Archive | Magento

14 April 2010 ~ 0 Comments

Sage Pay System Upgrade

Sage Pay have announced that they have scheduled a major system upgrade beginning Saturday 17th April 2010 at 22.00 hrs UK time. As far as we can tell the main part of this upgrade will involve changing the ip addresses which their name servers work on.

Sage Pay are anticipating minimal disruption (calculated in minutes) while the ip address changes take place – but we have been here before with Sage Pay system upgrades and their track record is not great.

As Internet Service Providers lock onto the ip addresses which name servers use and not the actual names they use we hope that Sage Pay will put in place forwarding from the old ip addresses to the new. If they fail to do this, or fail to do it correctly, or their systems get overloaded with the redirects then you should expect disruption for much longer than a few minutes.

Our advice – if you have alternative payment modules installed but not currently in use, such as Pay Pal, then you should activate them ready for the 17th of April, thus guaranteeing that your customers are able to make payments to you.

Hopefully you won’t need this – but it’s just as well to be prepared!

Link to the Sage Pay email below:
Original Sage Pay Email

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12 March 2010 ~ 0 Comments

Magento and Multi-Sites

One of the things that attracts people to Magento is the ability to run multiple websites from one control panel, with one database and just one set of files. However, there is a lot of debate about whether the Magento multi-site capability can be used successfuly on Shared Hosting. The answer to that question is both “Yes” and “No”, depending upon how you wish to run the different websites. [...]

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09 January 2010 ~ 6 Comments

Zen Cart vs Magento Comparison

Zen Cart vs Magento Comparison

“What cart do you recommend?” is the number one query we get. An easy enough question, but the answer depends on your business and your requirements. To make your choice simpler, we’ve compared the features of our two most popular carts, Zen Cart and Magento, plus our in-house ReadyCart.

Read below for comparison or if you have have experience with either cart, leave a comment about the good and bad bits.

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26 October 2009 ~ 1 Comment

Upgrading Magento

Upgrading Magento

We’ve been asked how easy it is to upgrade Magento. So, there I was thinking, hey – they’ve got this Magento Connect Manager, a few clicks and we’re done. Wrong. Very wrong. Go on to read the tale of the dreaded “500 Internal Server Error” problem (= your permissions are wrong), a small issue with Url.php and why not taking backups is really bad for your health.

The upgrade test was carried out on a standard Magento v1.3.0 install on a Linux with PHP5.2.9. Note that Magento does not allow gradual upgrades, at least not via the Magento Connect Manager. If you use the Manager, it’s all or nothing.

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03 October 2009 ~ 23 Comments

How to install Magento on a PC with XAMPP

After wasting hours yesterday trying to get Magento working on XAMPP, I finally hit a winning combination. So here’s the summary of how to get a local copy of Magento running on a PC. Tested on Windows Vista (32bit) with XAMPP v1.7.1 and Magento 1.3.2.4.

Quick tips

  • Use XAMPP 1.7.1 – the version is important! v1.6.8 may also work.
  • Enable curl in php.ini
  • Install from http://127.0.01 and NOT localhost

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