There are a number of benefits associated with doing this before making changes on a live environment:

• The ability to upgrade on the test server as updates become available.
• Test extensions from Magento Connect.
• Developing, testing and implementing new features.
• Get sign off from the client while still in a test environment.

I can then quite easily and efficiently role out these enhancements without fear of complication.

What is vital though is that search engines don’t crawl and index the test environments. This can be done quite easily from within the Magento Dashboard.

Navigate to Configuration -> Design -> HTML Head and set the Default Robots option to ‘NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW’. This should add a ‘NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW’ meta tag to your site.

I have recently been importing a customers products into Magento with varying success. Hopefully this post will point you in the right direction to avoid many of the pitfalls I have discovered.

I have found that the best way to import your products into Magento is to manually create a single product in each category, export the csv file of products, edit the CSV for the new products and then import again.

Export

1. From the Admin Panel. ‘System’ -> ‘Import / Export’ -> ‘Profiles’.
2. Select ‘Export All Products’
3. Click ‘Run Profile’ from the left hand navigation
4. Click the button ‘Run Profile in Pop Up’
5. Download the export from your ‘\var\export\’ directory.

Import

1. After editing and inserting your products, save the file as something like ‘Import Products.csv
2. From the Admin Panel. ‘System’ -> ‘Import / Export’ -> ‘Profiles’.
3. Click ‘Import All Products’
4. Click ‘Upload File’ from the left hand navigation
5. Click ‘Browse’, select the file and then click ‘Save and Continue Edit’
6. Select ‘Run Profile’ from the left hand navigation and select the uploaded csv file from the select box. It will have been renamed.
7. Click the button ‘Run Profile in Pop Up’
8. Take note of any products that are skipped.

Notes

• If you have recently upgraded Magento, some of the field titles and values may have changed. For example, make sure the ‘store’, ‘website’ and ‘type’ fields are lower case.
• Some fields are mandatory like ‘SKU’ and ‘weight’
• ‘tax_class_id’ and ‘visability’ fields are now uppercase
• Regarding images, even if you have the same image for the main image, small image and thumbnail, Magento appears to need different values in here. e.g. productimage1.jpg, productimage1-sm.jpg and productimage1-th.jpg

Hopefully this will clear up some of the issues with importing large quatities of products into Magento.

I am happy to offer this import service if requried on your install of Magento. Please contact me for a quote.

WordPress.tv is Your Visual Resource for All Things WordPress

WordPress.tv is an excellent site and since virtually all the non e-commerce sites I create now are WordPress based, this will become very handy.

Here are a couple of the most common things I get asked about.

Creating New Posts

Adding New Pages

Just a quick tip. I have just designed my new business cards and needed to ensure that the artwork was correctly set to the CMYK colour space needed by my printers.

There are two areas you need to check, ideally before you complete your work else there is probably gonna be some colour correction required.

1. ‘Edit’ -> ‘Color Settings’ and ensure your working spaces and color management settings are setup correctly. If you are not sure about this, contact your printers.
2. ‘Image’ -> ‘Mode’ ->’CMYK Color’.

Easy eh?

Internet Explorer cannot download / from windows.

I assumed this was due to me being an early adopter and a Microsoft would release a fix through Windows Update.

It turns out I was wrong and in fact it was Dreamweaver 8 that I installed and this caused the problem. By default Dreamweaver 8 associates itself as the default editor of xml files and this in turn causes some sort of conflict with the help system. Dreamweaver 8 was release some time before Vista though so I don’t expect this problem with the latest release, Dreamweaver CS3.
To fix this issue, Adobe have released a registry fix which is incredibly easy to use. Download the file from here and extract the files, then run the enclosed file (DW8_Fix_Help_and Support.reg) to fix. You will need administrator rights to perform this action.

This ‘how to’ applies to Vista/XP.

Backup

1. Exit Photoshop CS2.
2. Ensure that you can see hidden files and folders.
   • XP/Vista: From ‘folder options’ and the ‘View’ tab, select the radio button ‘Show hidden files and folders’.
3. Locate your settings folder.
   • Vista: Users\user name\Appdata\Roaming\Adobe\Photoshop\9.0\Adobe Photoshop CS2 Settings
   • XP: Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop\9.0\Adobe Photoshop CS2
4. Copy this folder and archive securely.

Restore

1. Exit Photoshop CS2.
2. Locate the Photoshop CS2 settings folder in the same way as instructed above.
3. Rename the folder to ‘Settings Old’.
4. Copy the archived folder back to ’9.0′ folder.
5. Restart Photoshop CS2.
6. When you are satisfied that you have all your settings and Photoshop is working correctly then delete the ‘Settings Old’ folder.

Always backup before making changes to files and folders on your system.