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The Amazing Magento Configuration

At the heart of every piece of PHP in Magento is the XML configuration files that tell core Magento code where to find functions and what to do with them. It seems to be the biggest hurdle that most developers face when they begin developing with Magento.

When going through a bit of code recently, I discovered something in the configuration that looks like it should have never worked, but amazingly enough, has worked without issue the entire time it has been in place. Let’s see if you spot the bit of strangeness.

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Don't Be a Dunce, Save Your Orders

There are some gotchas that you think that you will always see coming. One such gotcha is the need to save an object to the datastore to persist any changes you may have made to that object.

While it seems like a reasonable concept at the base level, there are times that the need to save an object completely escapes your mind. It seems that for many non-developers, this occurs when they have been working a long time on a file, typically a Microsoft Word document, shortly before their computer blue screens, losing all of their work.

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Magento's preDispatch Observer

One of the decisions that always seems to arise when adding functionality to a Magento website is what the best strategy is for doing so. Should you override the controller or function, edit it in place, or use an observer to listen for a particular event to occur.

It just so happens that if you want to make sure that you have some sort of validation logic that runs before a particular controller action is executed, the easiest way to implement it is via a preDispatch observer. The other aspect of preDispatch controllers is that they can be configured to listen only for preDispatch events from a particular module, or they can listen for preDispatch events from every module, allowing you to add some password expiration policies to the adminhtml side of your website, for example.

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Avoid 'Persistent storage maximum size reached' in Firefox

One of the nice tools out there for tracking down issues that your website’s visitors are having is TrackJS. We started noticing the other day that we were getting overwhelmed by errors with the text Persistent storage maximum size reached for our Magento site. When we looked further into the issue, it quickly became obvious that all of the errors originated from a single user that was running Firefox.

It quickly became obvious that there was a single user that had exhausted their localStorage resources on their browser, but why was it only one user? Well, as it turns out, there is one browser that allows the user to set the amount of space that localStorage can use, and that one browser is Firefox.

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Stop Wanting and Start Choosing

I am used to hearing people use phrases like “I want to be able to do X thing” or “I want to have X position at my company” when people are talking in generalities about their goals. I tend to do it often as well, especially when using “self-talk” to attempt to work on internal goals and desires. However, when reading a book from Paul Tough, How Children Succeed, one of the quotes that he references from Jonathan Rowson, a Scottish chess grand master who had written about the importance of emotion and psychology in chess success.

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Authorize.Net Directpost is Overly Complex

One of the necessary evils that every ecommerce website that wants to accept credit card transactions must deal with is some sort of payment processing company. It just so happens that Authorize.net is one of the largest payment processors around, and they allow you to choose from a few different ways to integrate their payment processing functionality into your website. One of their ways is via DirectPost, which allows an eCommerce website to process a credit card transaction without the credit card information ever being sent through the website’s servers.

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Write Bulletproof JavaScript

While display issues have long been the bane of a web developer’s existence, current web development projects tend to have much more client side interactivity, focusing ever more attention on the reliability and resilience of the JavaScript you write to deliver the complete interactive experience. Many things can cause unexpected errors in your carefully crafted code.

However, there are a few things that you can do to make sure that your site degrades gracefully and still provides a basic level of functionality when something in the browser goes wrong. The following snippet of code illustrates a few best-practices for defining your JavaScript namespaced modules.

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JavaScript Can Have An Interesting Interpretation of Order

There is an interesting little quirk with the way in which JavaScript decides which function it should execute next. You see, while the JavaScript engine has a single thread of execution, it creates the illusion of multiple simultaneous processes running at once by utilizing a queue of functions to execute. This means that every time you make a call to a function in your JavaScript, there is no absolute guarantee that it will be the next piece of code run, as there may have been other events triggered that beat your custom function onto the execution queue.

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Avoid Custom mod_rewrite Rules with Varnish

When you are working on a website project running PHP on Apache, and you need to redirect a single device type to a different URL than the rest of your visitors, I’m sure the first thought that many of you would have is to utilize Apache’s mod_rewrite. It is a highly flexible URL rewriting engine that would allow you to rewrite with almost any combination of requirements to a just as complex set of URLs depending on the situation.

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Let's talk about equality

Equality has been a major topic of discussion over the last few weeks. Whenever this topic comes up, I am always suprised how limited many people’s knowledge about true equality is. Relax everyone, I am talking about equality operators in JavaScript, and not the topic of national discussion recently.

Thinking back to some interviews I have been a part of recently, it became extremely obvious how little most Front End Web Developers know about the JavaScript equaltiy operators. You got that right, I said “operators” because there are two operators that test for equality between two objects, == and ===.

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