Andrew McCombe

Posted on May 26th, 2016

Have you discovered how hard it is when testing Magento email? Have you ever tried getting Magento to use a separate SMTP server to send emails? I have, and got very frustrated with it. My solution to testing magento email is to use Mailtrap.io.

Posted on March 1st, 2016

Magento 2 comes with built-in functionality to backup and restore the code, media, and database. You can choose to backup and restore code, media, or database separately. Here’s how to backup and restore with Magento 2.

Posted on February 29th, 2016

Here’s how to add products and breadcrumb Rich Snippets in Magento.

Posted on February 22nd, 2016

Here’s how to get and set cookies in Magento.

Posted on October 29th, 2015

I’ve recently stumbled across an issue where PHP Imagick can’t open a PDF file despite the file being there and readable. This is using Mac OSX El Capitan with Homebrewed PHP5, Imagemagick, Ghostscript and the PHP55-imagick module. After a bit of searching I found the fix.

Posted on October 6th, 2015

Here’s a snippet for using a currency column type with the currency symbol prefix in Magento admin grids.

Posted on August 30th, 2015

Like many web professionals, I listen to a lot of podcasts when I have the time. They generally fall into two categories which cover my interests; tech and music, and so I thought I’d list my current podcasts in case anyone else found them interesting.

Posted on July 17th, 2015

Today I learned that `FLUSH PRIVILEGES` isn’t needed by Scott Lindsey in the comments. After double checking locally that Scott was correct I looked it up and found a great explanation why MySQL FLUSH PRIVILEGES isn’t needed

Posted on June 22nd, 2015

I’ve recently been working on a few of our older websites with newer MySQL installations and am coming across the following error:

SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1364 Field ‘delivery_address_id’ doesn’t have a default value

This is caused by MySQL having a strict mode set which won’t allow INSERT or UPDATE commands with empty fields where the schema doesn’t have a default value set.
There are a couple of fixes for this.

Posted on June 9th, 2015

On 8th June 1995, Rasmus Lerdorf announced the release of Personal Home Page Tools Version 1.0. To celebrate the 20th anniversary, Ben Ramsey has asked the PHP community to share their PHP experiences and share them on Twitter using the hashtag #20yearsofphp.

Here’s my story.