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Easily Set a Custom Order Number in Magento With My Free SetStartOrderNumber Extension

Every time I launch a new Magento store I have to go and hack the database to change the order, shipment, invoice and credit memo numbers. This just doesn’t seem right, and seeing as I was about to launch two stores (in one week!) I thought it’d be better to make the order increment ID’s custom from within the Magento admin panel. Now what I didn’t realize before I set about doing this was that someone had already made a very good extension to customize order numbers – woops.

So not knowing I could just buy an extension for $60, I went ahead and coded one up on my train ride home Friday afternoon.

This is a blog post about what the extension does (and does not) do and how it’s made. I’m going to release it for free, if you need full order customizing functionality, you should still buy Adjustware’s one, it has some great features.

If you’re just here for the free software, you can get it on Magento Connect, if you’d like to learn more about it and how it’s made, please read on.
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Why are my Magento products not showing up?!

This is a just a quickie – got caught out with a weird issue yesterday where the Magento products in a particular category just disappeared – they still existed if you navigated directly to their URL, but they would not show in their categories (though the Manage Categories screen in the Magento admin still showed those products in their correct category).

These things always happen at inopportune times, I was right about to start a pre-go-live review of a site, and was left with one category completely devoid of products, thanks for making me look like an egg, Magento!
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Structuring your Magento project for Engineering, not Hacking

This is a blog post about how I structure my Magento store development, and how that has been made easier thanks to the efforts of Colin Mollenhour and his script modman. Hopefully after reading this, you’re all inspired to go set up a similar project structure, because it gives a repeatable, hopefully less upgrade ruined Magento experience. Certainly if you’re not inspired, I’d like to hear about how you are structuring your projects – the more talk of this, the better the overall quality of Magento stores in the wild, I hope.
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WordPress: Blank page after posting comments and Akismet

Just a real real quickie related to WordPress here, not Magento. If you find adding comments in wordpress causes a blank page – try disabling akismet. If that fixes it, it probably means the domain you were using to test with in the comments field has been marked as spam by Akismet. WordPress serves up the blank page as a feature to prevent spam bots. No errors were logged though, so it made it a bit tricky to figure out what’s going on.

There are loads of other people with this problem, or variations of it online – googling around there semeed to be a lot of confusion – my sugegstion is to try disabling akismet first.

Other possible causes though I found and tried before getting to Akismet: Old theme with incorrect comment form on a newer version of wordpress – compare it to the default theme for your version of wordpress. Caching – try disabling your cache if you use one.

Hope that saves someone some time. Magento content coming soon, promise…

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Toshcomputers: (mis)Adventures in Buying a new iMac

I know this isn’t strictly Magento development related, so I’ll apologize in advance to those of you uninterested in this post, I’ll keep it brief, promise. I just wanted to tell a little story about an ill-fated ecommerce transaction with Tosh Computers, so hopefully I can save others a great deal of hassle if they stumble upon this post when looking for a review of Tosh Computers. Perhaps we’ll all learn a little something about selling on the internet too, that is why we’re here, after all.

Tosh Computers (toshnewzealand.com) is a merchant of Apple Mac laptops and desktops in NZ and Australia. I ordered a top-spec iMac 27′ from them on behalf of someone who needed one for business. Being such a Mac-convert I jumped at the opportunity to help someone into one, the less Windows PC’s in the world, the better it is, as far as I’m concerned!

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