Matthew Lanham

I had an exciting email the other morning welcoming me to the private beta of Magento Mobile, can’t wait to get my hands on this as it’s going to be extremely useful for many of my clients, especially as the costs seem to be reasonably acceptable.

Here’s some first impressions:

Installation was really easy, i took the manual approach and basically had to drop in some directories and change the permissions of one folder, this also required me to refresh the cache of Magento to pickup the Mobile option in the admin area.

Designing the application seems extremely easy also, you’re basically choosing the icon displayed at the top, the main image shown and an optional background image, i customised the colours to suit the website’s palette, had a few buggy issues and had to do this more than once, but i’m sure this will be ironed out in the public release.

It’s taken the best part of 10 minutes to customise the application to suit my needs, which is extremely quick, almost feels like cheating, but i’m not complaining, it’d take me weeks to get the same functionality programming it myself.

All in all it seems like a very impressive feature to sell to prospective e-commerce clients!

I’ve just written a nice handy piece of SQL script that allows you to import UK counties into the ExpressionEngine categories table, it’s also got the correct country as the parent category, i’ve made it super simple to customise also using 2 SQL variables.

You can read more and get the code from github:

http://github.com/swanify/UK-Counties-for-ExpressionEngine

I’ve spoken with a few people in the EE world regarding this and there seems to be quite a few people still developing new websites with ExpressionEngine 1.6.

EE 2.0 is now standard for all my new clients, i’ve got a couple of released websites and a few in development and so far i’ve not stumbled across too many bugs, until today.

A client who’s in the public sector is using IE6 and they are having issues with the way the admin theme displays, I’ve also noted the same issue on IE7 and it’s also not displaying the drop down menu for main items at the top, i’ll need to look to solve these.

For any of you unsure of taking the leap i’d certainly recommend it, there’s lots of little things that i love in comparison to EE 1.6 especially tabbing in the templates section!

So if you’re anything like me then you wont want to wait hours for a new domain to propagate, if you’re on Mac OS X then there’s a couple of tricks you can try to help things along.

The easiest option is to open up Terminal and type:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

There’s also another option if that doesn’t work, this also works on Windows but i can’t tell you where your hosts file is, on Mac OS X you can open up your hosts file and modify it so that it believes the new domain is pointing to the web server:

sudo vi /etc/hosts

Once the file is open add the following line under any other entries, replacing the ip address with that of your server and obviously change the domain also, once finished you should be able to load up the new website.

127.0.0.1     www.newdomain.com

Hope this helps some of you!

I’ve been using SVN for many years, and i’ve never had any problems, or reason to change. It’s been a life saver many times and it’s also saved me time, especially when using Beanstalkapp which has automatic deployment (it’s a killer featured!).

But i’m getting the Git bug, i’ll more than likely continue with SVN for some projects, but here’s a few reasons why i’ll use Git more often for the near future:

1. The ability to branch and merge is something that is extremely valuable when working with other developers to complete a project and is somewhat easier to do via Git than SVN
2. Git can manage the source changes locally and then commit these to a master server at any point, whereas with SVN you’d really need the internet to commit the changes

There’s a really good post on stackoverflow titled Why is Git better than Subersion? definitely worth a read.

So i’m now moving my SVN repositories over to Codebasehq, the great thing is they offer SVN + Git + Mercurial, plus the missing feature from Beanstalkapp ticketing!