Magento price not saving multi scope/store

Just ran into this issue on a multi store view website in the admin backend, it seems because the product price scope is global unless you have a module to override this functionality the price should only have one attribute value, and each time you save the product in any store view you are essentially saving one price to store 0 the admin store.

If you used an importer or some other process to import your products you may find that there are incorrectly two records in the catalog_product_entity_decimal table

entity_tbl

You can look at the data via this query, replacing ATTRIBUTE_ID with your product ID

SELECT * FROM catalog_product_entity_decimal WHERE attribute_id = ATTRIBUTE_ID

How to fix?

In my store the price attribute is 75 it may differ though, there should only be one entry for store_id 0. If you now delete that row you will be able to save the product price. You can delete all these values in one line. (please backup your database first.)

DELETE FROM magento_db.catalog_product_entity_decimal WHERE attribute_id = 75 AND store_id = 2

Where store_id is the additional store entry and magento_db is your database name.

I’m Joel a magento developer/freelancer based in St Albans

I’m a developer for Magento, I have developed many custom modules for my clients, some of my work includes:

  • Banner Management
  • Product display grid allowing the user to control the homepage inserting blocks of video,products,reviews,offers etc
  • Landing page builder tool – making it easy to create many pages at once around several different keywords
  • Price checking module – Automatically checks google shopping for defined competitor prices, matches pricing and updates the products via Google’s Merchant API in realtime.
  • Customisation of SOLR Bridge plugin
  • WordPress Integration
  • Magento Custom Theming
  • Custom PayPal response for error messages
  • Cardinal Commerce 3DS integration
  • Trade only configuration
  • Removing shipping and payment steps from the checkout
  • Extending Magento’s REST API and building a custom REST API
  • Integrating Loyalty points system, custom events to update MailChimp
  • MailChimp Integration
  • Social discount module – offering discounts at the checkout for social actions
  • Custom email templates
  • Integrating Amazon Payment module

I’m based in the London, St Albans, Watford area and available for a consultation, primarily I prefer to work by email.

Configuring Magento for Trade only

Magento never fails to amaze me in it’s flexibility and it’s ability to configure the site for almost any business objective. One popular choice might be a trade only site to use it as a platform for wholesalers or partners to purchase large quantities of goods.

trade

When thinking about this configuration usually you would want some of the below:

 

– Independent store per customer

– Customer can only access the catalog once logged in

– Remove registration or have approval only

– Prices only visible to logged in members

– Sell the same SKU to different customers at different prices

– Remove checkout payment option

– Restrict address and delivery address alterations

 

Independent store per customer

Magento does support multiple store’s per website, so a new store view can be set up per customer, but to get this to work as intended as Magento allows the customer to login to any store, which you may want to restrict. You can add a store attribute to the customer profile and then check this attribute upon login and redirect the customer to the correct site, no matter where they log in at.

Customer logged in Catalog

This is pretty straightforward again adding a check in the header to see if the customer is logged in, otherwise redirect to the login page.

Remove registration

You may want to disable registration if your using the API to update Magento or have an approval process , there is a free module on Magento Connect that allows approval. It’s also worth disabling persistent login in the configuration so there is only one login page to edit.

Prices only visible to logged in members

As above , if you wanted the site to remain accessible to the public but just hide the pricing, a simple customer session check will do the job.

Customer groups for different pricing

Supported out of the box, although if your running multiple stores this probably becomes redundant.

Remove checkout payment option

This is a little bit more tricky, and involves editing several files there’s a guide on doing just that here there are some changes needed for 1.9.1 though that aren’t covered in that article.

Restrict address and delivery address alterations

You will most likely want to restrict address changes as these are orders on account, here you can set the input/selects to disabled.

 

Thinking about starting a trade only Magento website and require a consultant? Please get in touch.

Developer Shortcut – Bash script menu to connect to servers via SSH

Managing various servers can get quite repetitive entering various IP address’s or even remembering them in the first place! Lets solve that with a simple bash script depending on wether your doing this from a server or on your local environment the location of your bash_profile may be different but the steps are the same.

Your profile is usually in /home/users/yourname/.bash_profile

nano /home/users/yourname/.bash_profile

Open up this file and add a new line at the bottom

alias connect='bash /Users/yourname/menu.sh'

What this is doing is saying when I type connect in the terminal run menu.sh, you could change this word to another word of your choice.

Change the location of menu.sh to suit your needs, save and close.

