Blog

May 19, 2011

I recently wrote an article explaining how to add arbitrary translations to your Magento site using an empty plugin to allow you to attach a translations csv file. You can read the original here: [Custom translations file in Magento][1] Anyway, this is all well and good if you are adding text to your plugin or suite of Magento plugins that need to be translated. Of course, if this is the case then you already have a plugin to put the translations in but hopefully my post explains how that is done.

May 17, 2011

I just came across an odd situation in Ruby on Rails where I was working on a fairly complicated form where sometimes you displayed and were editing an existing record, but sometimes you were displaying a blank form and creating a new one. This all worked when I originally was just creating a new record each time but when I also allowed for users to update the data using the same form I hit a problem.

May 12, 2011

I have been recently working on a Magento template that required plenty of changes to the product lists and grids and some way down the line I realised that the search results weren’t playing by the rules. In the catalogsearch layout file an action called addColumnCountLayoutDepend to set the number of columns depending on the template that is being used. Obviously you want to show more columns in the search results if you have the space to do so.

May 6, 2011

Most WordPress templates don’t seem to support displaying the descriptions for categories, tags and the author bio’s. Here is a quick explanation of how you add that information into your WordPress admin and then how to change your templates to display it. The main reason for wanting to do this is simply to provide a little extra supplementary information on lots of your blogs pages – but it may also have some benefit for SEO as well.

May 5, 2011

This was a simple site based on a HTML home page, with a javascript calculator and a wordpress blog simply attached with the same design. The application form is a third-party component and so I simply built the design in HTML, CSS and Javascript and implemented in WordPress.

Apr 28, 2011

I am pretty sure I missed the boat with this one but I feel like I should do my bit to contribute to the worthy cause of getting some decent Javascript documentation at the top of relevant google searches. The basic problem seems to be that some of the sites out there occupying the top spots have been there for so long and have built up such a reputation for google that they aren’t going anywhere soon.

Apr 28, 2011

This is a strange problem that has cropped up on Magento sites I have been building a couple of times now. There seem to be plenty of people with a similar problem, so I figured it was worth casting it out onto the Internet in the hope somebody might find it useful. This only happens on your dev/test server. Symptom You have been developing your Magento website using Firefox but when you view it in Chrome or Internet Explorer Magento tells you that you need to enable cookies.

Apr 26, 2011

A gently paddle around – a lovely way to spend a bank holiday monday in Guernsey. I started out from the slipway at Rousse and paddled across to Chouet, it was quite windy so there were a fair few waves and it was quite hard work. Once I was across the bay at Chouet, I paddled inland and by the time I reached sheltered Ladies Bay it was really calm. A gentle paddle across the bay again and back towards Rousse, followed by a quick look around the headland and it was time to go.

Apr 21, 2011

This is mainly just a quick reference for myself because I keep getting this error and have to search the internet for the solution. Basic problem is that on Ubuntu gems that use the nokogiri library for XML parsing require libxml2 which isn’t usually installed. When you try to install certain gems such as nokogiri or mechanize, either through gems directly or through bundler, get a message about missing dependencies – and when you wade a little deeper that libxml2 is missing.

Apr 15, 2011

I recently started experimenting with creating my own page templates and using the layout update XML to add content into the page. This works well for more complicated page designs and is particularly suitable for the homepage or landing pages. I did hit a minor snag however and that was when I added a product list or grid I couldn’t see how to specify the number of columns the grid should contain.