Posts on Luis Tineo

Zend Queue with Magento

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 12:53:00 -0400

By using Zend Queue with magento we can create an event driven asynchronus integration system.

Just think about how much work you will offload from Magento when integrating with other systems and Magento itself.

To keep things simple, let’s pretend that you send emails to your customers everytime a new product gets added. Usually these products get added during the day which also happens to be when your customers are most active buying in the site. An alert about a new product is very important but you don’t want to bug down your email server. That’s where Zend Queue comes to the rescue. In this example I am using mysql to store the queue. If you follow the same example remember to create the tables first, these can be found under: lib/Zend/Queue/Adapter/Db/mysql.sql

Cloning magento modules

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 12:37:00 -0400

Cloning magento modules will never this easy again.

Today I wanted (read was forced) to create a module based on one of Magento’s core. Literally I needed to clone some of the Magento modules and while the copy and paste is simple stuff, going class by class and file by file renaming and configuring files is not joke.

So why do I need to clone it instead of just doing the usual OOP stuff Magento is so good at? Simply because the functionality is really different in most files and settings. So creating a payment method or paygate or giftcard module is easier when you have an skeleton to work with. Think about it, how different is paying with PayPal from Google Checkout? Functionality wise not that much, essentially they do the same thing but implement it differently.

Full Page cache with nginx and memcache

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 12:32:00 -0400

Since the cool kids at Google, Microsoft and Amazon researched how performance and scalability affect conversion rates, page load time has become the topic of every eCommerce store.

Magento was once a resource hog that consumated everything available to it and you had to be a magician to pull off some awesome benchmarks without using any reverse proxy or full page cache mechanism. Creating a full page cache with nginx and memcache is really simple (right after hours of research).

Connect to a wireless network through the command line

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 17:21:00 -0400

Sometimes you decide that you don’t want to use any GUI to connect to your wireless network, especially when it doesn’t seem to work.

One of the main benefits of Linux and any other Unix based operating system is its ability to empower users to do things on their own. So tonight when the latest Ubuntu updates broke my laptop’s wireless, I decided to write a little script to fix it.

Dirt cheap way to make magento fly

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 16:47:00 -0400

There are several ways to accomplish the same task and some are more elegant than others.

This one makes any Magento community edition fly and is cheap and quick (read no Magento compliant - because it modifies the templates)

In other words while this trick can help you boost your Magento store server response I am not too proud of it.

Why is that a big deal? I am not a huge fan or changing templates, even if they are “allowed”.

PHP Offloading... Nginx helps so much!

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 18:06:00 -0400

So let’s continue our attempt to improve Magento’s performance and this time around let’s focus on the web server itself.

There are a bunch of web servers out there but the most known are, a least to me: Apache, Nginx and Lighttpd

My favorite, and of course I am biased here, is Nginx and it approach to serving content. As you may all know Nginx is an event-based web server and the main advantage of this asynchronous approach is scalability.

PHP offloading for better performance

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 22:19:00 -0400

So you recently launched your PHP application (read Magento) just to realize that it is really slow even though you have state of the art hardware, software and it is configured to kick ass. You decided to install varnish to help full page caching and your CDN, which it only has gzipped merged and minified assets, to serve content faster now your site seems to be flying but New Relic still reveals so many bottlenecks specially for the fillers you needed to keep some dynamic content rocking.

FireFox vs Virtualized environments

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 13:55:00 -0400

Firefox rocks no doubt about it… but using more memory than virtualbox just to run magento is not cool at all!

This is why I really dislike using FireFox and love using SwiftFox. How come Firefox is taking 2GB of ram, that is as much as my virtualized Ubuntu Desktop and more than my virtualized ubuntu server. In other words with that much memory I could be running a few more computers.

Varnish implementation hints and good to know

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 00:30:00 -0400

Sharing knowledge is always a good idea. Lately I have been doing lots of integration with Varnish and Magento with different clients and it will be interesting to find out if you have any ideas or suggestions (read improvements) to make it better and ultimately help the community even more:

Setting up varnish in switch mode:

In my home directory I always have a bash aliases (vim ~/.bash_aliases) file where I add the following iptable rules:

Magento 301 Redirects

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 09:10:00 -0500

Did you ever want to create a redirect in a Magento Store without having to use htacess?

Using Observers and the powerful Request and Response objects from Zend Framework you can. In this example I will show how you can do it.

First you need to create the module, more on module creations here: http://goo.gl/vvT2j.

Create a directory under app/code/community and name it FooBar, then create another directory under FooBar and name it Redirect. Create two directories inside FooBar: etc and Model.