Make a new file called /Users/yourname/menu.sh and inside put:

#!/bin/bash
# Bash SSH Menu

PS3='Please enter your choice: '
options=("mysql" "web"  "Quit")
select opt in "${options[@]}"
do
    case $opt in
        "web")
            echo "Connecting to web 10.0.0.1"
            ssh [email protected]
            break
            ;;
        "mysql")
            echo "Connecting to mysql 10.0.0.2"
            ssh [email protected]
            break
            ;;
"Quit")
            break
            ;;
        *) echo invalid option;;
    esac
done

Here we are setting up the menu options in the first line, in this case mysql and web which refer to my web and mysql server but these could be named whatever you like, the next part is similar to a switch statement in PHP, for each case print that we are connecting and then SSH to the IP. Finally a quit option and a default option to handle invalid requests.

If you use this in conjunction with SSH keys it will save a lot of time.

Extending magento’s REST Api v2 – Tutorial

In this post I’m going to go through all the steps you need to make in order to extend the REST Api, there is very little documentation scattered around on this and I had to pull pieces together from various official sources, not only that but the responses Magento gives you can at times be confusing and does not really give you a hint to what the problem is, finally this is a full guide so no knowledge is assumed other than setting up the rest roles/users and assuming you have ssh access on the server.

This guide is split into two parts. Part 1 configuring REST access and Oauth setup, Part 2 extending the Api if you already have the api access and oauth configured correctly then skip to part 2.

Part 1 – configuring REST access and Oauth setup

Firstly set up your roles/users follow the guide on the Magento site

  • Add a new user with an admin role
  • Add all resources to the role in Role Api Resources
  • In Rest attributes for the admin role select All resources
  • Add a new consumer

Install/Configure Oath

it’s likely you won’t have this set up on your server, this needs to be installed via PECL, if you do want to check that you don’t already have it, check phpinfo(); and see if you have these lines:

oauth

It’s important here to have curl in the Request engine support, if you don’t this means you need to install curl (apt-get install php5-curl) or oauth has not been installed correctly. If you do have it you can try upgrading

pecl upgrade oauth

or you may have to uninstall/reinstall if for example you didn’t have curl before installing oauth.

pecl uninstall oauth

There is another caveat with 1.2.3 of oauth and that is Magento uses the multi update HTTP_MULTI_STATUS with a 207 response code when you issue PUT requests to update multiple items. In this version of oauth it incorrectly gives Invalid/bad auth response when using this response code, to get around this you can compile your own version with a fix (the bug has been fixed in the latest SVN release).

If your not bothered about using the multi update via PUT then go ahead and install oauth

pecl install oauth 

To compile your own version download it from the PECL site http://pecl.php.net/package/oauth

Replace oauth.c with the fixed version

Upload all the files into a directory, if you haven’t already then issue the following commands a line at a time: (replace extname with the directory your working with)

$ cd extname
$ phpize
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

This should now have installed the extension correctly, you can check by doing:

pecl info oauth

And by looking at the phpinfo(), ok so now oauth is configured correctly we can run some tests.

Create a directory in the root of your site, e.g /tests and create a file called customers.php place the following code below changing:

  • mydomain.com
  • CONSUMEY_KEY
  • CONSUMER_SECRET

You can get the key and secret from System > Web Services > Oauth Consumers > Select the appropriate key you set up earlier.


<?php

require '../app/Mage.php'; //Path to Magento
Mage::app();

// $callbackUrl is a path to your file with OAuth authentication example for the Admin user
$callbackUrl = "http://mydomain.com/tests/customers.php";
$temporaryCredentialsRequestUrl = "http://mydomain.com/oauth/initiate?oauth_callback=" . urlencode($callbackUrl);
$adminAuthorizationUrl = 'http://mydomain.com/admin/oauth_authorize';
$accessTokenRequestUrl = 'http://mydomain.com/oauth/token';
$apiUrl = 'http://mydomain.com/api/rest';
$consumerKey = 'CONSUMER_KEY';
$consumerSecret = 'CONSUMER_SECRET';

session_start();
if (!isset($_GET['oauth_token']) && isset($_SESSION['state']) && $_SESSION['state'] == 1) {
 $_SESSION['state'] = 0;
}
try {
 $authType = ($_SESSION['state'] == 2) ? OAUTH_AUTH_TYPE_AUTHORIZATION : OAUTH_AUTH_TYPE_URI;
 $oauthClient = new OAuth($consumerKey, $consumerSecret, OAUTH_SIG_METHOD_HMACSHA1, $authType);
 $oauthClient->enableDebug();

