Why I lost my work? One of the frustrating aspects of utilising a digital system is when the system experiences an unexpected behaviour. It is frustrating, as all the work previously done tends to get lost and has to be done all over again. In the early years of word processing, the auto-save feature or [...]
My technical design is flawless It is a well known fact that developers tend to consider their product as their perfect creation. Thus, it is very difficult for them to understand that there might be scenarios that can occur, although not explicitly specified in requirements. The next sections show why introducing failover mechanisms does not [...]
Introduction A step in the project lifecycle is requirements gathering. During this stage in the project lifecycle the operation conditions are defined for the code that will be developed. However, whichever project management model is adapted, requirements are meant to change. Craig Brown in his articles on Better Projects has suggested that on average requirements [...]
Magento Enterprise comes with a very useful extension to close a Magento site either completely or partially. For example, you can close the entire site until an upgrade is completed or you can lock a store to only registered users. How It Works? When Magento receives a request it starts routing the request through the [...]
Some time ago, we analysed how C# Properties are emitted by IL. In this article we will extend our view by investigating how C# 3 (and later) Automatically Implemented Properties (or Automatic Properties) works. But first, let’s see how these properties are used. In order to use Automatic Properties, one needs only to declare the [...]
Magento installations normally use the URL /admin to access the back-office. To change the admin URL to something different: Open the/app/etc/local.xml file In the section 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 <admin> <routers> <adminhtml> <args> <frontName><![CDATA[admin]]></frontName> </args> </adminhtml> </routers> </admin> Change the CDATA value for frontName to the new admin address. For [...]
Menus are an integral part of any website. Elgg defines two classes that help in building and rendering menus. The first class provided is ElggMenuItem. The second class provided is ElggMenuBuilder, which provide methods that help in rendering menus using the ElggMenuItem objects. Adding Items to menu Adding items to a menu requires: Create a [...]
The Magento indexing mechanism is one of the core functionalities that improve a site performance. However, when programming bulk imports of data it is ideal to stop the indexing until the import is completed. For two reasons, first the indexing will slow the process, as on each line of data imported a reindex of data [...]
Note: This article is based on the article Magento quick way to create order invoice published on 10 June 2010. Update 13 June 2011: Please note that it is recommended that API version 2 is used. The article has been updated to reflect this recommendation. Also please note that the capture() method is not required [...]
Static blocks are a means of allowing store owners to modify the text displayed in sections of a page from the admin site. For example, a static block can be added to the header to show seasonal promotions. Static blocks can be added to templates through the use of layout files. Adding a static block [...]
