Failure for config changes in Magento to take effect - magento

I've inherited a projected involving a fairly large Magento store with no handover and no line of communication with the previous developer.
I have been teaching myself Magento for a few days and I feel I have a reasonable appreciation of it.
The main task I have to do is to create a new design for the front end, which seems straight forward enough to do through a theme. As there was only one website set up in magento, I created another as a test environment.
The issue I have, is that any change I make to configuration settings seem to take effect intermittently. I have disable cache, but still have the problem.
Specifically, at the moment, template path hints on are turned on. After turning them for the test website (where they are enabled), they still appear. This change was made half an hour ago, i have manually cleared cache on both the site and the browser.
Am I missing something?

Not the clearest explanation but these usually help:
Have you disabled the Merge of JS and CSS files in system > configuration > Advanced > Developer ?
After you've done that you need to flush the JS and CSS (Same page you turned off your cache)
Also if you're making Category & Product changes you should reindex data inSystem > Index Management
Make sure the compilation is disabled as well system > tools > compilation

Check the compiler is off too, although that shouldn't affect the template hints. Also check that there aren't any other caches such as an HTML cache at the webserver. And do flush the Magento Cache and Cache Storage too.
I think the main thing you need to look at is the 'Current Configuration Scope:' in the top-left of the Magento Admin System->Configuration page. That drop-down will control which 'website' you are setting config values for.
If it isn't that, please try to give more information about your set up; I didn't really understand your setup from your question. I recommend you set up a second server as your development server rather than a second website in an existing setup.
I would also add that the RWD theme in Magento 1.9 is an excellent theme and you might want to consider modifying that theme.

Related

Drupal 7 very slow due to cache clearing at each page

I don't know exactly why my drupal 7 website became suddenly slow last week, after few days in production.
With xhprof, i see that at each page load,the system_list_reset() function triggers a call to cache_clear_all() function.
I deactivated all cache features.
I've read that it may due to missing files in modules and/or themes, but I didn't find missing files (except a wrong issue in 'missing module message fixer' module that indicates a missing module in view_export sub-module of view module).
I manually searched them , I didn't find where drupal can list these missing files.
Or maybe it's due to another problem.
Regards,
Open page inspector of your browser and in network tab check what files have unusually long loading time. It maybe be that some external service is causing this. Also it can be that your site is hacked...
Check most banal reason, the storage space - maybe disc of your server is full?
Check if file paths drupal is using are writable. Go to Configuration -> Median -> File system and just click Save. If some path is not writable it will get red outline.
Go to Reports -> Recent log message and check if some issue is maybe logged there. Also check for web server/php logs.
Try updating modules and drupal core - maybe some bug caused that and it's hopefully fixed in module update.
If not, try disabling modules one by one and see will that still happen. If you don't find problematic module try the same method with your theme. Would be good not to try this in production development and/or make backup before doing this.
thanks a lot,
by disabling module one by one, and by "datamining" in drupal DB, i've found that ADVAGG module was guilty.
The clean was difficult, because some entires remains in some tables of Drupal DB afther the module removing, but I hope it Ok.
BEWARE OF ADVAGG MODULE !
Funny :-/ with 'top', I've found a mining soft in /var/tmp/
systemd-private-a5422b1e6694466bbb0b63203573cad1-apache2.service-jMBN4U : nullcrew (from https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig)
I will investigate how it could land on my webserver
Best regards,

Can sites built with Rapidweaver be worked on without Rapidweaver?

A friend has asked me to do some work on his existing site which was built in Rapidweaver. I'm on Windows, so is there another way I can access and edit his site?
The Rapidweaver project file is meant to be edited only in Rapidweaver, really. As far as I know, the only way around would be to use an HTML editor to modify the pages that are already in the server. However, I would not reccomend you to do it unless you are not going back to Rapidweaver anymore. Because changing the files in the server does not update your local Rapidweaver files. So, you could end up editing something in the server, then getting back to Rapidweaver and upload a "new" version that would not be completely up to date (the previous changes in the server version would be overriden by the older rapidweaver project).
For that kind of work, a CMS (Content Management System) is a more flexible way to work. Nowadays, one of the most common is Wordpress. It will require an inicial setup but after it is working it can be updated from anywhere via web browser, or even from an app in your iPhone. But it is not a Rapidweaver based sollution.
There are a couple CMS related plugins or stacks (Dropkick CMS, Armadillo, Easy CMS, Total CMS...) for Rapidweaver that could also be useful in this context. Once again, first you would need to buy a licence and to setup the website using one of those plugins or stacks. Only then you would be able to edit on the go.

Can I reference a theme, that resides in one database, in another database?

