It seems as though everyone always wonders what to do with app/etc/local.xml, and how to best manage it when deploying from development to staging and production. It took me a while to figure this out, but I think I found a really good way.
I feel as though I have to post about this sooner rather than later. A day or two ago, Kalen of MageUpdate posted an article, Mage Core: Keeping It Clean. The idea of the script is to check your Magento installation for properly coded modules. In theory, this is an absolutely great idea, because I can certainly attest that there is a plethora of garbage modules and extensions out there.
Looking into the script details, it's a simple two-step process:
Heroku is a very powerful application deployment system that was initially created for Ruby on Rails apps. But, did you know that Heroku quietly released support for PHP 5? Well, they did, and I will tell you how to deploy Magento to Heroku using Git and Amazon RDS.
Your first step is to unzip your fresh Magento install and get it on git.
For some reason no one can explain, it appears that the event observer checkout_cart_product_add_before never existed in Magento (even though checkout_cart_product_add_after does). Say what?!??
Anyways, it's fairly easy to go ahead and dispatch this event. Just add this to your module's config.xml to rewrite the checkout/cart model:
As it is with almost all Magento projects, you will have times when you need to modify sections of code in custom template files. There are many approaches and ways to handle these changes, but there are some that are more optimal than others.
There is a special case regarding code blocks within conditional logic in which I like to take a certain approach. Let's say we need to make updates & changes to the following file:
To normally target a certain CSS specificity of a page in Magento, you would reference a class in the <body> tag (.cms-index-index, .catalog-product-view, etc.). However, there isn't a way to target the specificity of a certain product type.
While package a Magento extension is very easy, the 1.5 documentation is an epic failure. It is very poorly written, and doesn't show you exactly what to do, what the dropdowns actually mean, or even what to do after you package the extension. There are other documentation pages, but they are bloated and confusing.
There are lots of tips, tricks and hacks on how to enhance Magento. A lot of them are good. Some are entirely wrong! And most do not have each and every update you must make to every single one of your sites in order to get it to achieve the fastest possible load times. This is a list to remedy that situation.
Remember, all of these updates only apply to production environments. Feel free to post comments, updates and suggestions and I will keep this list up to date as much as I possible can. Hopefully, in time we can achieve a golden master list of performance enhancements!
Let me start off my saying that I am a Magento Enterprise Developer, and that I work with both Magento Community and Enterprise editions every day. I also sell customized Magento Extensions through this website.
Performance is the one area of your site that you can make you or break you on the web. Testing out a lot of strategies and hearing about how removing .htaccess files would drastically increase your page speed, I had to put it to the test. The theory behind this tweak is that when AllowOverrides are turned on, Apache checks every single directory to see if an .htaccess file exists, and that this lookup costs valuable web server time in projects that have lots of files (such as Magento and Zend Framework) and could cause latency in page requests.