Duplicated product URL keys in Magento Community Edition

Recently, we have noticed an interesting issue in Magento Community Edition and decided to share our findings with our readers. There is no restriction on the product URL key duplicates in the Community Edition, so, multiple products can have the same URL key and the product URL path generation should handle it. This article is about how the URL path generation manages the duplicated URL keys, the issues that appear during that process and how to cope with all these problems.

Removing needless product attribute values

Recently, we have faced with an issue that looked like a default Magento behavior. It turns out that Magento keeps the product attribute value even if the attribute was removed from the current attribute set. This brief article describes the issue’s details and a shell script on how to remove the old unnecessary attribute values from the database.

Alternative way of adding tabs to the Magento product page

In our previous article we have discussed how to add tabs to the product page. After Magento 1.9 has been released people started asking how to handle the product page tabs since the previous method caused different troubles. The reason is in the modern RWD theme, which goes out of the box with Magento 1.9. It uses slightly different method for adding tabs than in the previous versions. So, let’s review how you can easily add own tabs on the product page for RWD-based themes in Magento CE 1.9.

Scheduled Redis cache clean up

Magento, starting from the CE 1.8 and EE 1.13 versions, has a built-in Cm RedisSession extension. This extension helps Magento to use Redis cache for the backend caching and session storage. We can find much information about Redis installation and configuration of the Magento store to make it working with the cache. Often, it is recommended to flush Redis cache daily to avoid huge cache amount and some caching issues that, usually, occur when some part of the dynamic content was changed. Our article describes a simple extension which will be running daily and flushing the whole Redis cache.

encoded extension

Sometimes we need to debug the extensions created by other developers to fix possible issues or adjust some functionality. Also, it is a well-known situation in Magento when you have to debug and resolve the extensions conflicts.

Overridingobservers

As you may know, we need to override the Magento observers when we deal with the extension’s conflicts or want to disable (or modify) a part of some extension’s functionality. Usually, there is no difference between the observer’s overriding and overriding of any other regular model. But sometimes we can face with the issues working with the simple override. How should we act then to keep it conventionally? Let’s check the following step by step instruction for Magento observers overriding.

Finding bottlenecks in your Magento store

In the beginning, Magento was one of the biggest PHP applications. The main purpose of that platform was to cover all needs of store owners being universal and flexible. So, Magento store owners got a big and interesting e-commerce platform and the developers got a big “battlefield” for their implementations. A lot of things have been changed from year to year: servers became more powerful, Magento much faster and the number of platforms, developers and extensions has grown significantly. As a result, every store owner has a wide choice of the solutions that might be implemented for their stores. Unfortunately, very often it’s hard to predict how good is some add-on for a specific Magento installation because of different reasons. You are installing first, tenth, thirtieth extension and then realize: the store is much slower than it was before.

The sales report is one of the main progress indicators in e-commerce. We often create a sales report using the default Magento features – just go to Reports -> Sales -> Orders, and then, fill in the filter form on that page. This way allows us to get full information about sales on the web store.