Writing

Howto's, snippets, and articles I've written over the years.

Magento Custom Variables

July 12th, 2016

Magento 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, 2016

Here's a quick tutorial on creating foreign keys with MySQL.

Testing Magento Email with Mailtrap.io

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.

How to backup and restore with Magento 2

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.

Product and Breadcrumb Rich Snippets in Magento

February 29th, 2016

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

Solved: PHP Imagick ‘unable to open image’ PDF

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.

Magento Snippet: Admin grid currency type with currency symbol

October 6th, 2015

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

TIL: MySQL FLUSH PRIVILEGES isn’t needed

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

Solved: MySQL fix for "Field ‘xxxx’ doesn’t have a default value"

June 22nd, 2015

If you're using MySQL and getting the following error "SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1364 Field 'delivery_address_id' doesn't have a default value" then this is how to fix it.

20 years of PHP #20yearsofphp

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.

Useful Oh-My-Zsh plugins

May 3rd, 2015

Oh-My-Zsh describes itself as a 'community driven framework for managing your zsh configuration' and comes with lots of zsh plugins (189 currently) but none are enabled by default. Some zsh plugins are tailored for your specific operating system whilst others are aimed at helping improve developers workflow. Wether you're using Ruby, Python, PHP or Javascript as your main language or you're a systems administrator, there will be a plugin to help. Here are the zsh plugins I'm currently using.

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