On PHPBuilder.com there's a recent post looking at debugging Magento applications with some of the built-in tools the platform makes available.

Magento is the world's most popular open source e-commerce platform, relied upon by countless Fortune 500 and small business alike for selling goods and services of all types. [...] But with Magento's considerable power comes a great deal of complexity [but] it can be incredibly difficult to even identify the origin of an error let alone resolve it. You can however dramatically improve your productivity as a Magento developer by taking advantage of a few key debugging features.

They recommend using four tools built into the platform - the developer mode, logging, template path hints and viewing the raw SQL queries. They also recommend using a few other tools like FireBug and the features of Eclipse to help with code formatting and completion.

On the Liip blog today, there's a quick post about integrating Symfony2 and Magento, the popular PHP-based ecommerce platform.

So last week four developers sat together on a regular Hackday to see what's needed to hook up Magento into Symfony. To make this short the outcome is a Magento bundle for Symfony2. When we met in the morning we weren't even sure what exactly to try out but soon agreed on implementing a Symfony authentication which uses the Magento customer database.

The post talks about some of the issues they came across in their work - mainly a problem with incompatible autoloaders. There were also problems getting the logins to play nicely with each other and each product's session handling. You can find the current results from their hacking in this bundle posted to github.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today there's a new tutorial from Rupert Jones showing you how to get the best performance from Magento with a set of technologies tailored for just that.

Following our earlier entry about installing Magento Enterprise, we thought it would be appropriate to follow up with some tips for getting more from your Magento installation. One of the major criticisms leveled at Magento is its speed; many complain that it is far too slow. In this article we'll go through some steps you can perform to fine-tune your server to allow Magento to run more smoothly and more quickly in a production environment.

Among the technologies they recommend are things like memcached, mod_expires, APC, gzip and MySQLTuner.

New on the Ibuildings techPortal site, there's an article from Rupert Jones that walks you through the installation of Magento Enterprise on a linux-based platform (LAMP).

Magento is an increasingly popular e-commerce platform due to its sheer flexibility, wide range of features and the facility to customise it relatively easily. In this post we will examine how to get Magento Enterprise set up and running. We assume a debian-based LAMP stack but these instructions could be adapted for any other platform as required.

He shows you how to install ionCube first (a requirement for Magento) and how to get the latest Magento package, unpack it and set up some permissions so the application can write to things correctly. From there it's a simple database creation and Apache config away from being setup and working.

New from the Ibuildings techPortal today, there's a tutorial from Michael Davey looking at using Gearman with Magento to do some of the "heavy lifting" of queuing jobs from inside the tool.

With most web applications, there comes a time where there is a need to perform either CPU or I/O intensive work based on user actions. Whether processing uploaded files, or performing system-wide database updates, developers are increasingly turning to Gearman as a simple way to hand off the heavy lifting to another server to be performed asynchronously.

He's created a basic module that can be downloaded and dropped right into your Magento install to make it work with your Gearman queues. He includes an installation guide and a bit of code on how to make a sample job to run an event and the class sitting on the other side for the worker to use in handling it.

Christoph Dorn has a new post to his blog today about using the FirePHP extension for Firefox/FireBug to help debug applications running on the Magenting service.

FirePHP can be useful when debugging remote PHP applications on shared or dedicated servers. This tutorial illustrates how to setup FirePHP 1.0 on Magenting which is a managed Magento hosting service. Go to http://magenting.com/ and create an account. This tutorial was prepared by using a Spark account, but it should work just the same with all plans.

He walks you through all the steps you'll need - getting the FirePHP extension installed, getting the PHP libraries set up on the remote server and configuring it to work with your application. A snippet of code is included that can be used to test the connection.

Lorna Mitchell has posted a sort of follow-up to her previous post about accessing the Magento A{I to pull information about products from the application. In this new post she takes it a step further and shows how to get attributes from those products.

I've been working with the API for Magento in recent weeks and I had a bit of a struggle explaining to the V2 API which attributes of a product I wanted to retrieve. Actually I had issues talking to the V2 API at all, but that's a different post so I'll skate over those for now. Instead I thought I'd share (or rather, record for the next time I have the same problem!) how to specify which attributes about a product to retrieve.

She figured out that you could use the info method for the product_catalog call and specify the attributes you want. Her code example shows how to fetch the title, description, a shorter description and the price of an item.

Setting up and using the Magento e-commerce application can be a difficult process in itself, but when you start moving things around from server to server, things can get even more complex. In this new post from the Godaddyhostingreview blog they talk about moving a Magento instance from your local install out to a live site.

This is the method I used to move my local copy of magento store from WAMP on windows to a shared hosting account. In my case am using magento1.3.x.

The instructions are detailed right down to which configuration values to change, how to update your database for the move, what will need to be removed before you and push everything over. There's even a bit of instruction on what to change if your database structure is slightly different.

Lorna Mitchell has a new post to her blog today looking at one of the differences she's found in her work with the Magento API between version 1 and version 2.

I must say that I am always pleased when I see that these products do include some kind of API. The Magento one is a bit interesting, although there is some half-decent API documentation for the original API. However they have then released a new version of the API, with very little documentation.

Her example code shows the difference in a call to grab a customer list from the SOAP interface - the version 1 method used a "customer.list" request while the version 2 method just made use of a normal SOAP method call to the "customerCustomerList" method on the service.

On her blog today Lorna Mitchell talks about a problem she encountered with the Magento web API interface - an "Access denied" message that was keeping her out.

I've been working with the Magento Web API lately, and the first problem I ran into was actually getting access to it. Contrary to its reputation, I found some perfectly good documentation outlining how to connect to the service and use it.

A search for a fix to her "access denied" message lead her to this forum post talking about web service permissions and how it relates to user setup. An API key and username are needed to work with the API and can be set up in the user's information.