Migrate magento to new server / domain / database / host

Move or migrate magento to new server, domain, database, host, anything by following the steps below.

To configure your Magento with a new domain, you will need to do following steps:

– Copy whole Magento project from current server and paste it to the new server.
You can do server-to-server transfer. First, tar.gz your magento project
tar -cvf magento.tar.gz magento
Then copy it to your new server from old server
scp magento.tar.gz root@your.ip.address.here:/var/www/.

– Backup the database (Admin -> System -> Tools -> Backup)
You can also take backup through phpMyAdmin, or by mysql.
mysqldump -u user -p database > /path/to/keep/db.sql

– Logout from your old server. Login to new server.
Extract the file magento.tar.gz that you sent from old server
tar -zxvf magento.tar.gz
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Magento Interview questions and answers

Magento Interview questions and answers for freshers as well as experienced developers.

1. Explain Magento’s MVC architecture

First of all, what is MVC?

MVC stands for Model-View-Controller. Any application that separates it’s data access, business logic and user interface is called MVC. There can be two types of MVC: convention-based and configuration-based. Example, cakePHP is convention-based, i.e. you just need to follow the instructions of the core system to get your module ready in just few lines. Magento is configuration-based, i.e. you need to specify each and every thing to your module’s config file in order to get it work. Magento has controllers (for request/response routing), Block (for rendering content), Model (for business logic), Resource/Mysql4 (for database operations), etc (for module-specific configuration files), Helper (for common functions), sql (for setup scripts), layout (for connecting block with templates for each controller action) and template/.PHTML file (for Presentation i.e. View).
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Magento add radio / checkbox button to admin grid

Add custom column in admin Grid which will show radio/checkbox button. I know this is weird, but some people need this as a requirement. Here I will show you how you can have radio button or checkbox button that you can have directly in your grids.

For radio button,

$this->addColumn('some_id', array(

            'header_css_class' => 'a-center',

            'header'    => Mage::helper('adminhtml')->__('Some Header'),

            'type'      => 'radio',

            'html_name' => 'items[]',

            'align'     => 'center',

            'value'    => array('1')

        ));

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Magento: Get rid of admin notifications pop-up

Ever annoyed by the notification which pops up everytime you login to your Magento admin panel? Well, you can get rid of those bugging notifications without changing core.

Just disable the output of Mage_AdminNotification at:
System -> Configuration -> Advanced -> Disable Modules Output

Now logout and login, you will now never see those unwanted notifications.

Cheers!

Magento: Image resize/compression reduces quality of JPEG

In Magento, image quality is distorted when it’s resized in Category page as well as Product page. This is very bad if you are running an eCommerce website because image is the only thing which gives best impression to your customers. There are several complains regarding this in Magento forums with different answers. Some even suggest to use ImageMagick over the default Gd2 library.

If you don’t want to switch to ImageMagick and also don’t want to do much changes, here is a simple solution.

1.) Copy app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Helper/Image.php
2.) Paste it in local (app/code/local/ , create directories Mage/Catalog/Helper if it’s not there)
So the final structure will be app/code/local/Mage/Catalog/Helper/Image.php
3.) Edit newly pasted Image.php’s init() method, just after it sets “watermark size”, add a line:

$this->setQuality(100);

4.) Save, flush image cache, run any category or product page and see the difference!

Hope this helps!