Magento

Our great USPS decided to make some slight name changes to their delivery methods.

When I launched some larger sites on Magento in August 2009 I was sold on the slight performance increase that memcache provided the cart. However, I ran into a few bugs and other anomalies that have caused me to abandon the use of memcache with Magento.

Say you want to redirect a customer to a URL. In Magento you'd invoke this little bit of code to produce the URL.

Mage::getUrl('<em>/</em>/post') 

This will produce a url like http://www.example.com/<module>/<controller>/post. The '*' just inserts the current module and controller.

Now you want to redirect to the secure version. Easy. Just simply say so

Mage::getUrl('<em>/</em>/post', array('_secure'=>true)) 

Now that was simple.

Some pages in Magento were giving just a white page, with no indication of errors in Zend Server console or log files. This was apparently a memory issue, so I restarted the web server and all was fine.

One issue I noticed was the server "setroubleshoot" was taking 12% of the systems memory. This program just logs issues with SELinux and it seems SELinux doesn't like my Magento install. I have SELinux just set to 'warn', but I may want to disable it all together. I stopped the 'setroubleshoot' program and turned it off with chkconfig.

Search seems so simple on the surface, but inside it's a very complex thing (just ask Microsoft why they still haven't beaten Google at this game). Magento offeres some search options for products, but it's search is not 'awesome', but just OK.

Here are some options I've found that return a small set of products that are most accurate.

System > Config > Catalog > Catalog Search
1. Search Type = Combine (Like and Fulltext)
- This will catch plurals pretty good as well as slight spelling variants

2. Disable quicksearch for 'Descriptions'

So you've successfully upgraded Magento and now you're rolling live on the new code and db.... You did remember to save a copy DB incase you have to back track?

You go to the Cache Management page and try to refresh the cache (just because you want to cover all your bases). After clicking the button with confidence you get a white screen, no alerts, no friendly exception report, just white.

Checklist.
1. Is your var/ directory writable by the web server?
2. Is your app/etc/use_cache.ser file writable by the web server?

Just an FYI, when you upgrade Magento, you may get an error for some searches. Just rebuild your search index and all should be well.