The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

In my last post I explained how to setup a table of flat rates for shipping.  Magento calls this table rates, but whatever you call it you will have to create a table of values to use to calculate shipping.  In this post I will talk about how to create that table using country codes so that you can assign shipping rates for international shipping.  You will need to do this because you don’t really want to charge the same shipping for the country where you live, and somewhere much farther away. Read the rest of this entry »

Or as I like to call them, “Disaster Recovery Dreams.”  Sure, you need to have a plan before you can test it.  But before you really tell customers, management, team members or even yourself that you have a Disaster Recovery Plan, you need to have it tested.  Until them you are dreaming.

All this does not mean that you test it once, and then leave it to age in the recesses of your file server.  This is a plan that needs to be reviewed periodically.  With every major release.  The parts of the disaster recovery plan like database restore activities need to be requested every few months to make sure that the tasks are repeatable and the backups are valid and ensure that a recovery is possible.

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In another post I talked about using Canonical Links on Magento to preserve the link juice in pages that are found both on their url key and on one or more category paths.  But some people have wondered why they would need to do this.  Well here is that explanation from Google.

Gotta love those guys at Google. This video goes for 20 minutes.  The short version is that if you have a page that can be found at more than one url, (www.example.com/howto/ and www.example.com/tutorial/howto/), search engines that crawl your site won’t know that these should really be the same page.  You will also get people that will backlink to both.

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I know it may sound cleche to state that a picture is worth a thousand words.  But some things are just really difficult to communicate in text.  You may have noticed a few diagrams showing up in my posts here.  Well, I have found that there are times in a conversation with other programmers, and more often in conversations with non-technical collegues that I am saying, “I need a whiteboard.”

Because of this propensity to illustrate my explanations, people have jokingly said that I couldn’t talk if they took my dry erase markers away.  At the same time, being able to communicate with others that are not versed in programming, databases, chemestry, or any other disapline that you find yourself will be a useful skill that will help you with your immediate project, and can advance your career.

I recently had to setup a tiered shipping table for a client on Magento.  I did find some instructions, but there were a few missing steps.  So here is a more comprehensive set of step by step instructions.

This is something that you will need to do if you are spreading and averaging the cost of multiple drop shipping vendors, and shielding your customers from getting unique shipping costs for each product.  You want to make sure that you aren’t gouging your customers, as they will notice and go elsewhere.  And it isn’t nice.  But you also want to make sure that you are not eating into your margins too much.

If you are starting a new store, you will probably be needing to evaluate and adjust your shipping table every week as you get data on the average cost and charge.

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When the definition for a data field or element is undefined or otherwise open to the whim of the user, we are asking for trouble.  Not in the sense that this causes trouble.  But how it is then used that causes trouble.  And this is not to pick on the CDATA tag in XML or ZZ qualified elements in EDI.  It seems that every data format of any size of adoption commits this sin of categorisation.

My general recommendation is to avoid using undefined or user defined data.  Relying on a user defined field that we use to solve a problem by working around some limitation (or perceived limitation) of the file data definition, may give us a feeling of power.  But over the long haul turns the implementation into a proprietary implementation that is not reusable with more than one trading partner.

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Here is a walk through of installing the “Telescope Magento” theme on a 1.3.3.0 Magento basic install.

First download the theme.  (you can find it at the link above.)

When you open this file there is a quick PDF explaining some basics on how to install the theme.  There are also two folders, one is app/ and the other is skin/  both of these could be copied into the root folder where Magento is living.  (yep, there is an app/ and skin/ folders there already.  But you should be able to just copy right over them.) Read the rest of this entry »

Just like synergy, a projects time-line is generally greater than the sum of its tasks.  Taking the time to complete tasks in a project together, there will need to be time between tasks.  Some of this time will just be spent updating people, and coordination of project participants.  There are also other needs, like water and bio-breaks.

Just like productivity during the day generally gives people a 15 minute break every 3 hrs or so.  When we plan our projects, we need to include not just the time that it takes to perform the collective tasks, but other activities that will be happening during the course of the project.

For the past few weeks I have been working in an integration project with the Magento shopping system. As I am doing this I am learning some new things about how it works in the inside. I hope that these insights will be helpful to others that are trying to figure this out and make Magento integrations easier for others.

