A shared server is exactly what it says on the tin, your hosting package is plonked on a server somewhere along with more customers from your hosting company, this can be anything from 20 to 100 other people on there with you. This can sometimes impact on performance as when it comes down to it a server is just a computer, it has a processor, ram and hard drives. Too many people accessing any one site on your server can cause problems for the performance of other sites on there, not good when it’s your sites performance being affected. The alternative to this is a dedicated server, this is relatively the same deal, you end up getting your hosting package on a server somewhere out there. The only difference this time is it’s your server! You’ll be the only website hosted on there with all the power of the server backing your website alone. the only caveat to dedicated hosting is the cost, these things can cost anything from £40($70) a month right up to £400($700) a month and beyond.

The one question you need to answer is, can you justify the cost? If you’re upgrading to Magento from another cart then you’ll have a rough idea of how many products you’re site will be hosting and how many visitors you’ll be getting per day. If either of these is in the high 1000s then you’re probably going to need a dedicated server. If you’re just starting out in the ecommerce world and your not sure of either of these figures then you’re best off going for a shared host, for now, just to test things out cause it’s most likely the case if you phone up your shared host after a few months and ask to get an upgrade, they’ll bend over backwards to help you out.

There are a lot of hosts out there that claim to be 100% Magento compatible but some times it’s not the case! The first thing to do when you’re looking at any hosting package is to check and double check their system config matches the Magento system requirements if it differs even slightly then you’re best off looking elsewhere or you’re going to be spending a long time on the phone to their support. There are a few good Magento hosts around including Simple Helix Hosting who offer a one click install service for Magento (that can take save you some time) there’s also United Hosting based in the UK and a few more great ones dotted about the place. I’ve always found with web hosting, Magento or not, that sometimes the smaller companies are better to deal with. At the moment I’m working on a site hosted at Internet Supermarket, their hosting packages are compatible with Magento and are quite stable and quick when dealing with larger websites. The one reason I like smaller hosts is the support, these guys are never more than a phone call away (during office hours that is) and they’re second to none in terms of helping you out to get things on track.

Just like buying a house one of the most important rules in choosing good hosting is Location, Location, Location. Where a server is physically based can greatly increase your chances of getting those high ranks on Google for your store. If for example your target market is in the UK then you’re ideally going to want a .co.uk domain and a server based in the UK, same goes for the US a .com domain and a server located somewhere in America. Now if you’re in a niche market then this may not matter as much as you’ll probably climb pretty quick on Google via on-site and off-site SEO but if you’re entering into one of the larger markets i.e. clothing retail then this could help you alot along the way.

Once you’ve found a selection of potential hosts you should start to compare them, support response times, get reviews from online spots like HostJury, WebHostingTalk etc just to make sure the host you’re going to pick is one you can stay with for a long time. If you’re unsure of a host make sure they offer some form of 30 day trial service or cooling off period just so you’re not trapped into paying them for the next year.

Once you’ve found the right hosting for your website, it’s time to start installing Magento!

Other Posts in this series:
Complete Magento Starters Guide

Magento Starters Guide : Which Version?

Magento Starters Guide: What Hosting?

As most of you reading this guide will know there are two versions of Magento out there for you to choose from, the free “Community Edition” and the “Enterprise Edition”. The main difference between the two is the cost, the Community Edition is completely free (bar your hosting costs)  whilst the Enterprise edition will cost you around £5,891 ($8,900). If you decide to go for the Enterprise edition, your £5k will be buying you a few extra features including advanced administrator roles, logged administrator actions, gift certificates, customer store credit, content staging and merging, private sales, higher level data encryption and the almighty core product support.

This edition is only really worth the money if you’re going to be running a high turnover store as that £5k is an annual payment to Varien or if you’re a large company and can afford the payment in exchange for the extra features that it provides. However there is one word that swayed us toward the free option “Community” there’s a strong community following behind Magento including a large forum at www.magentocommerce.com , an IRC channel on freenode (#magento) that comes in a few languages, Magento Connect which offers free and commercial extensions of all kinds for Magento and of course websites such as this one offering guides, hints and tips to help you on your way.

