If you are or have used Magento, do you think it is living up to the promise?

Why or Why not?

Welcome to eCommerce Evolved … Welcome to Magento
Video Rating: 4 / 5

For me, I am in the USA, so I will have domestic rates for USA, a set of rates for Canada, and then I just threw out a bigger rate for all other international shipping.  I don’t really have a market there, but if someone wants to pay it, then I will want to sell to them but not have shipping eat up all of my margin.

And I want to use a table rate as I have a variety of vendors that don’t all charge the same for shipping.  I am averaging their costs to me, and providing a simple, single shipping cost to my customers.

Country Codes:

First we need to get the country codes to use for our table.  These codes will be the first column of data.

I got a list from here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-3

I just cut and past them into a spreadsheet and then took only the country code column and made it into a text file for my script. I called the file countrylist.txt. And I moved it into the same directory where I made my script.  Since this is not something that you will be running every day, I just left it mostly primitive.

You can also get a list of countries from the Magento DB if you know where to look.  Here is a query that will pull that table.

SELECT *
FROM directory_country

You will want to use the iso2_code for your list of country codes.

Writing the Script:

Now you will need to write a script (I use perl) that will read the list of country codes, and creates a csv file in the right format to be uploaded to Magento.  The CSV file will have one or more lines for each country depending on how many shipping tiers you have.  My tiers are based on order dollar value, and country destination.  But you could do the same thing with a weight based table you would just need to modify the script to fit that format.

Here is a picture of my script that you can use if you like.  It is pretty primitive, but it does the job.

Things to note about this script and process:

• (As I said, in my countries list I removed USA and CAN from and have to add those rows manually to have separate shipping charges for domestic shipping and Canada.)
• (I also removed ROU, as Magento does not know what that country is.  So no selling to Romainia.  But if you get your list from the Magento DB you won’t have to remove anything, but you will still be missing this country.)
• (And don’t leave a blank line at the end our you will have a blank country.)

Results

Running the script will create a table that looks like this:

If you need to create separate shipping rates for a single country you can edit the file for that country.  And in a case where you want to adjust shipping for sub-country regions, you can add lines for a country with states or zip codes  to give those areas special shipping rates.

If you want to make groups of shipping rates, you can separate the country codes in the countrylist.txt file and edit the script accordingly.  Or you can make a more complex listing of values to loop through and really edit this script to make a really complex table and set of tiers.  I kept this example simple  on purpose.

Of course, if you create multiple csv files, you will need to merge the files into one tablerate.csv file to upload to Magento.  Magento only takes one upload as the complete shipping table.  If you get crazy, you may want to create a script that will merge your multiple shipping tables into a single file.  But really this is just a CSV file and we probably won’t ever need to do that far.

Remember.  Uploading this table will replace the current table.  This does not just add the new rows or rules.  So you will have to update your table of shipping rates all at once.

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.

These cause the relevance and value of your page to be distributed across both url indexes of the search engines.  Using canonical link tags tells the search engines that no matter where it came from or the path used to get to the page, that it should be indexed as the link specified in the canonical link tag.

This keeps all of the relevance and backlink and other types of link juice concentrated to the one URL specified.

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.

If you want to check out the wiki page about this on Magento Commerce, go here. http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/how-do-i-set-up-table-rate-shipping.  But all of the information is also in this post.

Step 1: “Enabling Table Rates”

Login to Admin and go to System>Configuration

On the Left side navigation click on Shipping Methods in the Sales group.

Expand the Table Rate in the main window and set enabled to “YES”

We are calling this “Standard Shipping” so if this is a new install, change the Title to this.  (This is what is displayed to the web site user and on their emails)

Make sure to  set condition to “Price vs. Destination”

Calculate should be fixed, and handling should be “0″ if you have no handling charge.

Now save the Config before you move on or your changes will be lost.

Step 2.  “Creating or Modifying the Rates Table”

Now again on the left side navigation, find the “Current Configuration Scope” and select your “Main Website”.

For clarity it should look like this exactly:

Thanks Clockman

(If you need to, navigate back to the Table Rate.  Sometimes it seems to know you need to be there, other times you are at the root of the configuration settings after selecting the Main Website.)

Now you have an “Export CSV” button, and an “Import” file selection Menu

If you need to get the format, click on the export button and save the current table to your desktop.

