Blog

In diesem Blog-Beitrag geht es um das Testen von Legacy-Anwendungen wie beispielsweise Magento 1 Shops. Als Magento Freelancer liegt mein Fokus insbesondere auf Testing-Strategien, die sehr einfach und kosteneffizient für meine Kunden umzusetzen sind.

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 chances to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) for your Magento store like noindex or canonicals.

Im folgenden Blog-Post möchte ich die aus meiner Sicht wichtigsten Aspekte erläutern, warum für mich Magento 1 bzw. der Community-Nachfolger OpenMage nach wie vor eine absolut sinnvolle Lösung für Kunden sein kann. Außerdem zeige ich anhand meiner eigenen Website konkrete Implementierungsmöglichkeiten auf.

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 extensions, 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 In the meantime, of course, used libraries and development patterns have been outdated, so is the case with Prototype.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).

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.

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 my freelance work I have established certain principles that always guide me through - whether to take on a new client or project, developing a new software, learning new things or choosing new software internally.

Back in time I have published an article about the dropshipping possibilities in Magento. As a lot of my customers are interested in this topic, let’s continue this series and explore how to use dropshipping functionality in Shopify with the help of some Shopify apps.

Recently I discovered a bug in the core Magento 1 PayPal Express extension that leads to the user being redirected to the home page after PayPal checkout with no error message.
As the investigation was a rather lengthy process, I’ll tell you the details and of course the easy fix in this post here.

In my previous post I introduced Joplin as my new note-taking app. After using it for some time now, there are several things that are a bit difficult to grasp so in this post I present some useful tipps for Jopin.

As a privacy-concerned user it can sometimes be very tricky to find alternatives to the most-used applications. Looking for the best alternative to the widely established note-taking application Evernote was one of those hard evaluations and it took me a while, but here is the result: Joplin. Read why.

In my recent blog post for our Recolize Recommendation Blog I highlight some of changes that browser vendors are implementing regarding the handling of cookies in 2020.

For a long time Apache has been the defacto standard for hosting PHP web applications like Magento 1 or WordPress. Then with the rise of the need for high-scaling applications hosted in the cloud webservers like nginx or full page caches like Varnish became popular in order to handle the enormous amounts of traffic pouring in. The LiteSpeed webserver for Magento 1 is the new cool kind in the block now.

Bitbucket has a great feature called Bitbucket Pipelines with that you are able to do tasks automatically after code has been pushed to the repository. This workflow can also be used for Hugo deployments with Bitbucket Pipelines.