With some advanced scheduled-post-voodoo i successfully managed to publish this post already yesterday with some completely unrelated queries and no text. this was not intended – please accept my apologies :P

Anyway: In the footer of my magento shop we might have a summary of the shopping cart,
which i simply put in the footer.phtml template file:

<?php if (Mage::getModel('checkout/cart')->getItemsCount() > 0): ?>
  <div class="footer_cart_widget">
    <a href="/checkout/cart" class="cart">
      <?php echo $this->__('Warenkorb') ?>:<br />
      <span class="cart_meta">
        <?php echo Mage::getModel('checkout/cart')->getItemsCount() ?>
        <?php if (Mage::getModel('checkout/cart')->getItemsCount() == 1): ?>
          Produkt:
        <?php else: ?>
          Produkte:
        <?php endif; ?>
        <?php echo $this->helper('checkout')->formatPrice(Mage::getSingleton('checkout/cart')->getQuote()->getGrandTotal()); ?>
      </span>
    </a>
  </div>
<?php endif; ?>

This means we might need to disable the caching for the footer HTML block,
so that my cart summary will stay dynamically generated.

This is how you can do it:

copy

app/code/core/Mage/Page/Block/Html/Footer.php

to

app/code/local/Mage/Page/Block/Html/Footer.php

and just comment out the following lines:

//$this->addData(array(
//    'cache_lifetime'=> false,
//    'cache_tags'    => array(Mage_Core_Model_Store::CACHE_TAG, Mage_Cms_Model_Block::CACHE_TAG)
//));

you could also put the cart values in the getCacheKeyInfo() method, but as this would result in caching a footer for any state of the shopping cart from my understanding, i don’t think it’s necessarily a good idea.

I just started digging in the shop software magento for a project and set up the following development environment.

In this scenario development is done on two local machines while products and pages beeing already edited on the “Live”-Web-Server.
Git is used for version control and deployment. Also FTP SSH.

Magento is quite nice when it comes to deployment, as most config stuff is stored in XML files.
Those files are kept locally and ignored from version control.

So this is what my .gitignore looks like:

#cache, sessions, logs
/var/cache/*
/var/session/*
/var/locks/*
/var/report/*
/var/log/*
#media folder - images etc...
/media/*

#local config files
/app/etc/local.xml
.htaccess

#database dump
/database.sql

So i got a copy of the repository in each environment with a local .htaccess and local.xml file.

Theres a few things stored in DB by magento, though.
The most obvious is the “web/secure/base_url” and “web/unsecure/base_url” which both reside in the “core_config_data” table.
Those have to be set to the name of the host you’re working on.

This can be done with a shell script like this:

#create a dupm of the live DB on the server
ssh user@server.com 'mysqldump -u[username] -p[password] > ~/db_dump.sql'

#copy DB dump to local machine
scp user@server.com:~/db_dump.sql ./database.sql

#import SQL
mysql -u[local_mysql_user] -p[local_mysql_pw] [local_db_name] < ./database.sql

#update config settings in the DB
mysql -u[local_mysql_user] -p[local_mysql_pw] [local_db_name]<UPDATE
core_config_data
SET value='http://local.server.com/'
WHERE value ='http://server.com';
EOFMYSQL

This way all CMS and products  can be edited on the server, while the local machines can be easily synched.
For me this works fine, as we are working only in the file system in the local environment.
In case you can’t use the online Server as “database master” this might be not that simple.

As we most likely don’t want the whole /media folder under version control we might want to have another shell script to copy the media files to the local machine (via SCP in this case):

#remove local media folder
rm -rf ./media/*
#fetch media files
scp -r ssh_user@server.com:~/magento_folder/media/* ./media

I guess this could be done more efficiently with maybe ant or something.
But for the moment this works fine for me.

So now i can update my local environment with one line on the console:

git pull; sh sync_db.sh; sh sync_media.sh

someone just +1′d this nice addon for firefox:
(thanks, conrad :)

Tilt visualizes the DOM in 3D and is a lot faster than i expected.

Although it’s flagged experimental it’s easily installed and works like a charm on my macbook with Firefox 6.

