The ultimate Magento local development environment

In my blog posts, I often describe things I observe in my day-to-day life as a Magento freelancer or tips and tricks that work well for me.
Feel free to give me feedback in the comments on what topics interest you.
It has been really quiet about the official Magento Mobile App so I have done a research for one of my customers that is in need of a solid, cost-efficient mobile solution that does not require building up a new site from ground (i.e. the mobile site should exist in addition to the current webpage – not replace it).
Perhaps somebody might be interested in an overview of the different Zend Framework versions that are used in each Magento CE release, e.g. if you are developing Magento modules and want to use some kind of Zend Framework methods that are only available after a certain ZF version.
With the following code you can retrieve the current page url in your Magento CMS block or page:
Für den bekannten Webguys-Adventskalender habe ich einen Artikel geschrieben, in dem es um die Magento Order Status/State-Logiken geht und in dem ich erkläre, wie man ungewollte und falsche Status/State-Kombinationen (z.B. hervorgerufen durch Extensions) verhindert:
Some of you may already have noticed that PHPUnit > 3.5 does not run very well with Zend Framework 1 applications because of incompatible interface declarations and there seem to be no efforts to make this happen in the future (because ZF 2 should be used instead).
A very funny demonstration of common checkout issues in real life..
Sellvana is promised to be new star in the ecommerce sky. Yesterday I had the chance to access the BitBucket repository within the closed beta access and take a more detailed look into the current status of the codebase.
If you are currently developing a Magento extension with a custom menu for the Magento backend and you are having the problem that the menu is not showing up, this tiny little hint is for you.
A few weeks ago we released the first version of our new Recolize Recommendation Engine extension for Magento.
Below I will list some tipps to improve the overall Magento performance of your shop:
I am often asked by my clients which Magento Extensions I can recommend for their shop. Thats why I created a (probably incomplete) list of Magento 1 extensions that I regularly use in my Magento projects:
Today I got a really nice present from one of my Magento Extension customers:
In Magento 1.9 there is a JavaScript error on the product page in the backend that prohibits adding links to downloadable products when using the default German localization that ships with this Magento version.
A lot of my clients complain about the fact that they receive tons of spam messages via the Magento contact and review forms.
Yesterday I had an interesting problem in a Magento community installation of one of my clients:
In this blog post I want to share with you a short list of my daily RSS feeds that I find very useful to stay up-to-date in different categories:
Basically I recommend following the PSR-2 standard for Coding Style Guidelines in Magento projects. Verifying your coding styles makes sense in any case – whether you are working in a large team of developers or as a freelancer for several clients. Agreeing to one common coding standard and following the rules improves readability and comparability.
Today I was asked by a client if he should upgrade his Magento 1.5.1.0 store to the latest Magento Community Edition 1.9.1.1.