When you are ready to upload, click the “Browse” button off of the “Import” option, and select the file with the table you are ready to upload.

Remember. Uploading this table will replace the current table. This does not just add the new rows or rules.

Then save the config to upload the new table.  (for some reason there is no “import” button)

Now you have just updated the table rate shipping.

Tomorrow I will list the instructions for getting and creating a shipping table including international shipping.

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.)

Now you will need to login to your admin page of your store.

Go to the System>Configuration menu.

Then click on design in the navigation on the left.

To change configuration to use the new theme, put the name of the the template folder in the Template, Skin and Layout folders.  Place “default” into the Default blank.  (you can find the name of the folder by browsing to the app/design/frontend/default/ folder.)

Be sure to click the “Save Config” button, and you are done.  Now you can browse to the front page of your store and see your new theme.

The logo is located at “skin/frontend/default/Telescope_1.2/images/” starting at the Magento root directory.

(You might want to change the logo.  You can find a logo.gif file at “skin/frontend/default/Telescope_1.2/images/” off of the magento root.  Use it as a template to make a log file the same size and replace it.)
Amazon.com Widgets

As always there are a few areas that I plan on covering. Here is my short list:

• Structure of Magento’s database.
• Importing data.
• Exporting data
• Extracting data directly from the database
• Building extensions that help with integrations.

Please feel free to comment and ask for me to add to this list.
Amazon.com Widgets

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.

Step 1.  Find the Store ID.

Even if you have only one store, you don’t want to guess at your store ID.  Log into mysql and run this query.

SELECT store_id, name FROM core_store;

This will return your store name and its ID.

Step 2.  Update the order increment ID for your store.

Run this query.

UPDATE eav_entity_store SET increment_last_id = [new order value]  WHERE store_id =[your store id] and  entity_type_id  =11;

Make sure to put in the new increment value where [new order value] is, and your store id where [[your store id] is in this query.

Changing other increments.

If you need to change the other increment values like the Invoice Increment or the Shipment Increment, use the same query in Step 2, but change the entity_type_id to 16 for invoices and 19 for shipments.  You can find these and other entity type ID values in the eav_entity_type table.

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

I received the sample specification that you sent me.  But I have no experience with Magento, and have never claimed to have any experience in Magento.  I don’t write code that require learning a new framework without a signed contract.  So if you want me to learn a new framework we will need a contract.

Or something like that.

Well we had a good laugh, and then continued to have a good laugh as we crafted our response.  It went like this;

<?php
/**
* Magento Developer Process
* How to get an interview
*/
$you = Mage::getModel('workforce/applicant');
$company = Mage::getModel('workforce/employeer');
if($you->hasFinishedEvaluation()){
if($you->getEvaluationLevel() >= $us->getExpectedLevel()){
$us->haveYouInForAnInterview($you);
} else {
$us->saySorry($you);
}
} else {
$us->ignore($you);
}
?>


So I don’t know if this will make any sense to most people.  And this code does not actually work in the Magento framework to do anything.  So don’t run it.  But it was fun to encode an answer that will also probably not be understood by the job applicant.

Here is an example of a simple way to add a resource to your Module that will run when it is installed.

Creating the directory and file stucture needed for the install script:

Normal file structure for a Module in Magento goes something like this.  Starting with a name space for your Module from the app directory, /app/code/local/NameSpace  where “NameSpace” is your company or project.  Inside NameSpace we create a directroy named logically or functionally after what you want the module to do.  I tend toward the functional, so if I were making a example module, the path is /app/come/local/NameSpace/Example/

Inside Example we create the etc/ directory, the Model/ Block/ Helper/ controler/ directories as needed.

For the install script we create a directory called:  sql/ and inside this directory make a directory called example_setup.  This is where we will place the install script.

I recommend not trying to be fancy with naming of directories and files here and just following the pattern.

Naming the Install script:

Name the file of your install script mysql4-install-X.X.X.php  (where X.X.X is the version number of the config.xml file.)

The X.X.X number can be longer or shorter, but follow the pattern to avoid problems the first time you do this.  The version number in the config.xml file must match the version for the install file.  This number links these files together so they will be executed at the right time and in the right order, and not executed again after the first time for the install.

