Errors

How to Install Extensions in Magento – Beware of Magento Compilations

This is a guest post by Nathan Strauss. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines.

Magneto is an open source web technology that facilitates the development of intuitive and user friendly websites that perform. With increasing popularity of Magento in the web development space today, several companies have emerged, offering professional Magento development, configuration, implementation, and integration services that facilitates developing websites that perform and generates revenues on the long term. Magneto e-commerce features high flexibility and advanced set of features and functionalities that are particularly designed to offer extendibility and versatility. With Magento, professional developers help you build the best online shopping cart that specifically suits your business objectives.

However, this blog addresses the common mistakes or complaints pertaining to installing extensions to Magento. There are several Magento extensions offered by different companies, and installing these may come up with errors or other common mistakes. Fortunately, there are solutions to cope with the errors in installing extensions to Magento. At the same time, beware of the common Magento compilations, which are the source of possible errors and issues in extension installation.

The Errors
Two common errors that you face at the time of installing extensions to Magento via the auto-load mechanism are:

Fatal error: Class ‘Activo_Adwordsconversion_Helper_Data’ not found in /home//public_html/app/Mage.php on line 516

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function toOptionArray() on a non-object in /var/www/includes/src/Mage_Adminhtml_Block_System_Config_Form.php on line 421

It is important to note here that both the errors may occur after you have successfully installed the extension via Magento Connect Manager and trying to access the System>Configuration area. It is also noted that both the errors highlight the same symptoms, i.e. the classes are not found properly via the Magento Autoloader. These two are the most common errors that may arise during installing extensions to Magento e-commerce website development tool. The problem is with Magento compilation, and it is important to beware of it every time you install a new extension to your Magento component.

The Solution
Mostly, such errors in Magento extension installation arises when websites are hosted in small environments, perhaps a semi-dedicated shared or VMs environment. This results into poor performance, which leads to Magento compilation. This will not occur if the sites are hosted in a nice environment, with Alternative PHP Caching or other Opt Code Caching mechanism for PHP. The best way to resolve the errors and issues with Magento compilation is to recompile.

Recompile Magento
The ideal way to cope up with the errors in extension installation is to recompile Magento. Since the major problem stems out of Magento compilation, the best way to resolve it is to recompile.
There are two different ways to achieve Magento recompilation. The first way is to go through admin panel> System> Tools> Compilation, and then hit ‘Run Compilation Process’ button.

Another way to go via the command line, as mention herewith:

php -f shell/compiler.php — disable
php -f shell/compiler.php — clear
php -f shell/compiler.php – state

It goes without saying that you have to undergo several SSH access permissions to run and execute PHP, but at the end, it facilitates Magento recompilation, helping to avoid errors in extension installation.

Author Bio:
This post is contributed by Nathan Strauss, who is the marketing head in a magento development company providing magento development services and facilitates clients to hire magento developers as per their requirement.

Mobile Web Design – Avoiding Universal Errors

This is a guest post by Spinx Web Design. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines.

Errors or Mistakes usually happen because of deviation from the standard. When it is about mobile web design, the perception of the designer is usually considered to be the main cause for the mistakes. The mistakes can be minor, small or even big depending upon the effort and money required to resolve it as well as the extent to which the losses occur because of that mistake. Some of the most common errors made by the designers when designing mobile websites are as follows.

1. Necessary Content: The mobile web design should have only the content that is necessary and can be displayed on the mobile screen. It should not be a copy of the content of the website that is designed for the desktop computers.

2. Load: If the mobile website is heavily loaded it may take a longer time to download and this could prove to be an irritant for the visitor.

3. Ignoring HTML5 and CSS3: Coding the mobile website with HTML5 and CSS3 can optimize the speed of downloading. The need of images can be reduced when the coding is done with the help of HTML5. CSS3 coding can offer rounded corners and gradients.

4. Width of the mobile device: When the mobile web designer does not take into consideration the width of the device it is possible that the elements may turn out to be not legible. This may happen because the elements have not been formatted to adjust to the width of the mobile device. This issue can be resolved with a simple HTML coding.

5. Downloading String: If the downloading string is not displayed on the screen of the mobile device the visitor may not know whether the action is being executed or not. The dilemma may compel or tempt the visitor to move to another mobile website.

6. Responsive web design: The mobile web designer should design a responsive website that is not only user friendly but also gets adjusted to the screen size and technicalities of the mobile device.

7. Home Screen: The home screen should be set in such a way that the screen does not look cluttered and illegible.

8. Excess of imports: When the designer uses AJAX framework like MooTools and jQuery, the import of data from the server becomes necessary and this can increase the duration of downloading time.

9. Images: The mobile website should have only the images that are required. Unnecessary images can add weight to the website and this could adversely affect the downloading time.

10. Size of the Finger: The touch screen is now becoming a regular feature of the mobile phones and this means that the mobile web design should be such that it can be navigated through with the help of the finger tips. The icon size should not be very small.

11. Form filling: The mobile web design should have short forms to be filled. If the visitor has to form long forms then it can irritate him/her. On the other hand the forms have to be designed keeping into consideration the facilities offered through the keyboard.

Author Bio: Spinx Web Design is a USA based web design and web development company and organization likes to write content on WordPress and designing,Web2.0, Mobile tips and
tricks, Social Media, Web Design, Web Development etc.

On April 1st 2009, GMail turned 5

Its not an April Fool prank. Google might have also found it quite embarrassing to put the Birth Day doodle on Google.com yesterday(on 1st of April).

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But sometimes GMail seem to be making fool out of us, by showing errors, mainly while using the lab apps! Anyway, GMail is still in BETA, so no complaints!

Five years ago, before Gmail was launched it was just used for the internal messaging requirement in Google Inc. Later with the users request and a lot of inconvenience with other mailing services(mainly for storage), Google decided to take the step towards email service, which mainly aimed at providing faster and spacious mail box to each user.

Even though GMail is still in its Beta, it has improved a lot from its initial days, making its users more and more lazy by adding more and more features which lessens our job 🙂
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From its simple text based plain emailing feature to the newly added video chat. From its invite only to, open to general public. Every move seem to be have taken more carefully and thus making it our favorite email service 🙂 ..ok most of our favorite mailing service. I have seen most of the bloggers use GMail and are addicted to check their mail 5 to 6 times a day. Crazy, isn’t it ? And orkut, FaceBook, communities having millions of GMail fans. With all these crazy fans and useful apps, service, GMail turns 5. We wish GMail and GMail team a brighter future ahead.