This morning I cleaned up the folder structure in my inbox (Inbox Zero is a never-ending fight). In the process of organizing folders I changed the folder size from small to large. It’s amazing how much more “comfortable” my inbox feels now. Sometimes really small and simple changes make a big difference.
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Elias Partner Featured on WorkstationSetups
Our very own Luke Whitson is featured on WorkstationSetups today!
Magento + Scene7 Case Study: theClassWatch.com
A combination of outstanding partner, client, and technology collide from time to time to form incredibly interesting projects. One such project for Elias has been theClassWatch.com, which involved integrating two popular web tools: Magento + Adobe Scene7. Our client, Josh Fendley, recently sat down with me to talk about his experience with Elias:
Background
Josh is a partner at an agency in Cincinnati, OH called Ample. His client, ClassWatch, wanted to create a shopping experience that personalizes high-end wrist watches with school logos, initials, and graduation year. Adobe Scene7 seemed like the perfect tool to manage images. And Magento is one of the most powerful ecommerce platforms on the market today. But there was just one problem: no one had integrated the two web services with each other yet.
Solution
Not one to back down from a challenge, Elias rolled up its proverbial sleeves and went to work setting up a store, installing a custom theme, and integrating the watch configurator with Scene7. It was a tight deadline, which required outstanding teamwork between Elias + Ample. Personally, I’m proud to have met and worked with the Ample guys. (disclaimer: I tend to think that way about all of our clients)
Lee is documenting the technical side of this story in a series of posts. Our current project load has stalled the remaining posts in the series so far, but I’ll update the following list as he adds the next two posts:
- Part 1 of 3: Scene7 Integration with Magento Ecommerce
Results
The final product is an impressive personalized shopping experience. Eric made a quick screencast to showcase the integration with Scene7 + Magento.
How to attract Magento developers for your project
Most people who follow our blog either are looking for a developer or are a developer themselves. And quality Magento developers are in high demand right now. So how do you get a top-notch developer to work on your project, Check out more from Palo Alto executive search services.
Seth Godin wrote a blog post today about how to be a great client. Personally, I would jump at the chance to work with a client who follows Seth’s suggestions. In fact, we decided to work with our clients because they fit several of the characteristics. Here is a copy of the post. I took the liberty of replacing “innovator” with “developer”. My guess is that our Magento developer following will strongly agree with the list.
As a client, your job isn’t to be innovative. Your job is to foster innovation. Big difference.
Fostering innovation is a discipline, a profession in fact. It involves making difficult choices and causing important things to get shipped out the door. Here are a few thoughts to get you started.
- Before engaging with the [developer], foster discipline among yourself and your team. Be honest about what success looks like and what your resources actually are.
- If you can’t write down clear ground rules about which rules are firm and which can be broken on the path to a creative solution, how can you expect the [developer] to figure it out?
- Simplify the problem relentlessly, and be prepared to accept an elegant solution that satisfies the simplest problem you can describe.
- After you write down the ground rules, revise them to eliminate constraints that are only on the list because they’ve always been on the list.
- Hire the right person. Don’t ask a mason to paint your house. Part of your job is to find someone who is already in the sweet spot you’re looking for, or someone who is eager and able to get there.
- Demand thrashing early in the process. Force [developers] and decisions to be made near the beginning of the project, not in a crazy charrette at the end.
- Be honest about resources. While false resource constraints may help you once or twice, the people you’re working with demand your respect, which includes telling them the truth.
- Pay as much as you need to solve the problem, which might be more than you want to. If you pay less than that, you’ll end up wasting all your money. Why would a great [developer] work cheap?
- Cede all issues of irrelevant personal taste to the [designer]. I don’t care if you hate the curves on the new logo. Just because you write the check doesn’t mean your personal aesthetic sense is relevant.
- Run interference. While innovation sometimes never arrives, more often it’s there but someone in your office killed it.
- Raise the bar. Over and over again, raise the bar. Impossible a week ago is not good enough. You want stuff that is impossible today, because as they say at Yoyodyne, the future begins tomorrow.
- When you find a faux [developer], run. Don’t stick with someone who doesn’t deserve the hard work you’re doing to clear a path.
- Celebrate the [developer]. Sure, you deserve a ton of credit. But you’ll attract more [developers] and do even better work next time if [developers] understand how much they benefit from working with you.
Magento Database Import Error: USING BTREE, KEY `FK_ATTRIBUTE_VARCHAR_ENTITY` (`entity_id`), KEY `FK_CATALO’ at line 9
Tonight I was setting up a staging environment for a client of ours so they would have the ability to “visually” interact with the recent data migration our team has performed (OSCommerce to Magento, in case anyone was wondering).
Here’s the error I was receiving:
ERROR 1064 (42000) at line 382: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘USING BTREE,
KEY `FK_ATTRIBUTE_VARCHAR_ENTITY` (`entity_id`),
KEY `FK_CATALO’ at line 9
The reason behind this is that there is an inconsistency in the way the export syntax was being handled as I imported into the staging environment (which evidently has a different MySQL version running). Thus, the staging site was expecting different syntax for the following:
-- -- Table structure for table `catalog_category_entity_varchar` -- DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `catalog_category_entity_varchar`; CREATE TABLE `catalog_category_entity_varchar` ( `value_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `entity_type_id` smallint(5) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `attribute_id` smallint(5) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `store_id` smallint(5) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `entity_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `value` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', PRIMARY KEY (`value_id`), UNIQUE KEY `IDX_BASE` (`entity_type_id`,`entity_id`,`attribute_id`,`store_id`) USING BTREE, KEY `FK_ATTRIBUTE_VARCHAR_ENTITY` (`entity_id`), KEY `FK_CATALOG_CATEGORY_ENTITY_VARCHAR_ATTRIBUTE` (`attribute_id`), KEY `FK_CATALOG_CATEGORY_ENTITY_VARCHAR_STORE` (`store_id`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=697 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;
As a rule of thumb, one can either
- (1) head over to the MySQL Developer Documentation for syntax reference
- (2) or simply check out a recent Magento export from the server they are trying to import into and determine how the “USING BTREE” statement was handled. Likewise, I simply removed the following:
UNIQUE KEY `IDX_BASE` (`entity_type_id`,`entity_id`,`attribute_id`,`store_id`) USING BTREE,
and replaced it with this:
UNIQUE KEY `IDX_BASE` USING BTREE (`entity_type_id`,`entity_id`,`attribute_id`,`store_id`),
Hope this helps someone who is experiencing the same error and spending way too much time trying to understand the incompatible syntax.