If you have seen other modules that use the install scripts, you will probably see that they also utilize upgrade scripts.  The  functionality is the same, but the nameing convention changes to be a range of versions.  For an upgrade the file should be named; mysql4-upgrade-X.X.X-Y.Y.Y.php  (where the X.X.X is the former version, and Y.Y.Y is the new, current version.  Make sure you also change the config.xml file version number to the Y.Y.Y or your script won’t execute.

Adding the resource to the config.xml file:

Just adding the install and upgrade scripts won’t make them run.  You also need them to be registered as resources in the config.xml file for your module.  This is actually very simple to do.

open your config.xml and find or create the <global> node.  It should be a child node of <config>

add a resource node like this:

        <resources>
            <example_setup>
                <setup>
                    <module>NameSpace_Example</module>
                </setup>
                <connection>
                    <use>core_setup</use>
                </connection>
            </example_setup>
        </resources>

Of course you will replace the ‘example’ in the <example_setup> tag with your module name. And the NameSpace with your name space.

I recommend adding this after your create your install script. Once you add this, Magento will add your module to the recource table with the version number.

Testing that your script is being executed:

The install script is just a php script.  So the cheapest way to make sure that you have all of the setup done correctly is to use a die statement.

In the top of the PHP file, just say die(‘The Example Install Script is executing here.”);

At this point, when you go to your Magento on any url, Magento will detect the uninstalled resource.  And it will run the install script and show you the die message as the only response.

It will look like your store is gone.  But once you remove the die statement, everything will work like before.

One thing to note is that the die statement will prevent Magento from registering the resource in the DB, so it is important to have the die statement before you run any other changes or Magento will run them again after you have removed it.

A quick note on Module and Versions:

The first time you build an install script, you may need to run it several times to make every thing work correctly.  An easy way to do this if you have access to your Magento Database is to delete the resource out of the database to force it to run the install script again.  Its located in the core_resource table, and indexed with the child node tag of the <resource> tag.

So a SQL statement would look like this:  DELETE FROM core_resource WHERE code = ‘example_setup’;

Of course you will need to add a table prefix to ‘core_resource’ if you are using one, and use your module’s setup tag.

However I strongly caution against deleting resources from the table after they have moved to the upgrade scripts.  Doing so will tell Magento to execute all of the install and upgrade scripts, and this can wreck your store.  I did this on accident deleting the sales_setup resource and had to reinstall.  It was a sad day.

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

Changing it manually is pretty straight forward.

Log into the Admin Pannel, and go to the Catalog>Manage Product menu

From there select the item that you wish to update.

On the left side you will see a navigation menu with “Meta Information”

Select that options and you will see this form:

The very first field is Meta Title.  This is the field that you need to update to change the title of the Product Page to a SEO or alternative value.

Simply put the title in this field.  Do not put any HTML or other markup here as this will not work and may break your page when it displays.

Click on the Save button.

And you have just update the title of the Product page.

If you are managing your catalog by uploading a spread sheet, look for a column called “meta_title” and use this field for your SEO content.

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.

And control of your message is what helps you get traffic from search results.

Here is how the search engines decide what text to use.  They use the <meta content=”description”> tag contents.  Its really that simple.

But looking back at our store’s SRP data, and we still see the chopped short description.  Well, when nobody tells Magento what to use for the meta description, it defaults to the description.  This is better than nothing.  But we can do better, and there is a straight forward way to tell Magento what we want to say to the search engines.

If you go into the Catalog>Manage Products menu, you sill have these options:

Select the “Meta Information and look at these three fields:

Meta Title allows you to use an alternate title for the item product page.  You might want to create a SEO page title.  If you leave this blank, Magento will use the product’s name as the page title.  Again, this is better than nothing.

Meta Keywords allows you to specify item specific keywords.  You might want to do this to enhance your SEO of this page.  If you don’t enter anything here, it will use the keywords from the configuration web settings.

Meta Description allows you to specify the description that you want the search engines to use.  This field has a max of 255 character, but you should keep it to under 160 so that you don’t have your description truncated.  This is also not the place to pack keywords.

I recommend a simple statement that showcases a selling point.  A FAB statement.  (FAB stands for Features, Attributes and Benefits)  Followed by a simple call to action statement.  Something like “Buy now”, or “Find out more”, will do.

