Magento Help - osCommerce 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.

Change File / Folder Owner With SSH

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 01:46:50 +0000

After doing a transfer of files for a website using SSH, if you’ve transferred from one domain to another, you’ll probably run into a file or folder ownership problem. Using SSH, this is actually easy to fix.

Change to the directory you need to change permissions or ownership.

chown -R correctuser *

correctuser is the name of the owner of this website

That’s it. You’ve now changed the owner of files and folders in that directory using SSH.

Another Way to Move Website Via SSH

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 22:24:48 +0000

Very recently, we published an article about moving entire website from one server to another via SSH. Sometimes those commands give us problems with the resulting transfer, so we found this alternate method that seems to work perfectly.

Keep in mind, you MUST perform separate actions for copying or moving databases as well as adding email addresses.

1. First log in to your old server via SSH. If necessary, you may need to login as a “super user”.

2. Change directories to the directory where your website resides.

3. Type in the following code:

4. tar -cpzf backup.tar.gz *

6. This creates a tar file of all files in that directory.

7. Login to your new server.

8. Navigate to the directory where you want to place the website you are moving.

7. Type in:

8. wget yourdomain.com/backup.tar.gz

9. (Of course, yourdomain.com is replaced with your actual domain name). This transfers the tar file from the old server to the new server.

10. Once the file is transfered, type:

10. tar -xzf backup.tar.gz

11. This will unpack the tar file onto the new server in the directory that you placed it.

That’s it, another way to move websites using SSH.

How To Move A Website From One Server To Another Using SSH

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:19:15 +0000

If you ever have the need to move or migrate complete websites from one server to another, you know what a hassle it is using FTP. For one, it takes a long time, especially for larger sites, plus most of the time, we lose connection and our FTP program stalls, meaning we have to start all over again. So here’s how to do it using SSH /Telnet.

First log in to your old server via SSH. If necessary, you may need to login as a “super user”.
Change directories to the directory where your website resides.
Type in the following code:
tar -cvf sitepack.tar ./ This creates a tar file of all files in that directory.
Login to your new server.
Navigate to the directory where you want to place the website you are moving.
Type in:
wget yourdomain.com/sitepack.tar (Of course, yourdomain.com is replaced with your actual domain name). This transfers the tar file from the old server to the new server.
Type:
tar -xvf sitepack.tar
This will unpack the tar file onto the new server in the directory that you placed it.

There you go. Within seconds you have moved all your site files from one server to another using SSH, which makes migrating a website as easy as ever.

Keep in mind, you MUST perform separate actions for copying or moving databases as well as adding email addresses.

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.

Problems With DrWeb Sending Failure e-mail Notices

admin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:02:55 +0000

If you have your own server and you are getting failure notice emails from DrWeb Antivirus, you need to make some changes to your settings.

You should change the crontab of the DrWeb update to not mail you in the first place – this will remove all the spam you recieve at every DrWeb update.

In the Settings -> Scheduled Tasks -> drweb (just click the link)

You change the Command of the cronjob by adding a “>/dev/null 2>&1″ to the end of command. I.e.

Code:

/opt/drweb/update.pl >/dev/null 2>&1

This will make sure that Crontab does not mail you with the output of the updatescript every time it exits.

Please keep in mind that depending on your OS – for some reason there might also be a crontab entry for the update in your filesystem under

#/etc/cron.d/drweb-update

Where you will also need to edit the commandstring to be “/opt/drweb/update.pl >/dev/null 2>&1″

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 Find A File Using SSH

admin — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:42:44 +0000

To find a file on your server using SSH, simply use the “locate” command.

Example: locate fileyouwant.file

This will result in an output of all files on your server with that name

How To Copy File Form One Directory To Another Using SSH

admin — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:35:50 +0000

Using SSH to copy a file from one directory to another is done simply with the following command:

cp file.name destination/directory/

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!