new, free, seamless mail solution!

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IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are a BlackBerry user, these settings will cause your handheld to be flooded with email coming from your Apple Mail client, due to the way that BlackBerry Enterprise Server interacts with Gmail. I would recommend exploring the various settings in Gmail and Apple Mail to find a combination that keeps your email as seamless as possible without overloading your BlackBerry inbox.

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UPDATE: As of late September 2010, the Google Sync integration for iPhone has not been working well. I began to have problems with deleted email from my computer remaining on my phone, drafts getting mixed up, and other issues. I switched my phone settings over to using IMAP, and have become a big fan. It is utterly reliable, and as a big plus, supports syncing Notes between your Mac and your iPhone. It also integrates the Google Calendar settings, making setting up your Google Calendars super easy. And on top of that, the IMAP integration tracks replies and forwards from Apple Mail, so that you can see what action you’ve taken when on your iPhone. The only downside is no push mail notifications, but who really needs that anyway?

Ameds.com Home Page (click image to go to Ameds home page)

I won’t lie.  We like being noticed.  That’s why we’re named Classy Llama Studios.

But we like it even BETTER when our clients are noticed.  Recently, Ameds.com, one of our Enterprise clients, was featured on the Magento blog.

Magento said the following about our work on Ameds:

“The migration of 40,000+ SKU storefront from a proprietary code base to Magento Enterprise Edition 1.8 was achieved successfully by minimizing risk of adverse effects on pre-existing marketing campaigns, traffic and customer base… [and] migration and integration of all customer data (including passwords and order history), as well as retention of thousands of old URLs via systematic URL rewriting patterns allowing for preserved natural search engine rankings, in addition to continued operation of PPC & CSE campaigns with virtually no changes.”

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