Magento Help - osCommerce Help » Magento E-Commerce Help

How To Copy Products From One Website to Another Website in Magento

admin — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 17:25:56 +0000

We’ve been playing around a lot with our Magento commerce websites over the course of a year or so. Which products on which website, categories, trying to avoid duplicate content, playing around with Google AdSense, etc.
Recently, we decided to change our power tools website, from a Magento commerce site to a Google AdSense site. We still had a couple thousand products from the power tools site in the Magento database. We decided we wanted to move all the power tools to a different Magento commerce site, so we had to come up with a solution for moving or copying all those products to the other website without eating up tons of time and resources. Turns out, it’s actually pretty easy.

Log in to your Magento Admin
Go to Catalog>Manage Categories
Have your default view active instead of just store view.
Drag the categories you want from one store to the other store view where you want to move them. (This is assuming you want to move the products from one store in Magento, not just copy them from one store to the other.)
Go to Catalog>Manage Products
Do a search so that you will come up with the products you want to copy or move.
Click the Select Visible link. (We do this to be safe at first. You can change the number of products that are visible with your view per page toggle.)
On the Actions drop down menu, select Update Attributes and click Submit.
This opens another page.
Select Websites from the left column.
Now, check the checkboxes for the site you want the products on and check the sites you want the products removed from.
Click Save.
You have now moved all of those products or copied those products, depending on your selection from one Magento site to the other Magento commerce site.
Make sure you refresh Catalog Rewrites and Layered Navigation Indices in System -> Cache Management

That’s it! Within minutes you have moved products from one Magento eccommerce store to another Magento store.

How To Change Headings On Checkout Page in Magento

admin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 22:26:49 +0000

Here was another tough item to track down in Magento. When you go to “One Page Checkout” in Magento, it really takes 6 steps to checkout, kind of a pain. We’re looking for a free solution to make it a true one page checkout process. In the meantime, we figured if we made the steps more clear, it might make checking out easier and therefore convert to more sales.

One of the ways to make checkout more clear in Magento is to use different wording on the checkout page. For instance, “Billing Information” may not be clear to people that they need to add the actual credit card bill mailing address. So to make it clear, we added to that line, so now it reads “Billing Information (If using credit card, make sure you use the billing address for that card)”. Problem is, where the heck is that line?

We wasted about an hour looking for it and finally found it in app/locale/en_US of all places. Find the line that reads “Billing Information”,”Billing Information” and change it to read “Billing Information”,”Billing Information ( If using credit card to pay, make sure you use the billing address for that card on this page)”

Typical Magento to make things hard to find, but there you go. That’s how to change headings on checkout page in Magento.

The Magento File Structure and Architecture

admin — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 21:29:09 +0000

When you start working with Magneto, you may find it confusing as to the directory structure. In this article I hope to help shed a little light on some of the key directories in Magento and what they do so that maybe when you’re working in Magento, things will make a little more sense.

Here are a few things you need to know the location of at some point when developing with Magento and the directories that they are stored in.

1. The templates file

/app/design/ is the core storage folder for template files. With it breaking down into adminhtml/ for administration templates, frontend/ for frontend templates and install/ for installation templates.

Within these you’ll find your default template set aptly named default. In your template set folder are your individual theme folders that come with Magento.

layout, locale and template are the core directories that contain the files that make up your themes.

2. The skin files (resources, components, resources)

In /skin/ you’ll find your CSS, images, Flash, JavaScript and any other resource files that relate specifically to templates in the system. You will also find the adminhtml, frontend and install directories distinction here.

3. Language files and e-mail templates

/app/locale/ is your core directory. With sub-directories for each language set installed for the store. You will find .csv files for each of the modules installed on the system relating to their translations. You’ll find the Magento e-mail templates in /template/email/ within your language directory in /app/locale/.

4. Core configuration

/app/etc/ contains all configuration files for Magento. From the local.xml file which contains your database configuration, amongst other things. To your modules/ folder which contains the declaration of modules in the system.

5. Local, core and community modules

All modules for functionality are stored in /app/code/ and are broken down into the following folders:

community – for modules installed via Magento Connect.
core – for modules that come with Magento by default.
local – usually for locally developed modules

6. Media files

All images uploaded to the system as well as the images resized dynamically by the system are stored in media/.

