Design Disclosure – Portfolio & Personal Blog of Alistair Stead

While at Magento Imagine I have used the time where I was awake due to jet lag to finish a couple of new features to MageTool.

MageTool v0.3.0 now includes:

• Improved feedback when running commands for mage-core-resource
• Added commands to query and run the Magento indexer
• Added commands to query and run the Magento compiler
• Improved mage-core-cache commands
• Added functionality to run individual module setup classes directly
• Added functionality to dispatch Magento events to test your observers

All of these commands are intended to make development of Magento extensions easier and more streamlined. If you have feature requests please let me know. Or if you wish feel free to fork the project on GitHub and add the command that you need.

If you find and bugs with MageTool please raise a ticket on GitHub.

While at Magento Imagine I have used the time where I was awake due to jet lag to finish a couple of new features to MageTool.MageTool v0.3.0 now includes:Improved feedback when running commands for mage-core-resource Added commands to query and run the Magento indexer Added commands to query and run the Magento compiler Improved mage-core-cache commands Added functionality ...

If you have spent any time developing with Magento I expect that like me you have found a number of tasks you find yourself repeating many many times. While developing new modules or themes there are many times when you need to clear the Magento cache or even disable it completely. Now of course you can log into the admin system and carry out these actions but have you every thought there must be an easier way?

Many development frameworks or other open source projects have tool that can be used by developers to issue commands quickly and easily. Magento however does not have any built in tools to improve the development workflow. This is where MageTool fits in!

MageTool

How can MageTool help? Well hopefully in a number of ways. MageTool extends the existing Zend Framework command line tool zf, adding new commands that are specific to Magento development workflow. Rather then navigating the Magento admin system to clear cache or the enable or disable caching you can issue a simple command in your terminal window and achieve the same results. You can also modify the Magento configuration quickly or issue commands that will selectively update many configuration values.

In my standard development practices I maintain a number of Magento installs on different servers. These are used for Development, Staging and UAT each using different domains to access the stores. This means however that I often need to move databases between servers, resulting in the ‘base_url’ configuration being incorrect. This can be easily updated if you have database access and is fairly simple if you only have a couple of sites setup. However if you have more sites setup this can become very very difficult to maintain and calls into question the idea of working with many environment servers during development.

MageTool can help again in any situation where you need to move a Magento install and then update the ‘base_url’ configuration. You can construct a command that will quickly and easily update all URLs in the Magento config.

Read More…

If you have spent any time developing with Magento I expect that like me you have found a number of tasks you find yourself repeating many many times. While developing new modules or themes there are many times when you need to clear the Magento cache or even disable it completely. Now of course ...

In a previous post I described some of the reasons why you would want to store your session data in an alternate location to temporary files on your server. I explained the setup of database session storage using Doctrine and how this would allow you to take advantage of storing session data in a database. However depending upon your application requirements storing your session data in a database may cause excessive load on you database. You could of course use a separate dedicated database server to store your session data. However there is an alternate setup that will allow you to centralise your session storage ready for horizontal scaling of your hosting e.g. adding additional web servers.

Read More…

In a previous post I described some of the reasons why you would want to store your session data in an alternate location to temporary files on your server. I explained the setup of database session storage using Doctrine and how this would allow you to take advantage of storing session data in a ...

Sessions are normally managed by your server and depending upon how involved you get with the PHP setup you need never know how this data is stored. The default setup for PHP is to store session data in temporary files on the server. So why would we want to change how sessions are handled and what advantage can we gain from any changes we make.

Why use database session management?

Sessions allow you maintain persistence within PHP applications. With every HTTP request a PHP application must re-assign every variable and object needed in your application. Sessions allow you to store data that is required to persist past each HTTP request allowing it to be easily retrieved and used.

Read More…

Sessions are normally managed by your server and depending upon how involved you get with the PHP setup you need never know how this data is stored. The default setup for PHP is to store session data in temporary files on the server. So why would we want to change how sessions are handled ...

I’ve been very busy with a number of project launches lately. While working on a little problem today I re-discovered a little gem for use with Propel to update multiple rows in a single statement, rather than iterating through a collection updating and saving each object in turn.

This task is simple in SQL but after a while using any abstraction layer you may find like me you forget about the simple solutions as you spend you day working with complex objects and trying to hydrate custom objects. Blah blah blah…

The complex solution to a simple problem:

// Obtain the connection configured
$conn = Propel::getConnection(YourObjectPeer::DATABASE_NAME);
// Create a Criteria object that will select the correct rows from the database
$selectCriteria = new Criteria();
$selectCriteria->add(YourObjectPeer::COLUMB_TO_SELECT, 'value_to_match');
// Create a Criteria object includes the value you want to set
$updateCriteria = new Criteria();
$updateCriteria->add(YourObjectPeer::COLUMB_TO_CHANGE, 'value_to_be_set');
// Execute the query
BasePeer::doUpdate($selectCriteria, $updateCriteria, $conn);

Thats it! I hope it helps…

I've been very busy with a number of project launches lately. While working on a little problem today I re-discovered a little gem for use with Propel to update multiple rows in a single statement, rather than iterating through a collection updating and saving each object in turn.This task is simple in SQL but ...