Republicans and other cultural conservatives feared the day the Internet at large and all its nodes would simultaneously collapse… we haven’t seen that happen yet, but we have seen industry collaborators get on the same page politically and take a stand against the war on civil liberties in the form of PIPA and SOPA. Who is supporting this terrible attempt at law-making? Those who don’t know that Intellectual property expires if you don’t maintain or share it, and some folks are trying to legislate their way out of that fact. The rest of us are taking a stand for what we believe is true. Information wants to be free, if you let it… and when you put a price on it, you’re essentially putting a price on your own head. The price of a troll’s head, technically.

@MCHAMMER says STOP! …. HAMMATIME

It’s no longer a secret that Elastic Provisioner, clients, partners, et. al. unanimously oppose legislation which attempts to control that which cannot be controlled… at the expense of the civil liberties which USA and other countries fought so hard for. In “america” we thought we were going to win some kind of war against drugs, but we were on them.. so we made peace with them. Now the war seems to be against online piracy. The same problem exists as before… people want drugs and pirated software, and those people are citizens… so it’s going to be very hard to control their behaviours. In fact, if we’re going to control them we’re all going to have to give up our privacy and innovation… just a little. Is it worth it? not really. The fact is that some people would prefer to make the Internet back into tubes again. I have decided to take a stand against it, and you’ll probably hear about it on twitter if you’re tuned into #STOPSOPA or #NOPIPASF or if you are attending The Silicon Valley PIPA and SOPA protest, brought to you by Hackers and Founders. If you’re taking computing personally, join us!

- Asher Bond

@PPLvPIPA: What sites are taking a stand against online erosion of civil liberties in the form of PIPA and SOPA?

Google, Inc.

WikiMedia / Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales has annouced that Wikipedia is abstaining from normal behaviour on this day of activism… unfortunately not in those words, but his were probably better. What I love about their implementation of the blackout is that their site appears to work normally until you submit a search query or click a topic, then all pages redirect to the blackout page.

The opposing political factions attack our Twitter account

This is from Tony Baldwin (one of my Diaspora friends).

It costs roughly $40 per month to host one Terabyte of data (that comes out to 1000 gigabytes if you’re a tech noob). Take a look at the edge locations. Having a CDN with servers in these locations probably makes sense if you are looking to distribute content to people in North America. The extension will streamline your Magento content and deliver it redundantly from at least 10 edge servers. It may also preclude the need for you to find a custom caching solution, depending how your Magento commerce solution was designed.

They’ve already released the integration software for WordPress, but here is an announcement of what you should expect to see when you can integrate CDN by configuring a single plugin per Magento deployment. Remember that you can sometimes operate multiple stores under one Magento deployment.

Let me know if you are interested in custom designed cloudsourcing, performance testing, or optimization of your application for more elastic scale and geographic efficiency.

Here’s how targeted merchandizing can be set up in Magento Enterprise 1.6

1. Set up rules for Up-selling: For example, present the buyer with items of the same category/manufacturer as the product last viewed if the price is 10% higher.
2. Set up rules for Related Items by Subcategory: For example, automatically scan the customer’s cart and offer them items within a subcategory of the items they are planning to purchase if these items are from the same manufacturer.
3. “Customer’s who purchased product A also bought products XYZ…” – This can be done, for example, by setting a rule to show the most popular 3 products that are bought over 40% of the time when other customers bought product A.
4. These rules are followed (calculated) automatically by Magento based on the items in the customer’s cart (prior to checkout.)
5. Sometimes you know for sure when and what to up-sell: You can override these automated rules by manually selecting products that you always want to use as cross-sell, up-sell or related-items for a specific product.
6. Create customized buying options on the shopping cart page.

Targeted merchandizing is an effective way to increase sales to existing customers, but take a look at what you can do to reach new customers with targeted marketing.

