Archive July 2013

Developing with Vagrant - Part 2

In the first post I wrote a little summary of the vagrant Getting Started Documentation. But the only thing that has been working was a apache. And for my project I need also mysql and php. I did take a look at a repository of Danilo Braband who made a very cool Magento Skeleton with vagrant, n98 and composer. If you are a magento developer, take a look at it.

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Developing with Vagrant - Part 1

In the last 3 years, I had mad a few steps in developing. In the very first days, I had uploaded files with ftp or sftp on the server. After one year I had my first big job in a little team and that was the first time I heard about version control. It sounds crazy, but I never had imagine that there were tools around coding that can bring you such a big benefit. And now, there are that much tools around coding. A good developer has to know so much about things like pipelining, version control, frameworks, desing patterns, testing, security and much more stuff. And today I want to check an other little thing. Vagrant. First I heard about it from Danilo Braband. He made a cool presentation about it, but I was a little bit critical. I thought:"I didn't need more fancy tools, I guess I can live without it". But a few weeks later, I did see more and more little Vagrantfiles on github and in practice it's very efficiently . And today I want to make my own first steps with vagrant.

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How to find the name in layout of a block in Magento

Lesti_Fpc needs the name_in_layout of a block to make that block lazy or dynamic. Magento needs a unique identitfier for every block in the layout. That is the Name in Layout of a block. You can get this name with the following function.

$blockName = $block->getNameInLayout();

Or you can find the name in the layout.xml of your extensions. For example the app/design/frontend/base/default/layout/checkout.xml.

<!-- ... -->
<block type="checkout/cart_sidebar" name="cart_sidebar" template="checkout/cart/sidebar.phtml" before="-">
<!-- ... -->

The searched attribute is name.

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What are Uri Params in Lesti_Fpc?

I have changed the keys in Lesti_Fpc 1.1.1. There was a problem with parameters in the Cache. Not a real problem, but the cache has produced too much keys. That means, more memory for the cache, but the real problem was, the cache had too much misses.

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Create Eventlist in Magento

Events in magento are very cool. Mostly events make it possible to build very modular extensions for magento. In my first steps, I always searched for a full list of magento events. The problem with these lists were, they aren't complete and outdated. And you will never find dynamic events like this.

Mage::dispatchEvent($this->_eventPrefix.'_load_after', $this->_getEventData());

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Piwik - Liberating Web Analytics

A few weeks ago, I wanted to build a little analytics tool. The idea was to send anonym data , to improve the performace of a magento extension (only with the permission of the shopowner). A little bit like mozilla or PhpStorm asks you after the install. But before building a static and very special webservice only for my interests, I decided to search for a tool like this. A tool that can collect requests. And I found Piwiki. A free Web Analytics Software. All I needed was a mysql database and php. I installed it after 5 minutes and was ready to check every request on my blog. I can see every visitor and can see the main problems of my website. All these datas are hosted on my server. There was also a app for my smartphone. There are many plugins for magento, wordpress and so on. I'm that happy with this tool, that I wanted to write a little post about it.

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What are lazy and dynamic Blocks in Lesti_Fpc?

In Lesti_Fpc 1.1.0 I created a new type of dynamic blocks. I call them lazy blocks. First I will explain what dynamic blocks are and what the difference to lazy blocks is.

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