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Magento 1.5.0.1 and SMTPPro 1.4.2 Now Working – Free Gmail/SMTP, ahoy!

There have been several reports of my SMTP Pro email extension failing on Magento 1.5. I hadn’t tested or recommended installing it on Magento 1.5 and wasn’t going to for a little while. You could say I’m not really an early adopter when it comes to Magento versions.

However, the ever helpful Rhonda (@rondata) from Magento got in touch with me late last week to report there may have been a packaging problem with my extension that has made it unable to be used on the new Magento Connect. So I thought if I was going to repackage it, I may as well also fix it up for Magento 1.5 – and so here is SMTPPro version 1.4.2.

As always you can download the package manually here (or via Magento Connect) to check it out before you install it manually.

I have tested the extension on Magento 1.4.2 and 1.5.0.1, also tested a Magento Connect install on 1.5.0.1. Everything seems to be in order. The change in 1.5 was a move to array based email addresses and names in the Email_Template class.

I still feel like it’s shoddy OO that I have to override an entire method and duplicate all the logic in it just to swap in my SMTP transport configuration. For those that care, I did try some techniques to avoid it, but the default transport is explicitly set by the core code if a return path is set, which invalidates anything I can do in a subclass – short of temporarily hijacking the return path configuration, which I may resort to doing in the next release.

In the process of testing a Magnto Connect install I did see a very cool feature in the latest Magento, and I may just have missed it in the earlier releases as I seldom use Magento Connect anymore.

Upload a Package directly

Installing a package directly from within the downloader module will surely make the day of many commercial extension developers – at least until they can sell extensions directly on Magento Connect*.

Anyway, that’s about it – the new version supports 1.5, and can be downloaded/installed on Magento Connect. Go enjoy some free SMTP/Google Apps/Gmail email sending! Please let me know if you have any problems or spot any bugs.

* Speaking of which, I wonder what % Magento will take… Apple set a pretty high benchmark at 30%. Magento doesn’t quite have the same kung-fu grip on distribution though so maybe it’ll be lower.

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Magento Development and Deployment: Setting up a Modman based Magento project on Magento 1.5

As I had noted earlier this week, I have not had a lot of Magento development time lately, so today I thought I’d spend a bit of time setting up a Magento 1.5 development environment on my Mac. This post will take you through the steps to set up Magento development with Eclipse for editing/debugging and SVN for version control, with deployment being managed by Modman. This relates to the project structure I described in my presentation at Magento Imagine, with the exception that I won’t go into detail about setting up a separate extensions repository, as that is probably more relevant to developers who build and release extensions than developers working on a single Magento project.

What this guide assumes:

  • Mac development environment with MAMP
  • Linux production environment
  • SVN for version control, but Git can work too.
  • Modman for deployment. Written by Colin Mollenhour

What we will cover:

  • Installing SVN, Magento and Modman.
  • Getting a free SVN repository.
  • Setting up a Magento store development project with version controlled extensions, templates/themes, locale and emails.
  • Development and deployment of changes to Production.

We have a lot to get through, so let’s not delay.

Step 1: Install Magento Locally

We’ll zap through a commandline install. We’ll be installing into your web server doc root. If you would like help setting that up I wrote a guide to installing MAMP on a Mac (a long time ago) and also (extra for experts) a guide to setting up virtual hosts on MAMP too.

#In your ~/Downloads directory or some where suitable
wget http://www.magentocommerce.com/downloads/assets/1.5.0.1/magento-1.5.0.1.tar.gz
tar xzf magento-1.5.0.1.tar.gz
# I keep all of my Magento development versions in a web folder within ~/Documents
mv magento ~/Documents/web/magento/1.5.0.1

Continue reading Magento Development and Deployment: Setting up a Modman based Magento project on Magento 1.5

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Magento Imagine 2011 Presentation Notes and Links: Engineering your Magento Store

Just finished my presentation at Magento Imagine 2011 and wanted to drop a quick post with the links to various tools I mentioned and my slides on Engineering your Magento Store.

Thanks to everyone who asked interesting questions, glad to hear others are exploring this area of Magento store maintenance too.

You can get my slides here, I’ll have about 20 hours of flying to do this weekend so I’ll try to write up a more step-by-step guide as a blog post too. You may also find this blog post from last year interesting, if this project structure/deployment topic is relevant.

Update: I didn’t get the follow up written on the flight, but better late than never, check out my full step-by-step starter guide to Magento development and deployment with SVN and Modman here.

Links:
Modman deployment tool by Colin Mollenhour .
The cool-kid’s SCM, GIT.
The one I use, SVN.
Bug in Magento 1.4.2 that you should know about.

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A Recipe to avoid having your Twitter, Facebook, CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet account stolen at an Airport or Conference

This week I’m heading to LA for the Magento Imagine conference. It should be a really diverse conference, with developers, marketers and all manner of other ecommerce industry experts brought together by a common interest in Magento. I’ll be presenting a short tech talk during the Developer UnConference section, which is billed as a developer only techy session – sounds like fun! I’ll be running through some Magento Engineering tips, for project setup, development and deployment in a repeatable way.

I have a fairly grueling trip to get there and amidst all this insecure wifi in the air at Sydney airport I thought I’d jot down a quick how-to for fellow travelers/conference goers to avoid having their Twitter or Facebook account hacked by a 10 year old with a Mac book.

Follow the recipe below for secure web browsing at airports on the way and while you’re at the Magento Imagine conference.
Continue reading A Recipe to avoid having your Twitter, Facebook, CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet account stolen at an Airport or Conference

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Creating a Runkeeper RSS Feed – the hack way.

I’ve started using RunKeeper since getting a GPS tracker for my running. I wanted an RSS feed along with plenty of others, so here’s a really trashy little hack to get one, until the good folks at Runkeeper make one for you.

This requires a free service called Feed43 – it’s just the first such html to rss service I found, so it may not be the best, I’d be open to suggestions of better ones. I thought it made the sometimes annoying process of scraping HTML quite painless.

Continue reading Creating a Runkeeper RSS Feed – the hack way.