Category: Magento Installation

I am an expert at installing Magento, I offer Professional Magento installation for a low price of $99. If you want Magento installed, save yourself hassle finding a freelancer or rent-a-coder, just talk to me.

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How to Bulk Enable Products when Google Checkout is Disabled in Magento

Magento allows you to disable Google checkout functionality for each product. Under certain situations though (when upgrading from 1.2 to 1.3 for example), the state of your products eligibility for sale through Google Checkout changes.

If you find yourself unable to sell products through Google checkout you can easily enable Google Checkout for your products through the Magento admin interface. However if you have many hundreds or thousands of products going through each one is not an option.

Here is a solution that will allow you to set the state of all your products to enabled for Google Checkout, quickly and easily. Testing has been limited to my own development installation, so as always backup your data before running anything.

Continue reading How to Bulk Enable Products when Google Checkout is Disabled in Magento

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Another Magento install success, Only 2 Free installations left!

Well I have finished another of my free Magento installations and have some more excellent feedback to share. I helped Alan Bold with his Magento installation and here is what he had to say about my work:

“Building a Magento E-commerce site for the first time is tricky! No doubt about it. My biggest worry was web-server and web-hosting performance. Fortunately I came across Ashley’s services and took up his offer of a free Magento installation. If I had to sum up the experience in one word that word would be professional, others could be: fast, efficient and cost effective. Ashley took time to answer all my initial questions and reviewed my chosen web-hosting package. His install was quick (much faster than my test server install) and worked great. I was left with peace of mind that everything was configured correctly and secure, for this alone I will be using Ashley’s service for future Magento sites. $99 is a bargain, cheaper than Magento and well worth it. Thanks Ashley and keep up the good work”

Thanks for the kind words Alan, I look forward to working with you in the future. For any readers interested in help with a professional Magento installation, please do not hesitate to contact me.

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First Happy Customer: Free Magento Installation reviewed

So I have got my first review for my Free Magento Installation offer, I’m very proud of it and thought I’d share it with you all.

I Helped Konrad Bloor install Magento for his store East To West. The store isn’t live yet obviously because Konrad is still configuring it and setting up his inventory. Here is what he had to say about the quality and professionalism of my work:

“Ashley’s magento services were just what we were looking for – we’d attempted an install ourselves but just couldn’t make it work. We wanted to use magento but setting it up was very complex, and we’d been coming up against a brick wall again and again.

“He first highlighted something about our hosting that had become incompatible with magento. Once we fixed that with our hosting company, he very quickly gave us a working install with a sample product (testing upload capability) and an obscured admin login to provide some protection against attack. He took care to establish trust, and backed up our existing attempt at installing. We also run a blog from that hosting on the same site, and because he left everything else alone apart from magento, that was still working as I expected. We don’t run cpanel but he figured out our control panel to get everything done without being given any instructions at all.

“I couldn’t be more pleased and would recommend his magento services to anyone – he obviously knows magento very deeply. I would happily hire him again.”

Konrad’s review has been added to my services page, which you should check out if you are interested in help with a Magento install or would like to discuss any Magento related services. As of right now I still have 2 remaining Free installations, with 2 reviews pending, so if you would like to get professional Magento help, and do not mind writing a comprehensive review like Konrad’s, then please get in touch with me.

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Magento Installation: Database server does not support InnoDB storage engine

If you have recently hit a brick wall when installing Magento 1.2.1 on a shared hosting service with the error: Database server does not support InnoDB storage engine then you’re not alone. I came across this today while helping with a Magento install (one of my 5 Free Professional Magento installs). There is not a lot you can do, short of installing an old Magento version and not upgrading in the future, which is not a really good solution at all.

My recommendation was to either:

A) Request that your hosting provider enables InnoDB, which may or may not be possible. I notice shared hosting providers find all sorts of excuses for not supporting InnoDB, there looks to be plenty of reasons to have InnoDB enabled to me. This is really easily done by simply not having the skip-innodb line your mysql server configuration. Sadly though if it is in there, they probably opted to put it in there, and may not be willing to take it out.

or B) Move to a hosting provider that does support the new 1.2.x Magento and modern Mysql storage engines properly. That’s not always as easily done as it’s said though unfortunately. Continue reading Magento Installation: Database server does not support InnoDB storage engine

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A simple way to password protect your Magento store

This post will describe a simple technique to secure your Magento virtual host with basic HTTP password protection provided by Apache. This can be useful if you want to keep users away from the webstore during development, or if you sell products wholesale and do not want unauthorized users to view your catalog/pricing.

To be very clear from the outset, this technique uses basic HTTP authentication, which if used over HTTP (rather than HTTPS) affords no security for the passwords while they are in transit across the internet. If you are interested, you can learn more about the limitations of basic access authentication. As a simple mechanism for keeping people out of a site, it will do just fine. If you store your nuclear missile access codes in a Magento store database, do not use this technique to protect them, please.

Normally when I’m developing a new site I just use virtual hosting and a modified operating system hosts file to prevent people visiting it while it’s in development. I realize that’s not really security, more obscurity, but it has worked fine for me in the past.

Recently I have had a need to more fully protect a site, but also to make it public via DNS records. In a nutshell the steps required are, configure virtual hosting for your webstore, configure Apache authentication, setup a user/password and reload apache. I’ll run through everything in detail below.
Continue reading A simple way to password protect your Magento store