Magento remove index.php from URL

In Magento remove index.php from URL using below steps. It will convert your URL from

http://www.example.com/index.php/blah

to

http://www.example.com/blah

1.) In Magento Admin > System > Configuration > Web > Search Engine Optimization, change the value of Web Server Rewrites to Yes

Make sure your web server rewrite module is enabled. If you are using apache as your web server on Linux, you can check it by going to /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/rewrite.load, if rewrite.load is present there it means your rewrite module is enabled. If not, you will need to copy rewrite.load from /etc/apache2/mods-available/ and paste it at /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ location. Then reload the apache by running service apache2 reload.

2.) Check the file permission of .htaccess, it should be present in Magento root directory and readable by server.

Magento clone collection – How to clone collection in Magento

Clone collection in Magento in an easy and effective way. Cloning collection in Magento is not as straight forward as we do in PHP object cloning. That’s because Magento does not implement clone in it’s collection object, which is why if you try to clone Magento collection it will nothing but just a copy of the original collection itself. If the original collection gets updated, this cloned will also get updated, which is what we don’t want right?

Let’s see an example where PHP’s clone keyword will fail. Consider you have an $collection in the class method and you want to perform operations on this $collection in two different ways. So you need to clone this $collection and perform operation differently in both the collections so that both collections have different result set.

$coll1 = clone $collection;

$coll2 = clone $collection;

Let’s perform different operations on these two separate collections now, like this:

$coll1->getSelect()->where('first where condition');

$coll2->getSelect()->where('second where condition');

if($coll1->getSize() == 0) {

    $collection = $coll2;

} else {

    $collection = $coll1;

}

But this will fail and not work what we expect here. $collection here will hold BOTH the where conditions, instead of any one depending on the result of IF condition.

To overcome this, in Magento, what you have to do is:
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Magento Recoverable Error Argument 1 passed to Mage_Core_Model_Store::setWebsite() must be an instance of Mage_Core_Model_Website

Magento Recoverable Error: Argument 1 passed to Mage_Core_Model_Store::setWebsite() must be an instance of Mage_Core_Model_Website, null given, called in /var/www/xxx/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/App.php on line 634 and defined in /var/www/xxx/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Store.php on line 395

When migrating Magento site from old server to new server, this error often occurs and appears in var/log/system.log. It prevents your Magento Admin to load JS and CSS files hence your admin panel becomes skinless.

The solution to get rid of this and load JS and CSS files is to run the following mysql commands in Mysql console or phpMyAdmin.

SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;

UPDATE `core_store` SET store_id = 0 WHERE code='admin';

UPDATE `core_store_group` SET group_id = 0 WHERE name='Default';

UPDATE `core_website` SET website_id = 0 WHERE code='admin';

UPDATE `customer_group` SET customer_group_id = 0 WHERE customer_group_code='NOT LOGGED IN';

SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=1;

What the above mysql commands does is:
– Disables foreign key checks on tables so that you don’t get any foreign key errors while executing immediate update queries.
– Updates store, store_group and website tables with ID = 0, for admin user

Once the above set of queries are executed, don’t forget to clear cache to reflect your changes.

Magento add attribute to order

Adding custom attribute to order in Magento is same as we do for customer and category. The difference is we will use different setup class AND we will not need attribute set, group and attribute input type now. We will create a quick module which will do exactly what we want and nothing more than that. So let’s start our new module.

1.) Create a file at app/etc/modules/ and name it whatever you want. I will name it Namespace_Module.xml
Paste this code in that file:

< ?xml version="1.0"?>

<config>

    <modules>

        <namespace_module>

            <active>true</active>

            <codepool>local</codepool>

        </namespace_module>

    </modules>

</config>

2.) Create necessary directories to reach to app/code/local/Namespace/Module/etc/, so that we can create our config.xml there. Paste below code in this config file:

< ?xml version="1.0"?>

<config>

    <modules>

        <namespace_module>

            <version>0.0.1</version>

        </namespace_module>

    </modules>

    <global>

        <resources>

            <modulename_setup>

                <setup>

                    <module>Namespace_Module</module>

                    <class>Mage_Sales_Model_Mysql4_Setup</class>

                </setup>

                <connection>

                    <use>core_setup</use>

                </connection>

            </modulename_setup>

            <modulename_write>

                <connection>

                    <use>core_write</use>

                </connection>

            </modulename_write>

            <modulename_read>

                <connection>

                    <use>core_read</use>

                </connection>

            </modulename_read>

        </resources>

    </global>

</config>

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Magento add attribute to category

Adding category attribute in Magento is same as we add for product and customer. Here in this post I will create a custom module which will add your new custom category attribute in Magento. So let’s start with the module:

1.) As usual, create an XML file in app/etc/modules/ directory, I will name it Namespace_Module.xml
Paste below code in it changing the Namespace and Module as you want.

< ?xml version="1.0"?>

<config>

    <modules>

        <namespace_module>

            <active>true</active>

            <codepool>local</codepool>

        </namespace_module>

    </modules>

</config>

2.) Second step would be to create a file config.xml in app/code/local/Namespace/Module/etc/ directory. Create all the directories required get there. Paste the below code in it making sure you have changed Namespace and Module with your naming.

< ?xml version="1.0"?>

<config>

    <modules>

        <namespace_module>

            <version>0.0.1</version>

        </namespace_module>

    </modules>

    <global>

        <resources>

            <module>

                <setup>

                    <module>Namespace_Module</module>

                    <class>Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Eav_Mysql4_Setup</class>

                </setup>

                <connection>

                    <use>core_setup</use>

                </connection>

            </module>

            <module_write>

                <connection>

                    <use>core_write</use>

                </connection>

            </module_write>

            <module_read>

                <connection>

                    <use>core_read</use>

                </connection>

            </module_read>

        </resources>

    </global>

</config>

I have only included setup class and connections as those are the only things we will need to execute our script which will insert the custom attribute to category in our Magento project.
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