Here’s how you can target new markets in Magento Enterprise 1.6

1. Set up your advertising campaign as usual with custom graphics, banners, etc.
2. Integrate banners to match your advertising campaign’s theme. Magento Enterprise offers a special smart page block that will serve the banners based on the rules created for each promotion. It could even be customized to serve as your landing page or micro-site.
3. When customers funnel in through these custom pages, you can associate promotional banners to catalog and shopping cart price rules. For example, you can offer promotional discounts without requiring users to type in promotional codes. This is done by creating call-to-action callouts in Magento Enterprise 1.6.

eBridge’s Bridgeconnect module integrates Magento Enterprise 1.6 with most Accounting and ERP software platforms including

• SAP
• Intuit
• Sage
• Epicor

You can choose to Synchronize information between Magento and your Accounting/ERP software, automatically, manually or on a set schedule. You can Bilaterally synchronize time-sensitive information such as sales orders, product information, order status and shipping information.

Magento Enterprise 1.6 brings you the Content Management features you have been asking for with CMS+

• Version Control:Store managers can create multiple versions of a static page before publishing.
• Administrators can restrict publishing privileges to only authorized users or approve pages before publishing them.
• Store Managers don’t have to know HTML. Magento Enterprise 1.6 comes with a WYSIWYG editor, which supports inserting images, URLs, product images/URLs, category URLs, and embedding videos from sites like YouTube.
• Magento Widgets: Widgets are movable, modular, configurable (and pre-configured) page blocks that allow you to display dynamic (or static) content on your store front-end. For example display all best sellers for a specific category on the top part of the category page. This is something Magento users have hand-coded until now.

These are only a few of the new features available in Magento Enterprise 1.6. For more information, visit Magentocommerce.com.

Fatal error: Call to a member function children() on a non-object …

The most common reason for this error message is that the Magento Installation script is trying to access other scripts which are in a directory that is unreadable by your web server. You probably broke the file and directory permissions for these installation scripts.

You might have better luck with uncompressing the tar.gz archived version of Magento, which you can download from Magentocommerce.com. Tar archives generally are preset with the permissions of the person who archived them, which might be easier since the good folks at Magento probably have a better idea about how permissions need to be set for their software.

If you are using a Magento friendly hosting company like Host Monster, you should be able to simply upload the compressed tar.gz file and uncompress it on the server side with the permissions already set properly.

It’s still a good idea for you to know how to set permissions for web applications on a web server, especially if you run your own VPS or dedicated web server or people are paying you to install/set up Magento for them.

Here’s how to set the file and directory permissions for Magento Manually

Check that all directories inside your magento directory are readable and executable by your web server’s user. Normally the web server runs as either the user apache or nobody. As a side note, it’s more secure to run your web server as it’s own username instead of “nobody”.

For those of you running the lazy (less secure) installation of your web server… The lazy (less secure) way is to change permissions is:
chmod -r 777 /your/magento

Don’t set permissions using the lazy method, because anyone with access to your web server (shell, ftp, or even just web access through a script) can overwrite your magento files and heavily compromise your e-commerce site. It is very important to run an e-commerce web server securely because a compromised web server can send thousands of credit card numbers to thieves before the security breach is noticed. If you are unsure about security, it is recommended that you use a scalable e-commerce service such as Shopify or that you purchase a Magento installation from someone who is seasoned in e-commerce. I can set up the Magento software platform (which supports the hosting of multiple web stores) in about an hour or two depending on your hosting situation. However, if you prefer to and are comfortable setting up e-commerce sites yourself, read on.

Try to limit permissions to only your ftp/shell username and the web server. The way most people handle this is to change the owner of files to their ftp/shell username and set the group to the web server’s group.

For example (assuming your web server runs under the user name “apache”):
chown -r yourname:apache /your/magento

Make files (not directories) readable by your web server:
find /your/magento -type f -exec chmod 640 {} \;

The next thing you should do is set the file permissions for Magento directories to readable and executable:
find /your/magento -type d -exec chmod 750 {} \;

Now set the permissions for directories that need to be writable and executable:

chmod 770 /your/magento/app/etc
chmod 770 /your/magento/var
chmod 770 /your/magento/var/cache
chmod 770 /your/magento/media
chmod 770 /your/magento/media/downloadable

chmod 770 /your/magento/media/import

Many people don’t know the news… You can now subscribe to a low-cost, PCI and DSS compliant, managed version of Magento in the Cloud. It’s called Magento Go (formerly Magento Stratus when it was only a nascent release candidate). Along with this new Magento offering, Varien (Magento’s open-core contributor company) has announced a startup-friendly economic stimulus package (which is a freemium trial with no setup fees and deferred monthly recurring costs) to help you build e-commerce business momentum with little technical effort.