if (!isset($_GET['oauth_token']) && !$_SESSION['state']) {
 $requestToken = $oauthClient->getRequestToken($temporaryCredentialsRequestUrl);
 $_SESSION['secret'] = $requestToken['oauth_token_secret'];
 $_SESSION['state'] = 1;
 header('Location: ' . $adminAuthorizationUrl . '?oauth_token=' . $requestToken['oauth_token']);
 exit;
 } else if ($_SESSION['state'] == 1) {
 $oauthClient->setToken($_GET['oauth_token'], $_SESSION['secret']);
 $accessToken = $oauthClient->getAccessToken($accessTokenRequestUrl);
 $_SESSION['state'] = 2;
 $_SESSION['token'] = $accessToken['oauth_token'];
 $_SESSION['secret'] = $accessToken['oauth_token_secret'];
 header('Location: ' . $callbackUrl);
 exit;
 } else {
 $oauthClient->setToken($_SESSION['token'], $_SESSION['secret']);

$resourceUrl = "$apiUrl/customers";
 $oauthClient->fetch($resourceUrl, array(), 'GET', array('Content-Type' => 'application/json'));
// print_r($_SESSION);
// die();
 echo $oauthClient->getLastResponse();
 }
} catch (OAuthException $e) {
 print_r($e->getMessage());
 echo "<br/>";
 print_r($e->lastResponse);
}

This should first ask you to authorise , proceed and accept the request and if all goes well you should now have a list of customers in JSON format, if you don’t want JSON then replace the fetch with


$oauthClient->fetch($resourceUrl, array(), 'GET', array('Accept' => 'text/xml'));

If you’ve got this far your now ready to extend the API, If you get any other response check that you have assigned the role properly and everywhere there is a resource dropdown it’s set to ALL. I’m not going to cover how to do this in a browser as well as Magento provides a guide on this , follow the guide you can get the access token/secret by uncommenting the two lines in the above script:


// print_r($_SESSION);
// die();

Part 2 extending the Api

Assuming you’ve set up the access and oauth correctly, (note incorrect oauth set up may look like it’s working when it isn’t!).

Let’s create a custom call for managing customer groups, create the following structure:

app/code/local/Custom
app/code/local/Custom/Restapi
app/code/local/Custom/Restapi/Groups
app/code/local/Custom/Restapi/Groups/Model
app/code/local/Custom/Restapi/Groups/Model/Api2
app/code/local/Custom/Restapi/Groups/Model/Api2/Group
app/code/local/Custom/Restapi/Groups/Model/Api2/Group/Rest
app/code/local/Custom/Restapi/Groups/Model/Api2/Group/Rest/Admin
app/code/local/Custom/Restapi/Groups/Model/Api2/Group/Rest/Admin/V1.php
app/code/local/Custom/Restapi/Groups/etc
app/code/local/Custom/Restapi/Groups/etc/api2.xml
app/code/local/Custom/Restapi/Groups/etc/config.xml

Enable our extension, create the following file

app/etc/modules/Custom_Restapi_Groups.xml
<config>
    <modules>
        <Custom_Restapi_Groups>
            <active>true</active>
            <codePool>local</codePool>
        </Custom_Restapi_Groups>
    </modules>
</config>

Set up the config.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
    <modules>
        <Custom_Restapi_Groups>
            <version>0.1.0.0</version>
        </Custom_Restapi_Groups>
    </modules>
    <global>
        <models>
           <groups>
                <class>Custom_Restapi_Groups_Model</class>
            </groups>
        </models>

    </global>
</config>

set up the api2.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
    <api2>
        <resource_groups>
            <catalog translate="title" module="api2">
                <title>Catalog</title>
                <sort_order>10</sort_order>
            </catalog>
        </resource_groups>
        <resources>
            <groups translate="title" module="api2">
                <group>catalog</group>
                <model>groups/api2_group</model>
                <title>Groups</title>
                <sort_order>10</sort_order>
                <privileges>
                    <admin>
                        <retrieve>1</retrieve>
                        <create>1</create>
                              <update>1</update>
                              <delete>1</delete>
                    </admin>

                </privileges>
                <attributes>

                    <name>Name</name>
                </attributes>

                <routes>
                    <route_entity>
                        <route>/groups/group/:id</route>
                        <action_type>entity</action_type>
                    </route_entity>
                    <route_collection>
                        <route>/groups/</route>
                        <action_type>collection</action_type>
                    </route_collection>

                </routes>

                <versions>1</versions>
            </groups>
        </resources>
    </api2>
</config>

Here the resource groups refer to which group it appears in the backend role configuration in the admin, it’s title and sort order and the privileges available, The attributes section is important for when your using POST if you do not specify the variables your posting you will get an error 400 bad request.

