New Magento Security Patches
The e-commerce business is growing at a very fast rate and it is important to keep your sites protected. They include very sensitive customer data that, if stolen, can be devastating not only to the consumer but the business as well. Most customers buy from e-commerce...
Magento Security Vulnerability with Open Git Directory
Is your Magento .git repository exposed and vulnerable? Git is an amazing platform that allows for version control on many sites, including Magento commerce sites. According to the official Git website, Git is a "free and open source distributed version control system...
Review of Customer Paradigm: Watchdog Magento Extension Development
Customer Paradigm Review Reviewed by Skinz on Aug 23, 2015. Summary: "This is a must have extension. It was/is the first extension I added to my site. Why because every other extension subsequently installed gets logged and you receive an email showing what database...
Magento 2.0 Community & Enterprise: Full Page Caching Explained
Full Page Cache in Magento 2.0 In Magento 2.0, full page cache is built-in for both the Magento 2.0 Community platform, as well as the Magento 2.0 Enterprise system. I can't emphasize how amazing this feature is to have for an eCommerce store. Full page caching...
Magento 2.0: Location of Database Configuration File
In Magento 1.0, the configuration file that contains database settings and other information is located here: /app/etc/local.xml In Magento 2.0, the configuration is in the same directory (/app/etc/) but has been renamed to env.php. The file path is: /app/etc/env.php...
Magento 2.0 Community Speed Test with Full Page Cache
I just ran a speed test on a new Magento 2.0 community installation. It's still in Beta and still has a few bugs; it's due for an October or November 2015 release. One of our developers just downloaded the latest version - Magento ver. 1.0.0-beta from Git Hub, and...
Magento Imagine 2015 Recap
888.772.0777 303.473.4400 As you may know, I went out to Las Vegas for the Magento Imagine show in April, to find out the new trends in eCommerce, and get an overview for what's going on within the Magento company and in the industry in general. I've let me thoughts...
DNS Caching & Why My Site Doesn’t Show Up After Moving Hosting Companies
Why does my site not show up after I moved it to a different hosting company? We had a client issue this week where after he moved his site from one hosting company to the next, he wasn't able to view the site in his browser. To him, it looked like his website was...
Emergency Bypass: Magento's Saved Credit Card Option
Last Tuesday (and for a little while on Wednesday), Authorize.net's payment gateway was down. Authorize.net is one of the top ways that eCommerce stores take payments, so it meant a lot of lost sales yesterday for companies all around the Internet. It's very...
Magento API Shipping Email Notification Bug (Solved)
Solving Magento API shipment notification and tracking problems If you want to use the Magento API to handle shipment notification for your customers and add tracking numbers into the email sent to an end user, there's a well known issue / bug. The main issue is that...
Magento Nerf Gun Battle
Just in case you ever wanted to see some of the behind-the-scenes of what goes on at a Magento Web development / programming company, here's a quick video. Background: I was out of the office for a couple of hours, and the team had a bit of a nerf gun battle....
Authorize.net Payment Gateway is DOWN (May 26, 2015 – 2:59 pm)
If you're en eCommerce site, please know the Authorize.net payment gateway is DOWN right now, and not accepting payments. If you're running an eCommerce site like Magento and use Authorize.net for payments, and the payment is failing / people are not able to check...
Punny Error 404 Page for Peanut.com
If you know my sense of humor, I came up with this pun of a 404 page for one of our clients, Peanut.com... Check it out here:
Review of Customer Paradigm: Magento Programming
Customer Paradigm Review Reviewed by Mike R. on May 11, 2015. Summary: "I just wanted to send a quick note thanking you and your team for the excellent experience we had on our first project with Customer Paradigm. You'll recall your team did a Magneto "downgrade"...
Godaddy Crons Not Working / Not Firing
Over the weekend (May 9, 2015) , a couple of cron functions stopped working for a client that is hosted on Godaddy. For whatever reason, the site's path to execute the cron was not working. And even the Godaddy hosting system that allows you to create a cron didn't...
Google Update: April 21, 2015
In case you didn't know, Google is rolling out an important update to their algorithm on April 21, 2015. And if your site is not mobile-friendly, you may see decreased search rankings. April 21, 2015 - Google's Mobile Ranking Change Google doesn't often come out an...