I was just looking into referencing css files in a theme, that reside in a different database and I was wondering:
Could I reference a whole theme that resides in a different database as well with "extend"?
The reason behind that is: Would it possible to keep themes in one central database that can be used by all kinds of applications and therefore, if there should ever be changes to the themes, they only have to be changed in one location and not in every application.
Thank you for your responses in advance.
no I don't think this is possible (happy to be wrong if someone else knows it is?)
to keep all your theme files in a central spot, an XspLibrary in an OSGi plugin is a good solution, however it is a steep learning curve if you haven't done this before. The benefit is once you know this technique it opens the door for 'centralizing' other parts of xpages.
you deploy the plugin to each server and each client if using xpinc, and the every nsf can use a theme from that plugin.
there are a few 'getting started with xpages plugins' articles popping up around. check through planetlotus.org (I'll edit this answer later with some links)
once you know how to do an XspLibrary, you can then download the source code of the bootstrap4xpages project on OpenNTF to see how they are serving up their theme from a plugin.
it relies on the Extension library though so if you don't use the exit lib you could reverse engineer the necessary parts of that project too!
this bootstrap project was set up by Phillipe Riand who was the chief architect of XPages, so it should be a good example!
I am halfway through creating a video series on doing a theme from a plugin but have temporarily lost motivation :(. I might finish it sometime this year, if I do I will post a link to it on this answer. in the meantime I am happy to answer any questions you have about it if you want to give it a go.
otherwise, a quick and dirty solution would be put the theme files / CSS / images directly on the file system of the domino server, where the other theme files are. 'Mastering XPages' might have some advice about this but I don't have it with me right now :)
I think the short answer is you won't be able to load just a theme from a different database.
Each NSF has it's own JVM, sitting on top of the server JVM. So you can extend a theme that's sitting on the server, but not one in another NSF.
XPages Single Copy Design loads a theme from a different NSF by effectively loading the template's JVM. So it's the theme, but also all other design elements.
Jesse Gallagher's done some work in OpenNTF Domino API to allow you to load an XPage or Custom Control from another database, but I'm not sure if that would work for a theme.
If you want to design once and use in many, you can add the theme to the server itself. Looks for the OneUI elements to see where you need to store it (or it may be mentioned in Mastering XPages). You can only nest themes to five levels, but you should be fine.

Clearing cache in the server

This is related to my problem here:
Editing velocity template of Liferay changes not showing or takes a while
I've tried to investigate the caching problem and tried different things. Here's what I found out.
I just found out that my css is also delayed in showing the updates. I tweak my css file adding comment and testing it on my browser. Now just requesting it on the URL it will just give me an older version of the file. now if i put a query asking for version, (eg. mystyle.css?v2) it will pull the latest file and it records it. I can even see different version, eg. (mystyle.css?v1) or (mystyle.css?v2. I've cleaned my cache so it's definitely on the server side (i think).
Is there a way I can clear my cache?
Thank You!
you can activate Liferay's developer setting by including the properties that are in ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/portal-developer.properties.
Explanation: Liferay minifies and caches CSS and Javascript - once this is done it will not examine those for changes. The developer settings will disable that.
However, you don't want this setting active in production as this will mean that you'll have to load dozens of files instead of very few combined+minified, well cached, files.
I assume you are using this for development, not in production.
If you're having these problems in production, you should rather work with a proper theme plugin and redeploy that.

Inherited a Joomla site, but only used to HTML and CSS. Is Dreamweaver still an option?

For about 12 years I've been working on a couple different web sites in Dreamweaver or even wayback in Homesite. That said, I've gotten very comfortable with the traditional set up of URLS with definite structures where you can logically follow the directory set-up and it was very clear how to program the relative/absolute links and more. I would either FTP the files through in Dreamweaver or would use some kind of Management Console. Recently I took a new job to help on a web site that currently lives and was built using Joomla. I'm looking to see if there is a way to get this entire site on my Hard Drive so I can work on it locally and then upload as pages are finished, or at the very least find out how best to work with this site.
Joomla has many things about starting a page from scratch, but I'm really trying my best to investigate a site that's already developed and find ways to make the necessary adjustments and take inventory of everything that's on the site. Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks.
In order to administer a site in Joomla, there is no need to have any files locally. You can add, edit, and delete pages all through the administrative back end of the website. The entire site is built based on the query string of the URL. The string determines which component is displaying the content and which content to display.
There is really only one page in a Joomla site, the index.php file in the current template directory. Every page is built using that page. The only time you would need to modify that page is when there is a structural change in the site. Even then, if the template is well coded it should have various module positions available for use that collapse when they are not in use. This allows you to have a 3 column layout on one page and a 2 column layout on another simply by adjusting which modules display on a particular page.
I would highly recommend reading some tutorials before messing around with editing any files. Here are a few decent resources:
http://www.virtuosimedia.com/dev/php/joomla-administration-explained-a-joomla-15-admin-tutorial
http://www.joomlashack.com/tutorials
http://docs.joomla.org/Beginners
Part of the purpose of Joomla is to be able to manage the content of a website without requiring local copies of all the pages. So what you are asking sort of defeats the purpose of using Joomla in the first place. To do what you ask you would have to get an offline copy of the entire website, uninstall Joomla, and then upload your "static" copy. I would predict that the end result would be a web site that is very hard to maintain.
If you really really want to do this you could use a website copy tool like HTTrack. It supposed to be used to copy a website so you can browse offline, but the end result is what you are looking for: a local copy of the website.

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