Finally we define our routes another important note here is when using PUT/POST you need to use the action_type collection as certain methods are only available to the collection type, if you unsure or trying to replicate how the default api works have a look in the api2.xml of the module for example this is the same as /app/code/core/Mage/Customer/etc/api2.xml

 <routes>
                    <route_entity>
                        <route>/customers/:id</route>
                        <action_type>entity</action_type>
                    </route_entity>
                    <route_collection>
                        <route>/customers</route>
                        <action_type>collection</action_type>
                    </route_collection>
                </routes>

Now that’s set up lets populate our model in V1.php

<?php
class Custom_Restapi_Groups_Model_Api2_Group_Rest_Admin_V1 extends Mage_Api2_Model_Resource
{

    /**
     * Create a customer group
     * @return array
     */

    public function _create() {
        //Create Customer Group
        $requestData = $this->getRequest()->getBodyParams();
        $groupName = $requestData['name'];
        Mage::getSingleton('customer/group')->setData(
            array('customer_group_code' => $groupName,'tax_class_id' => 3))
            ->save();

        $targetGroup = Mage::getSingleton('customer/group');
        $groupId = $targetGroup->load($groupName, 'customer_group_code')->getId();

        if($groupId) {
            $json = array('id' => $groupId);
            echo json_encode($json);
            exit();
        }

    }

     /**
     * Retrieve a group name by ID
     * @return string
     */

    public function _retrieve()
    {
        //retrieve a group name by ID
        $customerGroupId = $this->getRequest()->getParam('id');
        $groupname = Mage::getModel('customer/group')->load($customerGroupId)->getCustomerGroupCode();

        return $groupname;

    }

}
?>

Now we have our extension completed let’s try it out in a test, create the file groupInsert.php in the tests folder as before replace mydomain and the keys..

<?php

require '../app/Mage.php'; //Path to Magento
Mage::app();

// $callbackUrl is a path to your file with OAuth authentication example for the Admin user
$callbackUrl = "http://mydomain.com/tests/index.php";
$temporaryCredentialsRequestUrl = "http://mydomain.com/oauth/initiate?oauth_callback=" . urlencode($callbackUrl);
$adminAuthorizationUrl = 'http://mydomain.com/admin/oauth_authorize';
$accessTokenRequestUrl = 'http://mydomain.com/oauth/token';
$apiUrl = 'http://mydomain.com/api/rest';
$consumerKey = 'CONSUMER_KEY';
$consumerSecret = 'CONSUMER_SECRET';
session_start();
if (!isset($_GET['oauth_token']) && isset($_SESSION['state']) && $_SESSION['state'] == 1) {
    $_SESSION['state'] = 0;
}
try {
    $authType = ($_SESSION['state'] == 2) ? OAUTH_AUTH_TYPE_AUTHORIZATION : OAUTH_AUTH_TYPE_URI;
    $oauthClient = new OAuth($consumerKey, $consumerSecret, OAUTH_SIG_METHOD_HMACSHA1, $authType);
    $oauthClient->enableDebug();

    if (!isset($_GET['oauth_token']) && !$_SESSION['state']) {
        $requestToken = $oauthClient->getRequestToken($temporaryCredentialsRequestUrl);
        $_SESSION['secret'] = $requestToken['oauth_token_secret'];
        $_SESSION['state'] = 1;
        header('Location: ' . $adminAuthorizationUrl . '?oauth_token=' . $requestToken['oauth_token']);
        exit;
    } else if ($_SESSION['state'] == 1) {
        $oauthClient->setToken($_GET['oauth_token'], $_SESSION['secret']);
        $accessToken = $oauthClient->getAccessToken($accessTokenRequestUrl);
        $_SESSION['state'] = 2;
        $_SESSION['token'] = $accessToken['oauth_token'];
        $_SESSION['secret'] = $accessToken['oauth_token_secret'];
        header('Location: ' . $callbackUrl);
        exit;
    } else {
        $oauthClient->setToken($_SESSION['token'], $_SESSION['secret']);
        $resourceUrl = "$apiUrl/groups/";
        $productData = Mage::helper('core')->jsonEncode(array(
            'name'      => 'test_group'
        ));
        $headers = array('Content-Type' => 'application/json');
        $oauthClient->fetch($resourceUrl, $productData, 'POST', array('Content-Type' => 'application/json'));
        echo $oauthClient->getLastResponse();
    }
} catch (OAuthException $e) {
    print_r($e);
}

Run this file in your browser and you should get a JSON response with the name and ID, likewise we can get the group ID from a name by replacing $resourceURL and $oauthClient with the following:

 $resourceUrl = "$apiUrl/groups/group/1";
 $oauthClient->fetch($resourceUrl, array(), 'GET', array('Content-Type' => 'application/json'));

That’s it, you’ve now extended the API! If you want to use the other methods for example to GET all groups you will need to write the various functions, check your exception log to see what function is required as you will get an error similar to:

#0 /var/www/website/app/code/core/Mage/Api2/Model/Resource.php(301): Mage_Api2_Model_Resource->_critical('Resource method...')
#1 /var/www/website/app/code/core/Mage/Api2/Model/Resource.php(251): Mage_Api2_Model_Resource->_errorIfMethodNotExist('_update')
#2 /var/www/website/app/code/core/Mage/Api2/Model/Dispatcher.php(74): Mage_Api2_Model_Resource->dispatch()

Then simply add this to your class , monitor the exception log for other errors too, sometimes I would receive the error

exception 'Mage_Api2_Exception' with message 'oauth_problem=token_rejected' in /var/www/website/app/code/core/Mage/Api2/Model/Auth/Adapter/Oauth.php:61

When I didn’t have the correct attribute set up or something else was wrong event though the token was valid, the other errors your likely to encounter

exception 'Mage_Api2_Exception' with message 'Decoding error.'

The input here is wrong check your JSON/XML formatting

exception 'Mage_Api2_Exception' with message 'The request data is invalid.'

Did you add the correct attribute?

exception 'Mage_Api2_Exception' with message 'Resource data pre-validation error.'

The data is not in the expected format, for example if your trying to populate a multi-select attribute this needs to be in an array with the correct ID’s

Please do get in touch if you have anything to add to my example or i’ve missed something or alternatively if you would like your own API developed or help writing one.

Scraping Google Shopping for Magento or any Ecommerce platform

If you advertise via Google’s product listing ads and sell products that are commercially available elsewhere , it’s key to be competitive on price, one way of doing this is through Google Shopping as all competitors who also advertise on Google are of course publishing their prices and most do. If your business is very price driven or there’s some lines you would like to be competitive on then this is a unique way of keeping up with your competition.

The module can work in a variety of ways or be configured to work in a way that suits your business , I would be able to integrate it into other ecommerce platforms.

The main functions are:

  • Lookup a product on Google Shopping record pricing data
  • Price matching feature beat or match a competitors price – Automatically set the product price
  • Define which competitors you need to match or beat
  • Other conditions e.g not going below the product cost price
  • Works for grouped or single products
  • Trigger other functions upon product save
  • Receive a report of what products where changed, when and which competitor
  • Display competitor prices vs your price on the product view

Integration with Google Shopping API:

As well as updating the prices on your store, it can now also update Google Shopping directly via the Google Shopping API. Without this you may run the risk of the product listing ads being pulled because the prices in your feed are not up to date.

Of course the above runs on auto pilot and can run once a day or however frequently you need it, a daily file can be uploaded/emailed to your site

Contact me to find out more about this or discuss a project you have in mind that involves scraping google for Magento Ecommerce.

See squareprice.co.uk

Responsive design for Magento Checkout

One part of Magento that performs particularly poorly on Mobiles is the use of tables mainly because there just isn’t enough room to see everything in a legible manner.

Some clever people have invented ways to overcome this through scrolling tables http://zurb.com/playground/responsive-tables or http://elvery.net/demo/responsive-tables/ but for ecommerce I don’t think it works well as the information often important information is hidden without scrolling the table.

For example on the cart table you typically would get something like this

responsive

Which on mobile looks like this

squashed

I find it’s easier to have a hidden alternative layout for mobile

mobile

 

[code]
@media screen and (max-width: 800px) {

#shopping-cart-table {
display:none;
}

#shopping-cart-mobile {
display:block;
}

}

[/code]

This is only shown at the breakpoint you define in my example 800px at the same time hiding the normal table output.

This method does create extra markup though and a more organised approach might be to have a separate theme but this would rely on sniffing out the user agent and has the expense of keeping another theme up to date with any changes.

Perhaps the best solution is to ditch the table markup all together for DL’s, I would like to hear your thoughts.