For those of you who are e-commerce systems integrators who like to get down into the nuts and bolts and those of you who just like to take e-commerce in-house… you may be getting the following error message when trying to integrate USPS shipping calculations:

United States Postal Service:
This shipping method is currently unavailable. If you would like to ship using this shipping method, please contact us.

The error is generally caused by one of these four issues:

1. USPS hasn’t moved your new (test only) Webtools account into production.
2. You didn’t specify the weight metrics for your product(s).
3. You didn’t put in the correct web tools ID as your shipping methods user ID (should look like 123MYMAG4567 … or 6 dots when it’s saved)
4. You forgot to put the http:// in your gateway URL (under shipping methods).

Magento, by default comes with the following URL set up in the shipping configuration for USPS:
http://production.shippingapis.com/ShippingAPI.dll

If you put in the weight for each of your products and you are specifying the right production gateway (http://production.shippingapis.com/ShippingAPI.dll), then it’s likely that you don’t have access to USPS’s production API. USPS doesn’t give you access to the production API by default, but rather… they give you access to the test API which only supports one specific address. USPS needs to approve your account before they will give you access to the production USPS API. Once they transition your account into production, Magento should start working. Keep in mind that they only allow you to use it on one web site per account, so if you’re setting Magento up for a client, customer, or other business entity other than your own you should set up a separate USPS account for them.

If you don’t have a USPS API (WebTools) account, you can set up your USPS WebTools account here:
http://www.usps.com/webtools/

Once you have set up your account, they will give you access to the testing environment. The URL for the USPS test API is:
http://testing.shippingapis.com/ShippingAPITest.dll

Now, before you paste that into Magento, you should be aware that the USPS test environment only supports very specific data. According to their own documentation:

ZipOrigination: 10022
ZipDestination: 20008 (is set during Checkout process by user)
Pounds: 10
Ounces: 5 (weight can be set for every product on Administration > Products)
Size: LARGE
Machinable: TRUE

To test international shipping use the following values:

Pounds: 2
Ounces: 0
MailType: Package
Country: Albania

or

Pounds: 0
Ounces: 1
MailType: Postcards or Aerogrammes
Country: Algeria

All other parameters’ values won’t work in the test environment.

This is why most Magento consultants and installation service providers typically just ask USPS to turn on production mode. When you are approved by USPS for the production API, you should use the following URL:
http://production.shippingapis.com/ShippingAPI.dll

But remember, it’s very important that you set up a separate USPS account for each Magento web site (or at least one per domain). USPS will disable your access to their production server if you are caught using your account on multiple web sites. That would make all of your Magento customers very upset, all at the same time.

To request access to the USPS production API, fill out the form here:
http://www.usps.com/webtools/webtoolsapirequestform.htm

Be sure that in your request, you explain that you are using third party software (Magento) and that you only want access to the API so that you can calculate shipping costs associated with using USPS.

If you leave out this information they will reject your request or ask you to submit a valid test before they give you access. Third party software doesn’t need to be tested as long as you tell them you are using Magento.

USPS doesn’t allow you to use their API for batch processing or data cleansing, so be sure to NOT check these boxes on the request form.

Once USPS gives you access to their production API server, Magento should work with all USPS shipping options. If you are still having trouble, check that you have access to USPS’s production API server.

USPS Tech Support: 1-800-344-7779 (7:00 AM to 11:00 PM EST daily)

Once you have it correctly configured and you have access to the production API, you should be able to place an order and check out to see a list of USPS shipping options with the costs of each calcualted based on the weight of the product you are ordering.

You will need to remove shipping options that are irrelevant, for example USPS Library Mail is only for shipping academic things like books between academic institutions or libraries.

Click here to read about different shipping methods such as Parcel Post.

Click here to download premium themes for Magento, Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, PHPBB, etc.

To add these extentions, I had to recompile php adding these two parameters to my PHP 5 configure script:
–with-mcrypt
–with-pdo-mysql