When importing media files via system profiles (Magento’s name for batch processing), /media/import/ will be your folder to place the images for the products.

7. The var directory

The var directory is used for several functions in the system:

Backups are exported to backups/ by the built in system backup tool.
The system cache is stored in both cache/ and session/ folders.
Data import for default system data import profiles is set to import/.
Data export for default system data export profiles is set to export/.

Hopefully this has given you a good indication as to the important directories in Magento’s file structure.

How To Update To Latest Version of PHP

admin — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:33:07 +0000

Many web applications, including Magento need PHP5.2 to function. If your server doesn’t have PHP 5.2, there’s a simple way to upgrade.

Using SSH, logon to your server.

Use these commands:

wget -q -O – http://www.atomicorp.com/installers/atomic.sh |sh

yum update php

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -a

/etc/init.d/httpd reload

That’s it!

How to Import Database Copy Into New Database Using SSH

admin — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:08:45 +0000

Here’s the SSH command to import a database backup to a new database.

Navigate to the directory where your database copy resides using SSH.

mysql -uusername -p databasename < backupname.sql

You’ll be prompted for the password for the database. Enter that.

If this is a Magento database, it could take awhile to import. Ours is around 600M, so it took awhile.

That’s it.

How To Make Backup of MySQL Database Using SSH

admin — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:39:09 +0000

Part of the transfer or migration of a website many times involves a database. If you are on an “ix” server, SSH is a great way to backup your MySQL database.

Here’s how you do it:

Using SSH, navigate to your httpdocs or public folder on your server where the website resides.

Use the following command.

mysqldump –opt -Q -u dbusername -p databasename > /path/to/backupname.sql

This creates a copy of your database.

Now, you can transfer that database backup to your new server.

How to Transfer (Migrate) a Complete Site From One Server to Another

admin — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:34:23 +0000

If you ever have a need to migrate a website from one server to another, it can be a huge deal, especially when dealing with Magento, which has tens of thousands of files. Also, if your Magento store has many products, you have all those thousands of image files to move too. You could try FTP, but usually our servers hang during a large transfer. Even if you could do it by FTP, it would take hours at best to transfer a complete Magento site.

So here’s how to do a complete site migration using SSH. This can be used for any website you have root access to, not just a Magento site.

1. Login to server 1 via SSH and open the folder which you want to backup. You’ll probably need to login as root user.

Use this commands:

cd /home/somepath/to/yourwebsite/public_html

2. Make a compressed archive out of this folder using the command

tar -cvf sitepack.tar ./

3. Login to server 2 via SSH and use the command below to fetch the backup from server

wget yourdomain.com/sitepack.tar

4. Now uncompress the archive using the command

tar -xvf sitepack.tar

This is the easiest way we know of to move large websites with tons of files.

Fatal Error – Maximum Execution Time Exceeded

admin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:33:06 +0000

How to fix the error of maximum execution time exceeded or memory limit.

in your htaccess file put in this:

php_value memory_limit 256M

php_value max_execution_time 36000

You can even go up from there

Get Errors When Doing Backup In Magento

admin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:04:17 +0000

If you get errors when using the Magento admin to do a backup of your database, we found this solution:

Open: /lib/Varien/Data/Collection/Filesystem.php

Find this line:

foreach (glob($folder . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . ‘*’) as $node) {

Change it to read:

foreach ((array)glob($folder . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . ‘*’) as $node) {

This cured our problem of getting error messages in Magento when trying to do a database backup with the Magento admin panel.

How To Add Product Model Number In Listings In Magento

admin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 21:58:56 +0000

More and more now days, people shopping ecommerce sites are quite educated in regards to looking for a specific product and many times will know the part number or SKU they are looking for. We decided on our Magento stores to include the SKU# on the product listings on our category pages. Here’s how we did it.

Open app/design/frontend/default/yourtheme/template/catalog/product/list.phtml

Determine where you want to add the SKU#. We added ours above the “Description” section of the product.

Paste in this code:

getProductUrl() ?>” title=”htmlEscape($_product->getName()) ?>”>__($_product->getSku())) ?>

Save the file.

This should put the Sku# on your category page in the product listings. Better still from a search engine optimization stand point, the code supplied makes the Sku# appear in bold letters and it is a link to the product.