Speed up Magento without Varnish Cache – The Alternatives

More often than not you should probably stay clear of implementing varnish in Magento until you’ve exhausted all other options. It seems like the Holy Grail in terms of performance and will literally make your site fly, the problem is Magento is a complicated beast and any extension you use that claims a quick integration with Magento couldn’t be further from the truth! (unless of course your using a stock site, unmodified.) It’s likely you will need a ton of customisation and debugging to any of the Varnish plugins you can buy off the shelf. Not only that you will need to set up additional servers, learn how to debug varnish and it’s various admin tools and generally spend a lot of time getting it to work properly.

Turpentine offers the most reliable product from the one’s I tested but with limited documentation and help your going to struggle to get it set up correctly. The official Varnish Pagecache extension from the makers of Varnish isn’t much better, with a number of unfixed bugs and generally poor documentation, but before getting into all that you should really consider your options on improving the site speed without the use of Varnish.

Firstly set a benchmark for how your site is now, go over to http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ and record the speed of the homepage, category pages etc as you make each change you can run the tests again to track your progress

Optimisation for any platform

  • Tune .htaccess for speed , Creare have an excellent blueprint here
  • Use a CDN for images Pica CDN works with Amazon, Rackspace and many others
  • Install SOLR search free for CE edition alternatively this plugin works well and offers a more comprehensive set of features (be prepared for some debugging depending on your site) both these plugins require tomcat server to be installed
  • Use a CDN for content delivery e.g CloudFlare
  • Remove redundant code , php comments, html comments anything that adds to the page load however small
  • Minify your media files (JS,CSS etc) there’s a few extensions for this most widely used is the fooman speedster
  • Remove any unused styles or JS
  • Organise your main theme assets into CSS sprites
  • Reduce the quality of the images (save your images in the smallest file size possible) ideally combine the main images into a sprite
  • Use the cloud for your DNS, this can shave off an extra 50MS+ depending on your current provider, CloudFlare and other providers offer this service.
  • Use DNS pre-fetching , resolve the IP address for your assets before you use them. Something for modern browsers – Find out more in this guide from Mozilla
  • Use HTML5 browser caching through an app.manifest there’s an excellent guide on html5rocks
  • Move blocking JS to the footer, Google’s pagespeed insights offers a great tool for this (you can only do this for fonts, and external JS libaries. Don’t try moving Magento’s Core JS to the footer). Some libraries need to be in the header.

Client Side

A modern approach

Most browsers now support HTML5’s new app cache,  a cache on the users browser but browser already do that right? Yes they do – However AppCache works differently in that it’s designed for Apps where the user isn’t always online and in doing so when a cache is created on the clients side and when a page is loaded, cached resources are loaded directly from the cache, no connections to the live site, no checking if there’s a newer version –  a big speed increase.

However there’s some downsides to using this approach on how the cache expires and clearing it,  rather than re-iterate a very good explanation can be found on http://alistapart.com/article/application-cache-is-a-douchebag. I’m working on a module for Magento the makes use of AppCache if you have any thoughts please leave a comment.

Server Side

Tune Apache

Apache users can achieve quite a performance boost from tweaking the configuration:

  • Put .htaccess rules directly in your vhost conf and turn off htaccess – Magento has hundreds of directories and files each time a call is made to a file apache has to recursively loop through all these to check for .htaccess files. It might not sound like much but it can make a difference. Not only this you will be securing your server from exploits.
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>

You can find more about some of the settings here http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/misc/perf-tuning.html

  • Check the apache config,  are the settings correct for your server spec? There’s numerous guide on this so I won’t detail this here, you could also try adjusting settings and running the benchmark several times to see what works best, in normal load and under stress.
  • There’s 25 tips here on tweaking apache

Use Nginx + PHP-FPM

Nginx uses much less resources as it works a bit differently from Apache, if your already familiar with Apache and don’t have the time to learn how to use Nginx it’s probably best to take it as far as you can with Apache before considering this option, if you already use it then it works pretty well out of the box. What you might need though is some extra configuration settings there’s a guide here on that.

Make sure you install php-fpm if your running nginx.

apt-get install php5-fpm

In most cases the above configuration can be left as is in nginx, if your using port 9000, you will want to edit the php-fpm configuration usually www.conf found in:

/etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/

Change the user and group to match that of your nginx installation as default this is www-data

; Unix user/group of processes
; Note: The user is mandatory. If the group is not set, the default user's group
;       will be used.
user = www-data
group = www-data

There are three different ways of running php-fpm and that is ondemand,dynamic or static I won’t go into the detail of these, but i’ve found ondemand to work better for Magento which basically runs as many process’s as is required up to a maximum rather than fixing a certain amount to be running all the time. It’s worth noting here you can enable a status page that gives you some information about what’s going on.

pm.status_path = /status

In your php-fpm uncomment this line, you can then visit website.com/status to get an output, there’s a great tutorial on using php-fpm status page here.