Definetly makes you think twice about your markup nesting level ;)

This is a small shell script to set up silverstripe CMS
along with some modules i often use (as seen in ivo’s post)

The script has two parameters:
- the folder to clone the whole thing into
- the branch/tag to checkout afterwards

# install silverstripe + common modules from github
# usage sh install_silverstripe.sh <folder_name> <tag/branch>
# examples:
# sh install_silverstripe.sh some_folder tags/2.4.5
# sh install_silverstripe.sh some_folder master

As Silverstripe itself is split up in 3 repositories
(the installer/base folder, the cms and the sapphire framework itself)
we fetch the base folder first:

#set up project base folder
git clone git@github.com:silverstripe/silverstripe-installer.git $1
cd $1
git checkout $2

Get the cms

#setup cms
git clone git@github.com:silverstripe/silverstripe-cms.git cms
cd cms
git checkout $2
cd ..

Get sapphire …

#setup framework
git clone git@github.com:silverstripe/sapphire.git sapphire
cd sapphire
git checkout $2
cd ..

Setup some permissions for the web installer.

#set permissions for install
chmod 0777 assets assets/*
chmod 0666 .htaccess mysite/_config.php assets/*/*

Fetch the blackcandy theme from a fourth repository.
Backup the tutorial theme in case we need it.

#install blackcandy theme
mv themes/tutorial ./
rm -rf themes
git clone https://github.com/silverstripe-themes/silverstripe-blackcandy.git themes
cd themes
git checkout $2
cd ..
mv tutorial themes

Install some modules

# install common modules
git clone https://github.com/unclecheese/Uploadify.git uploadify
git clone https://github.com/unclecheese/DataObjectManager.git dataobject_manager
git clone https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-userforms.git userforms

iIput the script on github
…in case you might wanna use it or add something i’ve missed.

If you are going to install the mp3 en/decoder lame on debian lenny,
this is how i got it done:

choose your package: http://debian-multimedia.org/pool/main/l/lame/

wget http://debian-multimedia.org/pool/main/l/lame/lame_3.98.2-0.4_i386.deb
dpkg -i lame_3.98.2-0.4_i386.deb

yay!

yesterday i found this very useful jQuery-script on github:

https://gist.github.com/853841

jQuery.fn.scrollToViewPort = function(animTimeInterval) {
  animTimeInterval = (typeof animTimeInterval == "undefined")?"slow":animTimeInterval;
  return this.each(function(){
    $('html,body').animate({scrollTop: $(this).offset().top},animTimeInterval);
  });
}

it moves the users’ viewport to show the element that it has been called on.

I modified it somehow so that it will check now if the element is already in the viewport.
So we can avoid auto-scrolling in that case.
A offset Parameter has also been added in case we need some margin.

https://gist.github.com/1018842

jQuery.fn.scrollToViewPort = function(options) {
  var animTimeInterval = (typeof options.interval == "undefined")?"slow":animTimeInterval;
  return this.each(function(){
    var offSet = (typeof options.offset == "undefined")? $(this).offset().top : options.offset;
    if( $(this).offset().top <= $(window).scrollTop() || ( $(this).offset().top + $(this).height() ) >= ( $(window).scrollTop() + $(window).height() ) ){
      $('html,body').animate( { scrollTop: offSet }, animTimeInterval );
    }
  });
}

usage:

 $(this).scrollToViewPort( { offset : ( ( $(this).offset().top + my_custom_offset ) - $(window).height() ) } );

cooler Service, wenn man mal neutrale Platzhalter Bilder braucht:
http://placehold.it/

und was ähnliches mit Flickr Fotos:
http://flickholdr.com/

Firefox 4 ist ja nun draussen:
http://www.mozilla-europe.org/de/

Die Addons Firebug und der JSON Viewer sind ja zum Glück auch schon kompatibel.
Mein anderes Lieblingsaddon, der CSS reloader leider noch nicht.

Coolerweise gibt es aber dieses Bookmarklet:
http://david.dojotoolkit.org/recss.html
dass genau das tut.
Supersache!

Dogmatix recommends:

.WWF – ein PDF Format, dass sich nicht ausdrucken lässt.
Der Umwelt zuliebe.

Meine Rechnungen verschicke ich vielleicht trotzdem lieber nicht als .WWF,
aber coole Idee.

http://www.saveaswwf.com/de/

…seit längerem mal ohne meine Freunde die Framework Validatoren unterwegs gewesen,
das dann gefunden und gefreut wie einfach sowas heutzutage ist.

filter_var( $email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL );