Since I work on a local development machine/server, I’ve never taken the time to set up mail yet, nor do I want to. I think a staging environment is more appropriate to actually have email being sent out. Nevertheless, it has made testing any email functionality a little cumbersome. I’ve done a little research, and have found two ways to tackle the problem. I’ve also included code samples and other resources to get you started. Read more…
Disclaimer: in a production environment, spend the extra time and resources to meet Magento’s requirements. This post is about setting up a development environment.
I have had one hell of a time trying to get Magento up and running on my development server. I have probably spent about 5 hours fighting with mcrypt and for some reason, it is just not playing nicely with my setup (PHP 5.3, with everything compiled manually). I brought in a server guru as well, and he had the same problem. I think we both tore out some hair.
I’ve hacked together some steps to get it up and running for developers who want to get their hands dirty quickly. Read more…
It seems people underestimate the value of security. Most sites that I check on are running old versions of popular web applications (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, vBulletin, phpBB, etc.) and it’s downright scary. These applications, due to their extreme popularity, are huge targets for hackers. Many succeed, too. They have such large codebases that sometimes the developers slip up and leave security holes open.
These companies have been pretty good with promptly releasing patches, so it becomes a race between the hackers and the millions of sites out there to get patched. Most don’t though, sadly.
I was working with a high profile site this weekend which was targeted, and here is an outline of some of that steps that we took to fight back… Read more…