Tweak Mysql

There’s many guides out there on mysql and I make no claims to be an expert these settings have helped

skip-name-resolve
log_slow_queries       = /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log

If your mysql is listening locally e.g bind-address in my.cnf says localhost or 127.0.0.1 etc then you don’t need to resolve the name , this will avoid any delay from the DNS.

The rest of your config should be configured as per the report from mysqltuner, if that’s new to you check out this post on how to use it.

Redis

I have recently come across Redis It’s an extremely fast cache storage engine and works seamlessly with Magento, it does require some server configuration but I would say this is one of the easiest to configure and get up and running quickly. There’s also support for sessions via Redis Sessions have not tried this yet but also looks very solid as of CE 1.8 Redis comes part of the default install so it’s as simple as configuring it via the local.xml if you want to find out more there’s some benchmark information here and a guide to using Magento with Redis on the Magento Site.

HHVM

Review coming soon on this.

APC caching

Install it onto your server

sudo apt-get install php-apc
sudo service apache2 restart

Whilst it’s installing make a note of the version, we will need this later to tweak the settings e.g

Get:1 http://uk.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/universe php-apc i386 3.1.7-1 [79.2 kB]

Enable it via/magento/app/etc/local.xml and add the following lines (note if you have more than one Magento Install on the same server make sure the prefix is unique for each one)

<global>
        ...
        <cache>
            <backend>apc</backend>
            <prefix>alphanumeric</prefix>
        </cache>
        ...
</global>

Tweaking APC couldn’t be easier, first check what version is installed (as noted earlier) download and browse the archive which matches on http://pecl.php.net/package/APC

Inside there will be a file called apc.php , you need to put this somewhere that is served by Apache or Nginx ideally on a password protected area of your site.

What you want to achieve here is a high Hit ratio and little fragmentation, usually this happens because there is not enough memory allocated to APC. You can alter this setting by changing the config file in /etc/php5/conf.d/apc.ini or wherever your php install is located until you achieve the desired result.

it should look something like this:

extension=apc.so
apc.enabled=1
apc.shm_size=500M
apc.max_file_size=3M
apc.enable_cli=1

shm_size
The maximum amount of memory APC can use, one it runs out it has to purge cached items which leads to fragmentation.

max_file_size
The maximum file size that can be cached by APC, this defaults to a low value and I would recommend changing this to 3M or 5M.

Memcache

There’s a decent guide here on installing Memcache once you’ve done that follow this guide on enabling it in Magento

Single split servers

This is generally a good idea for failover, and that’s to have a separate MySQL and Web Server, this takes the load off one server and allows you to upscale each individually. Ideally if you have enough traffic also separate out the SOLR instance. Splitting the connection between mysql and your web server can have negative effect though depending on the connection between each you will need a gigabit connection to remove network latency so if you haven’t got much load coming from apache/nginx then it’s probably not worth it.

Google PageSpeed

This can be installed server side on Apache as a module or Nginx (Nginx requires a re-build) , this allows you to do a lot of optimisation on the fly like removing whitespace, minifying JS/CSS and even optimising images. more about Google PageSpeed

App code

Non-Varnish Caching (build your own)

Magento’s built in cache

There’s a few ways to add caching that don’t involve varnish, first is that Magento comes with comprehensive caching out of the box.

There’s really only four methods available to us.

save($value, $key, $tags = array(), $lifeTime=null)
load($key)
remove($key)
clean($tags = array()

So let’s add something to the cache in this example we are retrieving the lowest price from a grouped product, it’s pretty intensive as it has to loop through each simple product to retrieve it’s price. The prices don’t change very often so we don’t have to do this everytime!

// load the cache
$cache = Mage::app()->getCache();

// The Code we are caching
if(!$cache->load($_product->getId())) {

// The cache doesn't exist
$aProductIds = $_product->getTypeInstance()->getChildrenIds($_product->getId());
                                    $prices = array();
                                    foreach ($aProductIds as $ids) {
                                        foreach ($ids as $id) {

                                            $aProduct = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($id);
                                            if($aProduct->isSaleable()) {
                                            $prices[] = $aProduct->getPriceModel()->getPrice($aProduct);
                                            }
                                        }
                                    }
                                    asort($prices);
                                    $prices = array_shift($prices);
                                    $grouped_price = $helper->currency($prices,true,false);
// save
$cache->save($grouped_price, $_product->getId(), array("grouped_prices"), 3600);
} else {

// load the saved price
$grouped_price = $cache->load($_product->getId());

}

echo $grouped_price;

So in the above block we are:

  1. First checking if the the cache named “id of product” exists
  2. If it returns false we then run the code to save the price to the cache with a lifetime of 1 hour (3600 seconds) and with a tag of array(“grouped_prices”)
  3. If the cache doesn’t exist we run the code as usual
  4. In all scenarios $grouped_price is returned with the price

If you don’t set a lifetime value then the item would be cached until it’s removed manually, to remove this value earlier than 1 hour we would do so by using remove

$cache->remove($_product->getId());

We can also remove by the tag if for instance you wanted to clear the cache for all grouped product prices you can use clean.

