Category Archives: Administering Magento

Fedex Web Service Change: Impact on Magento & Free Patch

Earlier this week some Magento merchants began to experience issues with the standard FedEx carrier including issues retrieving rates, tracking information, and generating labels. Magento Certified Developer Phillip Jackson (www.somethingdigital.com; on Twitter @philwinkle) was one of the first to dig into this issue and helped us narrow down the cause. What happened? Beginning on Sunday, March […]

Also posted in Fedex | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Responses

Importing Transactions in to Sage 50 Accounts

Let me preface this by saying, I am by no means an expert in Sage 50 Accounts. However, we’ve had a few enquiries on how to use our Sage preformated export from Order Export. It is pretty straightforward to take the transaction details from this csv and upload directly to Sage 50 Accounts. In Sage […]

Posted in Administering Magento | Leave a comment

Tracking with Royal Mail

Anyone using Royal Mail tracking links lately will have noticed that when they click on the link, it redircts to a generic tracking page and doesn’t carry accross the tracking number which isn’t great for your customers. This is because Royal Mail have quietly changed the tracking link and format you need to use. The […]

Also posted in Shipping in Magento | Comments closed

VAT in the EU using Magento

VAT – what’s the deal? WebShopApps is based in the UK and we sell extensions all over the world, so like many eCommerce businesses, we have had to get our head around VAT rules. Our understanding is that: VAT is charged at your local VAT rate to all non-VAT registered customers based in the EU […]

Also posted in Developing with Magento | 10 Responses

Installing Community Extensions via Command Line (SSH)

I never really liked the idea of having to change permissions of my magento install to add on new extensions. So here is how to do via SSH. Obviously this only works if you have SSH access to your website. Firstly, navigate to base magento directory ./mage mage-setup ./mage -V ./mage list-channels ./mage install connect20.magentocommerce.com/community/ […]

Posted in Administering Magento | 1 Response

Adding New Regions/States to your Magento Installation

You may have noticed that Magento doesn’t include the Region/State information for a lot of countries. This can be particularly frustrating if you’re trying to set up your shipping rules and would rather use states than postal codes or if you just want to show a nice drop down on the front end of Magento […]

Also posted in Developing with Magento | Comments closed

Tiered Pricing on Configurable Products

A customer recently came to us with a query around configurable products and tiered pricing. Lets say, for simplicity, he was selling soap. A large soap and small soap are different prices. He wanted to configure tiered pricing on the soaps, with discounts for multiple purchases, but obviously the tiered prices differed across products.

Here’s the products we’ve created to demonstrate…..

Posted in Administering Magento | Comments closed

What’s changed in Magento 1.4.2

Changes that may affect us The new 1.4.2 version of Magento Community has now been updated to a release candidate status, and will probably be live by the end of 2010. According to Magento, it’s mainly a bug fix release, but there are a few items that may affect our extensions. One of the biggest […]

Posted in Administering Magento | Comments closed

Importing/Exporting Magento Databases

Magento Databases can get pretty big. Here are some commands to help with import/export. Exporting: mysqldump -h localhost -u <username> -p <dbname> > <exportname>.sql Importing: mysql -h localhost -u <username> -p <dbname> < <importname>.sql e.g. mysql -h localhost -u karen -p auctionmaid < auctionmaid.sql If you need to transfer this file off the server via […]

Posted in Administering Magento | Comments closed

Upgrading your magento site without downtime

Before you put on a load of changes to a live site it’s advised to test. Obviously we hope you’ve tested locally, etc, but what if you have an external theme that’s been updated, and how do you test in as close to live as possible?  Here is your answer: Backup your live database – […]

Posted in Administering Magento | Comments closed