Because of the size constraints you will find that your meta descriptions are sounding a lot alike if you have more than a few products.  And this is okay.  Most likely you will only be returning one result on the SRP, so know one is going to notice that you are repeating.

And that is it.  Populate this field with something coherant, and searchers will be able to tell why they should click on your link better than with just the default description.

PS:  This is also available if you are importing your catalog.  Look for a field called, “meta_description” in your catalog format.  There is also one for title and keyword.

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.

Now digging into your header.phtml is just tedious.

(And its even worse, if you don’t have access to the commandline where your Magento store is hosted.  Now you are talking about calling your hosting guy, and asking him to do this for you.)

Well, magento has a way to handle this without digging into and editing a file in your theme or calling your hosting guy.  Here is how it works:

1.  Login to the admin panel

2.  go to system>configuration

3.  Click on the Design menu on the left

4.  Open the HTML Header menu

5.  And look for a text box labled “Miscellaneous scripts”

6.  Drop your temparary tag (or not so temporary) into this field, and click the save config button.

7.  Now go to your front page, view the source and make sure it looks like you expected and you are off to the races.

Dropping a meta tag or a bit of javascript on your site may not seem important most of the time.  But when a simple task is standing between you and the results you need, its good to have a quick and easy way to get the job done.

While you are in the Design section, take a look around and see what other configuration tidbits Magento has to offer that you may have forgotten about.

Here is how that works.  The settings in the child over ride the original css.  Thus settings in the child CSS override the same element setting in the original CSS file.  And changes can be grouped logically for manipulation of like changes, or whatever makes sense to you.

How to find all of something

The first thing we need to do is to find all of the settings that we are going to want to apply our change to.  Lets use a color change as our example.  Grep is your pal here.  Lets say we wanted to find all of the places where the color #D7E2C4 was used.  We could issue the following command at the command line, (yes this is Linux or Unix only.  Sorry windows users, but did you really install Magento on a Windows server?), while you are in the directory with your CSS files.  (this are found in [Magento Root]/skin/frontend/default/default/css/ if you are using the default theme.  Otherwise you will need to replace the “default/default” with your theme’s path.)

grep D7E2C4 *

This will return all of the lines where D7E2C4 occurs.  (Grep is not fool proof, but it will work here 99% of the time.)

Next we take these lines that are returned, and we drop them into our child.CSS file and remove all of the non-color properties.  So if one of your grep lines returns this:

.product-view .short-description { color:#B7AD85; font-size:12px; line-height:14px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; padding:10px 0 0 0;}

You would change this in this manner:

.product-view .short-description { color:#B7AD85; }

Do this for all of the lines in the child CSS and you now have a block of lines that you can modify to over ride this color only.

(One thing to watch for is lines that your grep returns with only “color:#B7AD85;”  These are not errors, some CSS files will have lines that have line feeds in them.  Hopefully this will be a minority.  You will have to go into the fine and dig out their attributes in order to make the override line.)

Most likely you will have more than one color that you want to change.  When that is the case, you will need to keep your child CSS lines in some order.

Make a blank CSS file for your child CSS

This is pretty straight forward.

1. Make a file called child.css  (or whatever name makes sense to you.)
2. Put a comment at the top between /*  and   */ that explains what this file is modifying.
3. put a line like this:  @import url(“styles.css”);
4. goto the layout section of your theme and edit the page.xml and change the “styles.css” to “child.css”

As long as the file you are modifying is styles.css then you are good to go.  If the CSS you are modifying is not style.css, then you will need to make the necessary changes to these steps.

How I organize my child CSS

For me, I organize my child CSS in a functional manner.  And to me, this means that all of the B7AD85 changes will be in a block.  And I lead them with comments.  So if I have color changes, I start that section with /* This is a Color Change Section */ or something equally as obvious.  Then each color change in this section is in a block with another comment /* Color B7AD85 changed to 7C765B */ or something to that effect.  This helps me know what the original color in the CSS file was, and what it is now.

Changing your color or other values

Some changes won’t be this simple.  But if you are just changing a color or a font style, then here is a quick way to get it done.  I use VI to edit my CSS.  In VI, using a search and replace works like this.