$cache->clean(array("grouped_prices"));

Full Page caching and others

Unicache Inchoo

This builds on the default caching system but really only offers convenience and an admin section allowing you to clear the cache for individual items. check it out here

Lesti FPC

Gordon Lesti wrote his own FPC for Magento, it’s easy to install follow the guide on using it, although this suffers from the same problems as using Varnish if you have custom blocks you will need to configure them for the site to work properly. However it does not require additional servers or software so it cuts a lot of set up time.

Do you know of any other ways to speed up Magento?, get in touch.

Quafzi Performance Tweaks

Recently came across this module, that offers a lot of optimisations based on recommendations from Ecommerce devs

https://github.com/quafzi/magento-performance-tweaks

One thing I had to disable on this particular module is the CMS block caching if for example like me you are using it to load a template that changes for each product category. It’s well commented so it’s easy to see the particular changes that might affect your site.

Add affiliate window to Magento

It’s straight forward to add affiliate window into Magento, there are a few extensions but you don’t need them.

Edit your checkout success page which would usually be in app/design/frontend/yourpackage/yourtheme/checkout/success.phtml

Add near the top inside the php tags

// get the order
$order = Mage::getModel('sales/order')-&gt;loadByIncrementId($this-&gt;getOrderId());
// get the total
$total = $order-&gt;getGrandTotal();
// get order data
$_totalData = $order-&gt;getData();
// helper for the price formatting
$helper = Mage::helper('core');

Then add anywhere in html part of the page (replace MERCHANT_ID with your merchant ID). I’ve omitted the Category here as it’s optional

<!-- Image Pixel Tracking - Mandatory -->
    <img src="https://www.awin1.com/sread.img?tt=ns&tv=2&merchant=MERCHANT_ID&amount=<?php echo $helper->currency($order->getGrandTotal(),false,false); ?>&cr=<?php echo $_totalData['order_currency_code']; ?>&ref=<?php echo $this->getOrderId() ?>&parts=default:<?php echo $helper->currency($order->getGrandTotal(),false,false); ?>&vc=<?php echo $_totalData['coupon_code']; ?>&ch=aw&testmode=0&cr=<?php echo $_totalData['order_currency_code']; ?>" />

    <form style="display:none;" name="aw_basket_form">
        <textarea wrap="physical" id="aw_basket">
            <?php

            $items = $order->getAllItems();

            foreach ($items as $item) {

                echo "AW:P|MERCHANT_ID|".$this->getOrderId()."|".$item->getProductId()."|".$item->getName()."|".$helper->currency($item->getPrice(),false,false)."|".$item->getQtyToInvoice()."|".$item->getSku()."|default|";

            }

            ?>
        </textarea>
    </form>
    <!-- Javascript Tracking - Mandatory -->
    <script type="text/javascript">
        //<![CDATA[
        /*** Do not change ***/
        var AWIN = {};
        AWIN.Tracking = {};
        AWIN.Tracking.Sale = {};

        /*** Set your transaction parameters ***/
        AWIN.Tracking.Sale.amount = '<?php echo $helper->currency($order->getGrandTotal(),false,false); ?>';
        AWIN.Tracking.Sale.currency = '<?php echo $_totalData['order_currency_code']; ?>';
        AWIN.Tracking.Sale.orderRef = '<?php echo $this->getOrderId() ?>';
        AWIN.Tracking.Sale.parts = 'default:<?php echo $helper->currency($order->getGrandTotal(),false,false); ?>';
        AWIN.Tracking.Sale.voucher = '<?php echo $_totalData['coupon_code']; ?>';
        AWIN.Tracking.Sale.test = '0';
        AWIN.Tracking.Sale.channel = 'aw';
        //]]>
    </script>

Finally in your footer app/design/frontend/yourpackage/yourtheme/page/html/footer.phtml

<script src="https://www.dwin1.com/5715.js" type="text/javascript" defer="defer"></script>