loonyblurb

So today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day organised to highlight the wide-ranging contributions and achievements of women in science and technology.

Ada Lovelace

While in general I try to stay away from the whole gender debate surrounding these industries, I don’t think that anyone can deny that women form a very definite minority in these areas. There are a whole host of reasons for this, none of which I particularly want to go into and none of which are going to be that quick and easy to solve. But I believe that everyone has the ability and opportunity (however small) to help change mindsets, throw out the old stereotypes and encourage a more open and welcoming atmosphere.

In regards to today’s post, it can only be a good thing that women are being publicly recognised for the work that they do. This will hopefully lead to them being inspired to keep up with the good work and stand as encouragement for others just starting out or looking to join the profession. One day I hope that we won’t really need events like these as they’ll have served their purpose, and our industries will be freed from the stigma and issues that arise from having such a wide gender ratio.

I should also point out that throughout my time working as a developer, I have received a massive amount of help and support from both friends and colleagues, male and female, and I would really like to thank all of you! You’ve been brilliant!

But in the spirit of Ada Lovelace Day, I am going to highlight one person in particular who has helped me such a lot in past, both personally and professionally, and to whom I owe a great deal.

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I’ve been feeling bad about not posting for a while, but I’ve just realised how long it’s been!

All I can say is that it’s testament to how busy I’ve been recently. I take quite a bit of time tweaking my blog posts until I am happy with them, so as a result I’ve got a few unpublished posts and some ideas that as yet are unwritten, but I just either don’t have the time to complete them or just can’t get my head into the right frame of mind for writing.

As such things have been a bit quiet around here recently.

However I shall be taking the opportunity to hopefully kickstart everything again tomorrow, as it’s Ada Lovelace Day.

I meant to take part in this last year but couldn’t quite get everything up together in time. I shall be joining in this year though to help celebrate the contributions and achievements of women in science and technology.

Will you?

First off let me apologise if this turns into a little bit of a rant from me but this is a pet topic of mine so I could be liable to  go off on one. I’ve also just been working on a project that has had me running into the corner of the room screaming because of the standard of the code (luckily my colleagues are used to my slight idiosyncrasies).

Coding standards are not a new thing by any means, and in my view are really essential to any organisation. They help to promote consistency and ensure that anyone working on a project knows how they should layout and structure their code. This way it becomes much easier to read (especially at first glance), new developers have a handy reference detailing what they should be doing and everyone is generally on the same page with how things should be done.

PHP_codesniffer

To make life even easier there are applications around like PHP_CodeSniffer that can automatically check that your code confirms to the set coding standards so you don’t have to worry about remembering every single point in the standards. I’m not going to write much about this in detail as there are already some very good references out there such as this one on techportal by lornajane. The documentation on the PEAR site is also very good and shows you how to create your own sniffs, and there are also plugins out that link into some of the most widely used IDE’s, such as this one for eclipse.
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So today is blog action day, and this year the big drive is to get everyone talking about climate change.

Now this is quite a big topic and one that I feel quite strongly about, among many other things. It’s just unfortunate that I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t had time to really work on putting this post together with lots of interesting (and quite scary) facts and figures like I had originally planned. So instead you’ll have to put up with just a brief ramble from me that may or may not go some way towards encouraging you to think about the state that the world is currently in.

Pretty much everyday there’s some story in the newspaper about climate change or the causes and outcomes of climate change. Be it global warming, deforestation, you carbon footprint – all sorts of things. For example I came into work this morning and the first article that appeared on my google reader was this from the bbc:
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So it’s a few days after PHPNW09 now, and I think I have finally fully recovered!

For anyone who has never been to a conference I really would suggest that you check it out and look into any events that happen near you,as they really are worth every penny through what you get of them.

This year was no different and I have come away with so many ideas, hopefully more knowledge, an increased to-do list, and so many more friends that for the bargain early bird price of £50 you really can’t complain! Well my liver might, after the enthusiasm that I approached the free bar with, thanks Sun!

So I arrived on the Friday evening and promptly headed to the pub! Well what else would I do? There I managed to catch some of the speakers before they went off to their dinner, but then actually went out myself for a lovely girly dinner with a group of php women to an excellent local indian. I have to admit I ducked out a bit early that night though, claiming pathetic tiredness.

As a result though I was up bright and early on Saturday, ready for a day of networking and brain overload, which was well planned as it was a busy day with some very interesting sessions that have given me a lot to take away and think about.
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Current magento version – 1.3.2.4

I’m guessing that quite a few people will have done what I did when I initially set up Magento, which was to just move the magento folder into my required document root and then go in and run the installer.
Logically all the files then got installed into that magento folder resulting in all my urls having “/magento/” in them which wasn’t exactly ideal. Of course this fact only registered with me once I’d done quite a bit of work, so the idea of doing a fresh install to sort this out was extremely unappealing to me.