As always there are a few areas that I plan on covering. Here is my short list: Read the rest of this entry »

Odd errors can occur when you get data that doesn’t fit the format, but matches close enough not to fail outright.  This type of error can be really hard to unravel. Preventing these messy errors, it is a good practice to implement a validation process before processing the data.  Some integration technologies come with validation, if yours doesn’t you should pre-process inbound data for validation.

In addition to this, pre validation can be used as a way to catch and handle other errors early.  Leveraging pre-processing with validation and error handling can give you a one stop place to catch, and report or correct systemic problems.

If you are just starting to use Magento, or you have a Magento that is integrating with another processing system, then it is likely that you don’t want to use the default order numbering increment. If you just need to change the starting number to avoid colliding with existing orders or to make the Magento order numbers resemble an order numbering system that is compatable or similar to what you used before Magento.

In any case you have decided to change the increment ID for your orders.  The fast and easy way is to just change the value in the database.  There are basically two steps.

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Regardless of the standards that you adopt for your integrations, you need to pick some.  EDI, XML, or any of the others.  You need to evaluate and decide on a standard that will do what you need.  And you need to be prepared to present it to your trading partners.

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A strange thing happened to me the other day.  A friend of mine showed me an email he had received from a job applicant.

Okay, that in and of itself is not that strange.  It was really the content of the email.  It went something like this; Read the rest of this entry »

If you are making a module for Magento, you may need to add an attribute, alter some settings or do a variety of things when the Module is installed. Magento has a facility to do this.

Here is an example of a simple way to add a resource to your Module that will run when it is installed. Read the rest of this entry »

The accuracy of the time-line will only be as accurate as the accuracy of the least accurate task estimate.

The time estimate part of project planning is a tricky thing.  Generally there is some guessing involved.  To keep us from falling short a good practice is to pad estimates to account for the unforeseeable.  Project planners can’t just pad and pad.  There is pressure from the other side to keep your estimates accurate and keep your time-line short.  Time is money after all.

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By default Magento makes the name of the product the page title.  And this is way better than having every page have the same title as the main site’s title.  It’s good to have the different aspects of a page, not be identical.  So we have things like description, keywords, title, header tags and other content that does not just repeat the same keywords over and over.

Changing the Title of the product page is one of those opportunities.

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You may have noticed this before, but in case you haven’t, many many many projects are not completed on their due date.

I know this is shocking, and if you are a new project manager, you may want to leave the blog now.  Continuing to read this article may result in the following.

1. Better understanding of the factors that should go into a project plan time-line.
2. More effective communication with the key players in your project.
3. Increased ability to accurately predict the completion time of a project.

If this frightens you…

Well at least you have been warned. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever notice what you are looking for something on a search engine, that much of the time you get a nice, short, descriptive text burb.  Some even have a call to action enticing the searcher to visit the site to buy or find out more?  Well, this is not an accident.  And if you are searching and find your own products from your store, and they nave a block of text that looks amazingly like the short description and gets chopped with a … or something at the end.  Well, that is not an accident either.

If you want to change that so that your items are the ones with the cool, FAB statement with the Call To Action at the end, then here is how to do just that.

First, it is important to make your SRP data as effective as possible.  Better than PPC, the search results are what a searcher is looking for, and is more likely to receive a click through.  So making sure your data tells the search engine what to say about the products on your site, allows you to control this message.

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Learn the basic tools.  Learn them first, and learn them well.  Sure, you can find some fancy XSLT tools or text editors.  And you can carry them around on a thumb drive and install them on all of your computers, workstations, laptops, and servers.  But sometime, some day, you will need to make a change, or fix a problem and you won’t have the fancy tool.

My experience says that this will also happen in the middle of the night when you are under pressure.  Knowing the basic tools like VI and Notepad, and any other tools that are a standard part of your systems will allow you to get your integration back up and running quickly and get you back to bed so you can go in and answer the questions about what happened with just that much more sleep.

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If you are using a tool that asks you to place a tag or script onto your homepage or in every page so that it can track affiliate links or other useful SEO data, you may want to dig into your theme and add it to your header.phtml file.

But on the other hand, you may not.  And sometimes you just need to add a meta tag to show that you own the site to Google or some other entity that tries to make sure it only tracks legitimate data and sites.  And you only need to add it for a verification cycle. Read the rest of this entry »