Writing
Howto's, snippets, and articles I've written over the years.
Magento Snippet: Use a Group By clause on a collection model
August 17th, 2016Here's a Magento snippet showing how to use a Group By clause on a Magento collection model.
Managing Homebrew Services
August 5th, 2016Homebrew is easy to use and makes installing services such as MySQL or Elasticsearch a breeze. Here's how to manage those services.
I’m a Magento Certified Developer!
August 4th, 2016I'm pleased to announce that I have recently passed the Magento Certified Developer exam.
Solved: Fix for PHP Composer “????%” issue
July 28th, 2016I've had a problem on a few older projects where composer dies with "????%" after running `composer update`. Here's the fix.
Magento Custom Variables
July 12th, 2016Magento provides an interface for you to define your own custom variables. You can use these in CMS pages, static blocks, email templates and phtml templates. Here's how to use them.
MySQL Foreign Key Tutorial
July 9th, 2016Here's a quick tutorial on creating foreign keys with MySQL.
Testing Magento Email with Mailtrap.io
May 26th, 2016Have 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.
How to backup and restore with Magento 2
March 1st, 2016Magento 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.
Product and Breadcrumb Rich Snippets in Magento
February 29th, 2016Here's how to add products and breadcrumb Rich Snippets in Magento.
Magento Snippet: How to set and get cookies in Magento
February 22nd, 2016Here's how to get and set cookies in Magento 1.
Solved: PHP Imagick ‘unable to open image’ PDF
October 29th, 2015I'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.
Magento Snippet: Admin grid currency type with currency symbol
October 6th, 2015Here's a snippet for using a currency column type with the currency symbol prefix in Magento admin grids.