In my experiences with Magento there’s never been anything missing from the Community addition that wasn’t available as an extension. If however you’re working as part of a large company developing an online presence then the £5k a year might not be that big an expenditure for those extra features and the support that’s there with it. If you’re looking for a shopping cart to use for your own business however then the Magento Community Edition is ideal in helping you keep costs down whilst delivering a strong, stable online platform for you to build your business from. It integrats with Paypal and Google Checkouts as standard it offers a saved Credit Card option (make sure your covered by your SSL when using this option) and integration with Google Base and other shopping feed websites to help drive sales toward your website. Anything the Community edition is missing that you really need is most likely available as an extension.

Other Posts in this series:
Complete Magento Starters Guide

Magento Starters Guide : Which Version?

Magento Starters Guide: What Hosting?

• Which Magento package is right for your business.
• What hosting will suite your site best.
• Installing and configuring Magento.
• Magento Basics.
• Theme selection or creation & customisation.
• Choosing and setting up Payment Gateways.
• Getting your websites content right.
• Configuring products.
• Processing orders.
• Going online

So that’s around ten parts to the guide that I’ll be adding over the following weeks. As always if there’s anything you feel is missing from any step of the guide or there’s anything you think i’ve missed and would like to contribute then you can email me at nath at creativedistrict dot co dot uk.

Another good way to add the all important content to your Magento site is through use of the CMS Pages you can use these pages for your extra content such as your About Us, Delivery Info etc. But you can also make good use of them as pages such as manufacturer/brand directorys with content regarding your manufacturers/brands that will only help but to bump up your positions on search engines aslong as you stick to the general SEO rules of not using duplicated content and creating good inward links across the site.

You can also get some unique content into your category pages via the Category Description in Magento’s category management section. You can call this in your template by using:

<?php echo $_helper->categoryAttribute($_category, $_description, ‘description’) ?>

You can also make this abit more aesthetically pleasing by placing it inside a <div> tag with a fixed height and setting the overflow to auto, giving the area scrollbox effect. The content in this section as always should be unique and relevant to the category it’s placed inside.

One feature of Magento and pretty much any online shopping cart is duplicate content! With Magento you will usually end up with something like this:

domain.com/product.html
domain.com/category1/product.html
domain.com/catalog/product/view/id/1/
domain.com/catalog/product/view/id/1/category/1/

Not very good for your optimisation! Don’t fear, help is at hand! In the form of Yoast’s MetaRobots Extension that will help with preventing the indexing of most of your duplicating content.

Once you’ve got most of this sorted you should be on the right tracks to getting your website indexed more efficiently by the top search engines. Magento SEO optimisation is no simple task and will take continued effort, especially keeping up with continued content addition, product description and meta information.

Fooman Speedster

This extension can help massively in speeding up Magento page load times and aid in cacheing ultimately resulting in a better experience for your customers. Utilizing the minify library this extension compresses and caches your Javascript and CSS files. There are some downfalls to the extension compatibility-wise, if you don’t have the ability to use mod_rewrite or modify your .htaccess file then this extension won’t work on your installation. Though if you can overcome this and get it installed it really does speed up Magento a noticeable amount.

Showing CMS pages in a dynamic menu

Not exactly an extension and requiring modification of core Magento files this addon allows you to insert a dynamic menu of all your CMS pages. So if you’ve got extra pages such as about, help, contact etc. this plugin rids you of having to manually insert links into your template files. Though if you do follow this post be aware that some of the files have changed but mainly it’s just the odd incorrect line number.

Vertical Category Navigation

Not a fan of Magento’s default javascript category navigation? This extension is for you! As the name suggests it rids you of the horizontal javascript navigation with a <ul> based list of your categorys that will drill down around 3 levels into your subcategories. Easily customised via the included CSS it’s a really great extension to save alot of time in the development process.

