Notes of a Magento Developer's Life

Over the years I have collected several useful layout XML code snippets that you can e.g. insert into individual Magento CMS pages or into your layout xml code in the local.xml file. This offers several changes to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) for your Magento store like noindex or canonicals.

In my daily work I regularly take over legacy projects from customers that have a relatively old code base and shall be upgraded in order to be compatible with latest software versions, PHP versions and so on. Within those projects I always use several techniques to quickly get to work but at the same time carefully try to not introduce new defects.

In the following blog post I will take you through several tips when you take over legacy projects.

If you are maintaining several Magento instances or use features like AWS autoscaling, you have many different places to look for your Magento application logs. In these cases a central logging application is very helpful.
In this post we will examine how to use the ELK stack with Magento logs.

While tweaking your Magento 1 online shop for performance you might have come into try to remove the default Mage_GiftMessage extension.
Unfortunately like many other default modules this module cannot be removed so easily because of some errorneous, hidden dependencies in other modules.
So let’s have a look what needs to be done in order to remove the default Magento gift message extension.

As we all know Magento 1 was using latest technologies at the time it has been published more than 10 years ago in 2008. In the meantime, of course, used libraries and development patterns have been outdated, so is the case with Prototype. This post is about how to start to remove the Prototype library from Magento 1 or OpenMage.

I am a big fan of the possibilities that CI pipelines like Bitbucket Pipelines offer and I have already wrote an article about integrating Hugo with Bitbucket Pipelines.
In this post today I will create a Bitbucket Pipeline for Google Lighthouse checks to continuously monitor the important Google Lighthouse Score to improve performance and search results.

Especially for Magento 1 after its end of life but also for Magento 2 it is important that you secure the Magento instance as best as possible.

In the following I will list some tips of that I use for my clients to secure their Magento backends.

Recently I was very impressed by the reported numbers of millions of people switching from WhatsApp to Signal in response to the latest privacy policy changes of WhatsApp in Februar 2021 (which has now been postponed to May because WhatsApp fears to miss so many users).

After the official end of life of Magento in last June, I recommended two ways of continuing with Magento 1 to my clients: either use MageOne to take care of providing security patches and updates for the latest Magento Open Source version 1.9.4.5. Or use the community-driven OpenMage fork of Magento. In this post we will see how I did the migration of my own website from Magento 1.9.4.5 to OpenMage.

In the field of search engine optimization (SEO) everyone tries to write the content in best quality from a customer perspective and ultimately also for the search engine. One important aspect therein is to avoid duplicate content as this is a major problem for search engines.

In this post I will clarify what duplicate content is and show a common source of duplicate content in Magento.