Stephan Miller
Building Websites, Traffic, and Income
The Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook
Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook
Development in Magento
I would have to say that I chose Magento in the first place because it would have a lot of the features we would need available without writing or editing code.
It turns out, that wasn’t so. There will never be a platform you don’t want to tweak, and Magento code may be some of the most complicated PHP code you have seen. It was when I first dug into it.
There were no books at that time and I depended on forum posts to get my answers and I made many mistakes long the way.
I love cookbooks. Telling me how to write the code, documentation or giving me a toy example may help a bit. But a cookbook with real code is something that gives me ideas. And that’s just what the Magento Development Cookbook is.
Pentaho and Apatar, My Two Strangely Named Free Data Friends
- Image by rickbradley via Flickr
I have to admit that cool tools like these will eventually make certain types of programmers worry about job security. But I see it as a tool. I have an idea about the movement of data that will make me money and then I have to figure out the way to get that done. You see, I deal with masses of data for the most part. They make me money.
Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook Review
This is the third Magento book I have reviewed at this blog. The first book took a beginner through the basics of adding products to and running a Magento store and not much more. The second book was for Magento Developers interested in extending Magento’s functionality. So both of those books covered the “build it” part of running an online store with Magento. And this book covered the “and they will come” part of running your store.
A Review of Magento 1.3: PHP Developer’s Guide
- Image via Wikipedia
Let me guess. You’re an in-house ecommerce developer. About a year or so ago you heard about this slick ecommerce software called Magento. You’re skeptical but you see a large community and free extensions. So you think you can make it work.
Yeah, you can start with that default Magento theme. It’s better than that crappy table driven one you are currently using with osCommerce anyway. So you start with the default theme. And all is well until you try to get that stupid dog picture off of the sidebar. Some of you might have just stopped there and I can’t say that wasn’t a wise choice. But for those of you who stuck with it, this is probably only the first WTF moments in a long line with Magento.
What’s New with Magento
First, let me tell you that I will soon be receiving the Magento 1.3 PHP Developer’s Guide to review. Magento has an architecture link no other software. Hopefully this book sheds some light on developing with Magento and beats hunting a pecking through the forums. The last book I bought for a CMS was one for Drupal. With WordPress, I picked up everything I know online.
How to Host Your Own Blog in 5 Minutes for $10 a Year
A few weeks ago, I just happened on a really cheap hosting company called NearlyFreeSpeech and nearly free is right. To host the average WordPress blog, it will cost you about 2 cents a day. Beat that GoDaddy. There is no billing. You fill your account up and you get that amount of hosting. $10 may last you longer than a year. I threw $5 in my account just to play around. It should last me until the end of summer and I have 8 domains there I am setting up. As they get traffic, I will move them away to VPS hosting for more power, but for now it works and it is very low cost.
NearlyFreeSpeech has some idiosyncrasies like you can’t set up cron jobs. But you do get SSH access to your accounts and that is about all you get. No Fantastico. No One Click Installs.
I had been doing a lot of SSH work lately installing Magento sites, so I figured I could find out a way to speed up the process for WordPress. I made a video which I will break down here first because it does not have the first three steps:
- Get a NearlyFreeSpeech account
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