:%s/[value to change]/[value to change to]/gc

This works like this.

• :%s lets VI know you are doing a substitution.
• /[value to change] is the current value.
• /[value to change to] is the value that you want
• /gc are flags, “g” makes it global, or executed on each line, and “c” lets you confirm  or reject each replacement.

(I recommend the confirm flag so that you will notice if your substitution jumps out of the block you were intending to edit.  And so you can say no to the comments from being edited too.)

What about modifying other parts of a theme?

Alas, we will have to get to that later.

There are many other parts of a theme that can be edited.  Part of the power of Magento is the fact that it is open source and you are able to edit all of the files that make up Magento.  I hope to post some layout and phtml modifying posts soon.

One of the things that can be an SEO concern for Magento deployments is the proliferation of URLs that don’t have unique content.  If you haven’t realized this, the product URL, and the Category/Product URL are the same content, but the URL is different.  Which one should the search engine index?  Both?  If it does, you lose some of the “Link Juice” and your page rank can suffer.

Google addressed this concern not specifically for Magento sites in a June 17th, 2011 posting.  In this article Google explains how they support canonical relational links in the header.  Now you just need to add these to the header of your Magento pages so that Google and other search engines can realize that the category item and the product item are the same page.   And here is a quick way to do just that.

First, you will need to be familiar with your theme, and navigate to the app/design/frontend/[theme name]/main/page/html/page/

Here you will find a file called head.phtml  This is the file you will need to edit.

Adding canonical links for your products and categories:

In the head.phtml file find the group of code that has <link> content.  In mine this was right after the <meta> content.

What is this doing?

• First there is a call to the Magento Registry to find out where the visitor is looking.  The PHP if condition is looking for if this is a product, or category.
• Inside the if condition we create the html <link/>
• Inside the link tag, we are going to call the Magento Registry and get the product or category URL to use as the HREF target.
• This does one of three things; create a link tag with the category URL, create link with product URL, or not create anything.

Done

After you save the file you can see that it works by going to a category or product page.  You will have to view the page source and look in the <header> section to find the new link.  (you might want to refresh the cache.)

And it is just that simple.

You now have a Magento Store that will concentrate its “Link Juice” on fewer URLs and reduce a redundancy of indexing  in the search engines.

And Magento doesn’t have an “out of the box” way to modify the order to customer profile relationship even though the solution is really simple.

Simple that is, if you are comfortable writing queries in the database.

Here are the steps to do this once you are in the mysql database:

Associate order with Customer Account

1.  Get customer account entity_id based on email:

SELECT entity_id FROM customer_entity WHERE email = ‘[email address]‘;

You can also pluck this id from the end of the url in the manage customers section of the admin panel if you are already there.

2.  Verify Order

SELECT entity_id, email, customer_id, created_at  FROM sales_order WHERE increment_id = [order number];

This step is really to verify that it is in fact the right order.  Associating the wrong order with the customer will make your store look less secure.

3.  Associate Order with Customer

UPDATE sales_order SET customer_id = [customer entity id] WHERE increment_id = [order number];

This sets the association up so that the customer can now see the status and order data from their customer profile.

And thats it.  The customer to order relationship has been corrected.

(Note, this will not change the listing of how the order was placed.  If placed as guest, the order view will still show this.  But I have never found this to be important.)

Out of the box, the Magento admin does not have the ability to change this.  But if you are comfortable in the database, then these steps will let you make this change in seconds.

1. Get order entity id

SELECT entity_id FROM sales_order WHERE increment_id = [order number];

2. Find order email address and get it’s value_id

SELECT value_id, value FROM sales_order_varchar WHERE entity_id = [order entity id];

This will return many values.  The email address should look distinctively like an email address.   In my current instance, the attribute ID is 124, but that may or may not be the same for you.  In any case, what we are looking for is the value_id for the email address that we will use in the next step.

3. Update email

UPDATE sales_order_varchar SET  value = ‘[new email address]‘ WHERE value_id = [value id for the email address];

And that is it, the email address has been corrected and the customer will get future emails relating to this order.

Creating URLs that contain keywords help your site to be indexed by search engines.  A Keyword in a URL, combined with other factors helps a page be seen as relevant to that keyword in the search engine index.

