Secure your Nginx for Magento

Recent security patches have covered many security leaks. Some of the changes were added via .htaccess files either in Magento root or in specific directories (e.g. shell directory). These fixes will be applied automatically, if your Magento 1.x installation is running on Apache 2, but it won’t work if you prefer Nginx. In this post we will show you the proper Nginx config which provides the same result with a few additions.

n98-magerun tool - swiss army knife for Magento developers

Most of Magento developers face with the problem of the same operations repetition for many times – that takes some time and slows down the development process. So, it’s a wise idea to simplify and speed up some operations during the work, isn’t it? Fortunately, we have a great CLI tool and it makes Magento developers life easier. It is n98-magerun provided by netz98.

Manage Translation System in Magento

In this post we want to share our expertise on how to manage translations in Magento. We will cover various methods, their priorities and characteristics. We will show you the pros and cons of each solution to match your needs when you change or add a new translation to your online store.

As you may know, Magento has 3 different ways of adding/changing translations (from highest to lowest priority):

Logging system. Optimize Magento database by cleaning logs

Magento is a powerful and, at the same time, complex eCommerce system. One of the important parts of this system is a different events logging. After some time of functioning, Magento collects more and more events data and it might have the performance impact. Of course, the logs information can be cleaned manually in the database to avoid issues with performance, but this approach is not always handy. Therefore, in this article we want to review Magento logging system and built in tools for logs handling.

Magento Security Patch SUPEE-7405 Overview

As you may know, Magento released security patch SUPEE-7405 on 20th of January 2016. This patch contains changes to more than 50 core files and in this article we are going to review the changes and potential issues that could be faced after the patch implementation.

Every change should be carefully tested before the release on the live store to make sure that it does not break any functionality. The most important is to check the main places such as customer registration process, customer log in to the account, adding different types of products to the shopping cart, checkout steps etc. We need to check the mentioned parts for every modification made for the website, these repetitive actions take a lot of time. But what do you think – is it possible to speed up and improve this process? As one of the most obvious solutions is to develop functional tests for the website and, in such way, we will automate all the actions.

Magento is one of the biggest and most popular e-commerce platforms written in PHP. The very first Magento release, known as ‘Bento’, is dated to March 31, 2008. For that time the actual PHP version was 5.2. Nowadays we are happy users of Magento 1.9 that supports PHP versions up to 5.5.x (officially announced), but the platform also smoothly runs on PHP v5.6. Recently we had good news about Magento 2.0 release and that fact is really great. From the opposite side, the first version of Magento will lose official support quite soon but, we are sure, there are many merchants who will stick with Magento 1.x for the next couple of years because of different reasons.

Magento security patch SUPEE-6788 - installation issues

Magento has released a new security patch SUPEE-6788, and we would like to share our experience with its installation troubleshooting. We are describing this topic assuming that you’ve already checked a web store on magereport.com and implemented the security recommendations like closing access to var directory, downloader, changed the URL to the admin panel to more secure etc. We will also try to avoid the discussion of the admin routes compatibility here because the patch already contains the back routes compatibility. Therefore, the main goal of this article is to make your store functioning correctly after applying the patch.

Take care of your Magento store - be aware of 404 errors

Every owner of the web store does all possible to provide good conditions for customers and takes care of their needs. Moreover, it is also good practice to use different services to track the behaviours of web store visitors, collect and analyze the data related to customers preferences to determine how to improve the conversion rate. As a one way of such improvements is to test if there are any issues on the web store. Maybe you’ve heard the words “to win the battle – at least, you should know your enemy”, as follows – you should find what problems the website has. In our article we are describing possible ways to notify the store owner or website admin about 404 pages. Therefore, if you know what URLs are sending the customers to 404 pages, you will be able to fix it by creating the corresponding redirects, rewriting rules etc.