Luckily for me it is possible to change the magento root from “/magento/” to “/”, but as you might imagine this sort of thing is fraught with danger (if that’s not too dramatic).

So I will stress here that it’s best to setup your root folders correctly on install, or run a fresh install if you can. But if you really need to change the root after the event then here’s what you have to do: Read the rest of this entry »

Current magento version – 1.3.2.4

jQuery is my favoured javascript library. It is the one I use most so it’s familiar and I can develop quickly with it. Magento however relies heavily on a mix of prototype, scriptalicious and their own varien scripts, none of which I’m familiar with or feel particularly confident about extending and adapting to my own needs.

So when I needed to add some custom javascript functionality to my magento site, I immediately thought “Wouldn’t it be great if I could use jQuery”. Now obviously this raises some issues. Firstly you’ll be adding in another javascript library to the mix, so the first thing to decide is “is this really necessary?”. You don’t want to add a whole load of extra code just for a really small bit of functionality as that doesn’t justify the performance hit or the extra bulk (if I can call it that). It is also well known that jQuery and prototype don’t really get on, so you’ll need to make sure that you can get them to play nicely together.

If you decide that it is worth it and you can justify adding the extra library, then here is what you need to do: Read the rest of this entry »

Current magento version – 1.3.2.4

This is what you need to do to add a new layout template, eg 4 column page layout.

1. Copy app/code/core/Mage/Page/etc/config.xml
   to app/code/local/Mage/Page/etc/config.xml.
   Creating this new file will allow magento core updates to occure without over-writing your changes (you’ll probably have to look out for changes to the core config.xml to megre them into your custom file).
2. Register your custom module by adding a new file to app/etc/modules, called something like Mage_Local.xml
3. In this file add the following code:

   <?xml version="1.0"?>
   <config>
   <modules>
   <Mage_Page> //relates to file structure
   <active>true</active> //set to active
   <codePool>local</codePool> //tell which folder to look in
   <depends> //requires the mage core
   <Mage_Core/>
   </depends>
   </Mage_Page>
   </modules>
   </config>

4. Now create your new template file, easy way is to copy an existing one such as 3columns.phtml (in app/design/frontend/your_package/your_theme/template/page), and give it a name, such as 4columns.phtml
5. Register this new template in the config.xml file your created in step 1 by adding your module to the layouts list. For my 4 column example I have added:

   <four_columns module="page" translate="label">
   <label>4 columns</label>
   <template>page/4columns.phtml</template>
   <layout_handle>page_four_columns</layout_handle>
   </four_columns>

You should now be able to access this new template in the cms->manage pages option in the magento admin backend.

Current magento version – 1.3.2.4

Magento had some very handy functions that easily allow you to find some fundamental urls of your site from your phtml files so you can avoid hardcoding them. These are:

• $this->getBaseUrl() – returns the base url of your store (funnily enough)
• $this->getSkinUrl() – returns the url of the folder containing your css, images and local js files (eg skin/frontend/default/your_theme, will vary depending on what package and theme the page is using).
  So to find the image logo.gif in the images folder you would call $this->getSkinUrl('images/logo.gif');. It should be noted that if getSkinUrl does not find the file that you have specified (like images/logo.gif) then it will default to looking in the default theme folders rather than your custom theme folders.
• $this->getJsUrl() – returns the url of the main js folder. So if you want to include a new js library from a template you can use this.

There are probably a few other functions like this, and some variations including some that use the Mage_Core_Model_Store, but there are the ones that I use most often.

Current magento version – 1.3.2.4

This is a very brief introduction to Magento, a powerful php based open-source e-commerce platform.

I am currently working on my first ever Magento project, and given the flexibilty and complexity of Magento and it’s code base, it seems a good idea to write a series of Magento hints and tips so that the next time that I come to use it I’ll be able to spend less time searching out the solutions to little niggly problems or requirements.

As an e-commerce solution, Magento is extremely powerful and flexible and may well be the answer for many peoples e-commerce needs. However because of this power and flexibility the code base is extremely large and the processing can be a little on the slow side, so if all your looking for is a really small and basic shop then this might prove to be overkill.

Overall though, now that I’ve almost got my head round the basics, I really like Magento as a tool and it can be fairly straightforward to work with if you know what you’re doing. If you’re not sure what you’re doing or you’re trying something a bit new then it can prove to be very frustrating and mentally draining, as the documentation isn’t always great and the forums can prove frustrating. But if you keep at it and in turn share what you’ve learned yourself then you’ll find yourself with a site that does exactly what you want, while at the same time improving the amount of information out there and possibly giving a lifeline to other magento users. If you learn something, share it! It might help someone who could provide you with invaluable help later on!
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