Elias Interactive

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Screencasts with Jing and Screencast.com

· · 1 Comment

Over the past year, we have been learning some valuable lessons regarding communication. As we’re all involved with the web, communication without “connecting” with the intended party isn’t really communicating at all. We’ve been working to apply this into as many areas as possible within the communication avenues that exist between our team members and clients each day. As an example, we’ve started documenting project requirements (mostly business-uses) via screencasts to communicate within a project.

Josh (Colter) recommended we start using the tools at Screencast.com and Jing. I started today, and am very pleasantly surprised at the ease of these screencast tools. Though I haven’t unraveled all of the features these both bring, I was able to download the software from Jing to record screencasts, as well as the uploader desktop tool from Screencast.com. Within minutes I had created a screencast, uploaded it, and shared it within a project for others to see with nearly perfect quality.

We’ll plan to begin using these for all of our modules, installation overviews, knowledge base support, and other areas to help communicate (and educate) our customers effectively.

Should any of you have another streamlined process or even general thoughts on using multi-media within the work you do, please do share. All is welcome.

Magento Issue: Checkout Redirect With SSL Installation And Sub-Domain

· · 3 Comments

Considering the woes that can come with installing a SSL certificate. Yesterday, we ran into an issue with a client that I wanted to note, just in case anyone else may benefit from the scenario and solution.

logo

Scenario

We had the Magento integrated with SVN and have a post-commit hook that auto-deploys into our root directory on the server, using great server services from sites as ServerMania Montreal Data Center online. We originally had the httpdocs folder and the httpsdocs folder mirroring each other so that the httpsdocs folder would handle SSL (https) requests and the httpdocs would handle all other non-SSL requests.

As we were installing our SSL certificate, we changed the base_url and the secure_base_url to the appropriate (specific) URLs in place of the {{unsecure_url}} and {{secure_url}} generic values. All of a sudden, as soon as SSL installation was complete, the frontend would no longer transition from the “shopping cart” (url: http://cart.crankbrothers.com/checkout/cart/) into the “checkout” (url: https://cart.crankbrothers.com/checkout/onepage/). The checkout URL would redirect back into the shopping cart.

Solution

We realized that the sub-domain and shared docroot setup (httpdocs and httpsdocs, together) could be creating the issue. Thus, we simplified our setup (cheers Eric Dennis) to make httpdocts the separate docroot for both HTTP and HTTPS requests.

Game, set, match. Problem solved. By the way, you should check out Crank Brothers for a working example 🙂

Hope this helps save time for someone else!

Magento: Quick Change in Column Count for Products Displaying In Category Listing (Grid View)

· · 8 Comments

Hi All,

Figured I’d share a quick Magento snippet (There are several I’d like to share each day. For some reason this particular one seemed quick enough to post).

Want to change the number of products that display in the Magento Category listing?

You’ll need to modify these two files:

  • app/design/frontend/default/YourThemeName/layout/catalog.xml (default theme line 198)
  • app/design/frontend/default/YourThemeName/layout/catalogsearch.xml (default theme line 61)

See the screenshot for the variable columnCount()? In order to change that, go to the following file and add in this snippet:

  • app/design/frontend/default/YourThemeName/layout/catalog.xml (default theme line 198)
<action method="setColumnCount"><columns>3</columns></action> <!-- set your own number -->

catalog.xml

And also this snippet:

  • app/design/frontend/default/YourThemeName/layout/catalogsearch.xml (default theme line 61)
<action method="setColumnCount"><columns>3</columns></action> <!-- set your own number and insert <em>inside</em> the "search_result_list" block tags-->

catalogsearch.xml

Magento Database Import Error: USING BTREE, KEY `FK_ATTRIBUTE_VARCHAR_ENTITY` (`entity_id`), KEY `FK_CATALO’ at line 9

· · 33 Comments

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.