Why Remove .php and .html From the End of URLs
You might have noticed that the end of your website’s URLs have .php or .html at the end of it whereas others do not. Should you remove yours? URL rewriting doesn’t actually remove the index.php but instead hides it. While your website won’t suffer leaving them on,...
SEO for Infinite Scroll Websites
Many companies that want to stay ahead of the curve online get an infinite scroll website, which can be visually appealing and great for mobile surfing but is not good for SEO. The way an infinite scroll site works is that before someone scrolls, the content below...
Google Favors Secure Sites for Search Rankings
Google put out a notice in August 2014 that their algorithms would incorporate the existence of a website security certificate to affect website rankings in their search results. It is easy to tell if a website is secure through the HTTPS (hypertext transfer protocol...
Expert Tip for Magento – Searching The Entire Magento Database
If you're trying to find a specific piece of content in the Magento database, there's usually not an easy way to search through all of the tables quickly and easily. (At least without a lot of higher-end access to the system.) You could run a shell script that...
Oops. I just made a big email marketing mistake
Ooops. I just made a big mistake and broadcast it out to (many) thousand people via email. In this case, I was moving too quickly, and mis-typed my email address that was in the FROM line of the email. I made a mistake in the domain name - the part after the @ symbol....
Customer Paradigm Review: SEO, DNS and Duplicate Content Consulting
Customer Paradigm Review Reviewed by Greg G. on March 1, 2015. Summary: "Awesome! Thanks for doing the exhaustive audit. So it sounds like things are all good now. I'm especially pleased to see the number of indexed pages drop to 25 so quickly. I don't have any more...
Boulder, Colorado in the snow…
Boulder, Colorado in the snow - Skunk Canyon Here's a photo I took while on a hike a couple of miles from the Customer Paradigm office. This is of Skunk Canyon, after some of the big snow we've been having: Click here for full, high-resolution image >> This was...
Why Doesn’t My Abandoned Cart Email Work With My One Step Checkout Extension in Magento?
We are asked this question quite a bit, so I wanted to post it here... If you're struggling to understand why your abandoned cart emails are not working, and you're also using a one step checkout process, it's because they are conflicting. It's a lot like putting a...
SEO: Competition vs. Effort
As you probably know, one of the things that we focus on here at Customer Paradigm is search engine optimization (SEO). I'm ranked on the Moz.com site (the top SEO resource blog out there) as one of the top 100 contributors, out of 350,000 contributors worldwide. One...
Snapchat Discover Changing Delivery of News Online
Snapchat is known for their temporary photos and selfies you can text to friends but with their launch of “Discover,” it’s changing the SEO game. Discover is a new way of browsing news in bite-sized formats and an easy-to-use interface that throws a curve-ball to...
Magento Releases Security Patch – Feb 10 2015 for Enterprise and Community
A quick note: Magento just released a security patch for both Magento Enterprise and Community. Magento Security Patch - SUPEE-5344 (Feb 10, 2015) Although there have not been any reports of customers being impacted by this exploit, if an attacker knows what they are...
Most Common Job in Colorado is Computer Software Developer
NPR just did a study where they categorized the most common jobs in the US by state, and have animated it from 1978 to 2014. While truck drivers make up the most common jobs for most of the states, it was wonderful to see that Colorado (along with Utah, Washington...
Be Paranoid About Backing Up Your Site
I received quite a bit of feedback from last week's email about hacking. And one of the key things that I was asked was, "Is there an easy way to back my site?" Fortunately, there is. Backing up your site: Like any process, I'd recommend having multiple processes in...
Magento Admin – Changing Passwords to Lock Out Older Users
A quick note about changing Magento Admin users to lock out older users that you no longer want to have in your Magento admin area: If you have an older employee that you want to remove access for, make sure that you delete the user vs. just changing the password. If...
Net Neutrality Upheld – A Win For Anyone With a Website
I was thrilled to hear this week that the chairman of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, is defending net neutrality. It's wonderful news for anyone that runs a Website, as well as for end users. I believe that the Internet has transformed the world economy, and Net Neutrality is...
Why PageSpeed and Fast Websites Matter
When we talk about improving PageSpeed to a 2 second or faster page load time, it can sound like a miniscule change from 6 seconds to 2 seconds. However, every second really counts when it comes to the patience of people. In the case of Amazon.com, they slowed down...