Magento Image Compression

This is one addon to Magento that really should have an option in the backend to change the setting rather than forcing users to modify the core code of Magento. As some of you might have noticed Magento automatically runs an image compression on any product images uploaded, which can sometimes leave your products with awful compression artifacts all over them! Not good for showing off your products. This little change to the code allows you to tailor the compression and leave it barely noticeable with no artifacts at all. Obviously this comes with the caveat of slightly larger image file sizes but I think it’s a small price to pay to get your products looking that little bit better.

Hosts File edit for Local Installs

Some of you developers who prefer to work locally might have experience issues with Magento refusing to log you in from time to time. This is an error cause by the fact that most of the time your local install doesn’t have a period in the name i.e. http://localhost/mymagentoshop so Magento ends up refusing the login. There is a fix for it which involves editing your hosts file to redirect a domain to your localhost, so you’ll end up with something more like http://www.mylocalfakedomain.com/mymagentoshop which Magento assumes is a real URL and allows you to login. It’s a trivial issue but if you’re not familiar with Magento then it can cause a few headaches.

What do you use?

These are just a few bits I find make life easier when working with Magento. Are there any extensions or addons like this for you? Let me know in the comments and hopefully we can make working with Magento that little bit easier!

After some poking around the forums and in the #magento channel on freenode it seemed a few users were struggling to get Magento’s PDF invoices looking as good as the rest of their website. The invoices Magento prints off as standard are around 7mb each in size so opening them in the browser to print can take a while depending on your connection. A fellow Magento user (Nick Rigby from www.nickrigby.com) and myself managed to concoct a solution that allowed for speedy printing of a customised invoice! This solution does require some basic knowledge of how Magento works and a good working knowledge of CSS if you need to customize the invoice some more. Let’s get started then!

First off you’ll need to download the following CSS file and amend it a little.

Download invoice_print.css (Right click and save as)

First things first you’ll need to open up this css file and make a few changes to suit your needs. On line 67 of the css file you should find:

background: url(images/invoice_logo.jpg) no-repeat; /* Add company logo here if needed */

Now this file will be uploaded to your adminhtml skin directory which already contains an images folder. So get yourself a relatively small version of your logo and upload it to skin/adminhtml/default/default/images If you’ve named your logo anything other than invoice_logo.jpg then you’ll need to edit line 67 to reflect this.

The next change is the addition of two plain text lines at the foot of the new invoice for you to thank your customers and maybe provide contact info. Checkout lines 180 and 181 to find:

.order-totals:after { content: “Text line 1″; }
#history_form:after { content: “Text line 2″; }

As you’d imagine whatever you replace “Text line 1″ with will show up on line one and respectively line 2 for “Text line 2″. Remember to put your text inside the quotes.

That does it for editing the CSS file now we need to upload it to skin/adminhtml/default/default/ with the rest of the CSS files for the admin interface. Once that’s done you’ll need to head over to your app folder and dig down to app/design/adminhtml/default/default/layout and open up main.xml. From lines 74 to 75 you’ll find the code that includes 2 of the the CSS files in your admin pages, reset.css and boxes.css. Copy the following directly after these two lines:

<action method=”addCss”><name>invoice_print.css</name><params>media=”print”</params></action>

Login to your admin area and head over to your Orders > Invoices section. Open up the invoice you want to print with your new layout and instead of using the print button Magento provides, simply hit cmd (or ctrl) and p to print straight from the browser. Now most browsers will print the page with some jargon in the header and footer and your logo will be missing. Whatever browser you’re using head over to the print settings, you’ll need to disable the header and footer tags and ensure that the option to print background images is enabled.

Now when you print you’re invoice should come out rather neatly looking something like the one below (sans gaussian blur!).

CSS Customised Magento Invoice

Now this method as mentioned previously is not ideal as you can’t print more than one invoice at a time however I’ve found it a very acceptable solution until Varien either changes the way the PDF invoices are generated or provides better documentation to aid in the customization. Hopefully it should tide you over for now too.

Once again big thanks to Nick for the CSS, which is included with this article, saved me hours of scavenging through Google and the Zend PDF module.