PHP vulnerability
- 12 Sep 2019
A vulnerability has recently been discovered in PHP and we recommend Magento Commerce customers adopt changes to address the issue.
Blog
Indexes: Reasons not to refresh
- 5 Aug 2019
A presentation by John Hughes on indexes and why refreshing them is not best practice or as he put it "Stop refreshing the @#$%&! indexes"
The presentaion takes an irreverent look at indexes laying out the aims, what indexes are, their impact on performance and what should be done. We also have knights, kings, dancing and dragons (Giffs are as much a past-time for Hughes as Magento).
Aims:
Give you a solid understanding of Magento's indexes
Outline the impact indexes can have on store performance
Provide you insight on following the process of how data is indexed to aid with dubugging common issues.
An index is responsible for collecting, parsing and storing data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Hughes describes an index as a form of caching but where the data is transformed during the process. Indexes prevent the server from repeatedly making complex calculations in the form of database queries to retrieve often needed information. The larger your site the further the performance impact is without indexes.
See below John Hughes simple terminology.
We the learn what Magento Indexes:
Product prices
Product inventory (stock) status
Product attribute data
Product category associations and more....
As an example pricing:
The final price displayed to a customer on the frontend can be impacted by:
Base Price
Special price (and from / to dates)
Tiered / customer group pricing
Catalogue price rules
All of which can be per website!
Or as Hughes puts it:
Then consider the complex product types:
Configurable / grouped
Min / max price (e.g. cheapest / most expensive product)
Bundle
Min / max price (e.g. cheapest / most expensive items combination)
Dynamic / fixed pricing of all child bundle items
Hughes goes on to look at indexing modes Update on save and Update on schedule
Here you see how saving just one product with update on save clears the full page cache for every single product and if all products are affected then all categories are too so full page cache is also cleared for every single category!
So having established that is an incredibly bad way of doing things we now look at update on schedule, or essentially a cron task (running default every minute).
This feature is available in Magento 1 Commerce Edition 1.13.0 and newer, and Open Source Edition for M2. Indexes are run via schedule so no longer immediately after save. Things get even better as only the the data that has been changed will be indexed and only pages relevant to that record are removed from the full page cache.
From here Hughes goes into more detail concerning the cascading effects of refreshing indexes, what you need to look at and best practice for going foreward, and dragons, don't forget the dragons.
For the full presentaion CLICK HERE
Supee 11155 - Magento Security Update
- 27 Jun 2019
Working with multiple php versions on CLI / Composer
- 10 May 2019
If you are working with composer you may also need to work with a specific version of php. While you can edit composer.json it is easier to specify when you call composer...
Enable php 5.6 on Ubuntu 18.04 / Plesk 17.8
- 21 Apr 2019
As any of our customers will know Plesk has always provided 1 click PHP selection on a per domain basis. This is a powerful tool for anyone rolling out different applications or testing upgrades with newer version of PHP. However, Ubuntu 18 supports only those versions of PHP that support OpenSSL 1.1, and that are PHP 7.x and newer. Therefore, if you require php 5.6 then you will need to take additional steps and manually install PHP 5.6 and add this as an additional handler in Plesk.
Patch: SUPEE-11086
- 27 Mar 2019
Magento Releases and Security Updates March 26th
- 25 Mar 2019
WordPress: End of support for PHP 5.2 – 5.5.
- 25 Mar 2019
Post-Purchase: delivery
- 12 Mar 2019
For many retailers the moment the customer hits the ‘buy’ button the transaction is over. What occurs post-purchase can be equally beneficial to creating a trusting and lasting relationship no more so than the delivery of their item.
Magento 2.3: ElasticSearch support included
- 18 Feb 2019
An under-appreciated improvement was made with the release of Magento 2.3, included support for the Open Source version of Elasticsearch.
Spam Users: How to prevent sign-ups
- 12 Feb 2019
There is an increasing number of SPAM user accounts targeting Magento stores.
Here we look at what can be done to prevent further malicious sign-ups.
eCommerce sales: Video Marketing
- 6 Feb 2019
Tens of thousands of Magento sites at risk
- 18 Dec 2018
Third Party Online Scans
- 12 Dec 2018
MageCart and Content Security Policy
- 27 Nov 2018
A look at MageCart a card skimming toolkit and the latest Content Security Policy HTTP response header.
Mobile Phone cart Abandonment
- 13 Nov 2018