Magento give us a handy way to control the URL for categories, pages, and items.  Sure, Magento will figure out a URL key to use if you don’t supply one.  But we should take a moment to think about what we are saying to the search engine about the page, category or item that we are creating.

Here’s how it works:Where are the URL keys found in Categories, Items, and Pages.

Category

When you create a category for items, the URL key is found on the page on the “General Information” tab.

Here is a good place to enter in a key word or two that defines the category.  Using a dash to separate keywords is good.  Don’t leave spaces.

Once the URL key is selected and the category is saved, you won’t be able to edit it in the Admin Panel.

Items

When creating an item manually, the URL key is found near the bottom of the “General” tab.

Unlike the catagory, you can change the item URL key by simple editing an existing item.

If you are importing your catalog, changing the URL in the import file will also update it for the item.

Its not a good idea to change the URL key often.  If search engines index the page, the URL they put in their index will be broken after you change the key.

Pages

When creating a CMS page, the URL key is actually called the “SEF URL Identifier” and it is found on the “General Information” tab of the page.

Page URL Keys can be changed at any time by editing the CMS page settings.  Again it is not a good idea to change these URLs frequently.

What are good keywords.

Keywords are words that are important to define the category or item.  Noise words like “the” and “and” are noise.  Proper nouns, are only useful if those proper nouns are well recognized.  And words that are accurate and unique.

If you are trying to optimize a difficult item, category or page, you might need to do some keyword research.  Google is always a good source, and using their keyword tools are free and very effective.

What else can we do about SEO in Magento?

• Many of these locations also have keywords and descriptions that can be used for SEO.
• There is also a site keywords and Description in the system menu.
• And there are preferred types of navigation that make it easier for search enginees to spider and index the pages in your store.

We will talk about each of these in related posts soon.

First you will need to have a Google Analytics account.  If you don’t have one, you might want to check it out.  Its free and you can sign up at http://www.google.com/analytics

As soon as you are ready with you Google Analytics account.  And you have told it that you want to monitor your site.  It will generate some code for you to place on every page that you want to monitor.  But don’t worry, Magento doesn’t need you to do much to accomplish this.  If you look at your accounts page, you will see something like this:

I have blurred out my domain and account, but what you will see in the red box, is the number that you will need to put into Magento.

So copy it to a text file or just leave the page up and go back to it when you need this number.

Now, go to your Admin page on your Magento installation.  You will need to go to System>configuration as shown below.

Once in configuration, you should find a set of navigation links on the left hand of the page.  In the “Sales” section you will find a “GoogleAPI” selection.

This will take you to the section with a Google Analytics control.

Expand the Google Analytics control and set Enabled to Yes.

Now here is where you type or past in your account number from the Google Analytics report page we saw at the top of this article.

Once you have typed it in, click on the “Save Config” button.

When you see this message, you are ready to go.

You might have to wait a few hours before the green check mark appears on the Google Analytics site.

There are two parts to this task.  First is the Administration Cache Refresh.  Second is the Cache File Removal.

Administration Cache Refresh

Login to the Administration Panel

Go to the System menu

You will find the Cache Management here. (before version 1.4)

Once here, select all of the options unless you want a more narrow refresh.  Then choose “Refresh” from the drop down menu.

Then Click on the “Save Cache Settings” button.

If you are using 1.4 or higher, you will find yourself here:

Select the “Flush Magento Cache” button to flush the cache.

Of course you may want to disable or enable cache, and that is done on this page is well.

Cache File Removal

Sometimes you will have made dramatic changes to the theme or CMS of your Magento store.  In these cases, it is safer to also remove the cached files.  The cache files are located in this directory:

[Magento Root]/var/cache/

Or in Magento 1.4 or higher you can just click the “Flush Cache Storage” button in Cache Management.

At the command line, browse to this directory, and issue “rm -rf *” to remove all of the cache sub-directories.  You only want to do this after refreshing all of the cache from the Administration Menu.

Or in Magento 1.4 or higher you can just click the “Flush Cache Storage” button in Cache Management.

Either way the caution is the same. Flushing the storage is more broad and sweeping that just the cache, and there may be data there that is more than the normal cache for sessions and rendering pages. So the normal Flush Cache is generally sufficient and I only Flush Cache Storage when something is really not working.