This is a very common but annoying problem many of us face while working with magento. Sometimes we couldn’t really figure out what exactly is the problem. But don’t panic there are some simple check list which would make the product images displayed for all the products. I will start from the basics.
1. Check if the correct product image is selected from the admin panel for the correct store view. All – base image, small images and thumbnails (in Catalog->Manage Products->Images).
2. Disable the Magento cache(in System->Cache management) till you get everything working and Flush catalog image Cache.
3. Change the attributes/permissions of the ‘media’ folder in your root to 755 or 777 recursively for the sub-folders and files. *
4. During migration/installation through SSH, it’s normal that you make a zip of the media folder/entire magento and unzip it in root. Usually this would be done by a root user or a user other than the ftp user. Then you should change the owner and usergroup of these folders/files recursively. If the owner of an image is root and if we try to access it, it won’t allow it. *
5. If you use big images, try to increase ‘memory_limit’ parameter in your ‘php.ini’ file. Try to use images of size below 1000px. I don’t think we normally require one more than this. Also check if we can reduce the size of the image in kilobytes. Keep it less than 300kb.
*Changing the attributes/Permissions
All the FTP clients (fileZilla, cuteFTP etc) give you the option to change the file/folder attributes. Just right click on the folder and select the option change attributes/permissions. You can do it through shell also .
Command : chmod -R 777 /path/to/folder
*Changing the owner and user group of a folder
Login to linux shell and enter the following command.
Command : chown -R owner:group /path/to/folder
Hope this helps! Don’t forget to drop a comment if this helped you 
. Also please let me know if you still have problems after trying out all these things. I can add it to the solutions list. 
Filed under: Magentocommerce, PHP | 1 Comment
Here is a code snippet for setting the ‘Continue Shopping’ location to the category listing page of the last product added to the cart. Open the template/checkout/cart.phtml file in your active theme. Place the following code in the foreach loop
(ie. after this line of code)
<?php foreach($this->getItems() as $_item): ?>
that generates the products list in the cart.
$_categories = $_item->getProduct()->getCategoryIds();
$_category = Mage::getModel(‘catalog/category’)->load($_categories[0]);
$url = $this->getUrl($_category->getUrlPath());
Mage::getSingleton(‘checkout/session’)->setContinueShoppingUrl($url);
?>
You are done!
Filed under: Magentocommerce, PHP | Leave a Comment
Tags: magento, php
Here is a very useful functionality that doesn’t come with Magento by default. It is to display the shipping rate of the product in the product details/view page. This clearly gives the user an idea of what would be the shipping cost before going to checkout with other products. It can be used very well with shipping table rate calculation.
You can paste the following code into the ‘/template/catalog/product/view.phtml’ file in your theme.
if($_product->isSaleable())
{
$quote = Mage::getModel(‘sales/quote’);
$quote->getShippingAddress()->setCountryId(‘DK’);
$quote->addProduct($_product);
$quote->getShippingAddress()->collectTotals();
$quote->getShippingAddress()->setCollectShippingRates(true);
$quote->getShippingAddress()->collectShippingRates();
$rates = $quote->getShippingAddress()->getShippingRatesCollection();
foreach ($rates as $rate)
{
echo $rate->getPrice();
}
}
?>
The last foreach will give you the shipping rates of different shipping methods enabled. Store it in any variable and display it where ever you want in the view.phtml file. You are done!
(WordPress is converting the single quote ['] to a different charecter, so when you copy paste the code please check if they are understandable by PHP)
Filed under: Magentocommerce, PHP | Leave a Comment
Tags: magento, php, shipping rates
Regular expressions in PHP
PHP has three sets of functions that allow you to work with regular expressions. Programmer s does not use these powerful functions often as it seems to be difficult to create patterns. Also it is not easy to find a basic and simple regular expression tutorial in a single webpage . So I would like to give a try on this to collect the info and make it easy to learn and interesting. Also I will include some very useful reg-expressions in the end of this post.
About regular expressions
A regular expression is a pattern that can match various strings. Regular expressions started as a feature of Unix shell. They were made to make string operations easier. It’s really useful in programming with PHP as they help to reduce a lot of codes. As a simple example we can say the validation of an email address or a phone number.
Different sets of regular expressions
PHP provides mainly three sets of regular expressions.
1. preg – All the preg functions require to specify the regular expression in Perl syntax. If you want to include a slash (/) in your expression string, you should escape it with a back slash(\). Hope you understood the core idea of using Perl syntax in preg. (I would be using preg functions in my examples)
2. ereg – The ereg functions require you to specify the regular expression as a string, as you would expect.
3. mb_ereg – They are very similar to ereg functions, but when ereg treat string as a series of 8 bit characters, mb_ereg can work with multi byte characters.
Enough theories, let’s go practical.
Operators and purposes
| Operator | Purpose |
| . (period) | Match any single character |
| ^ (caret) | Match the string that occurs at the beginning of a line or string |
| $ (dollar sign) | Match the string that occurs at the end of a line |
| A | Match an uppercase letter A |
| a | Match a lowercase letter a |
| | | OR operator |
| \d | Match any single digit |
| \D | Match any single non digit character |
| \w | Match any single alphanumeric character |
| [A-Z] | Match any of uppercase A to Z |
| [^A-Z] | Match any character except uppercase A to Z |
| [0-9] | Match any digit from 0-9 |
| [^0-9] | Match any digit except 0 to 9 |
| X? | Match none or one capital letter X |
| X* | Match zero or more capital Xes |
| X+ | Match one or more capital Xes |
| X{n} | Match exactly n capital Xes (f.e: A{2}) |
| X{n,m} | Match at least n and no more than m capital Xes; if you omit m, the expression tries to match at least n Xes |
Basic syntax explanation
I will explain the main operators and syntax which are mostly used.
The use of “^” and “$” (start with and end with)
“^Aaa” – matches any string that starts with ” Aaa “;
“aa test$” – matches a string that ends in the substring “aa test”;
“^abc$” – a string that starts and ends with “abc” — that could only be “abc” itself!
“abcd” – a string that has the text “abcd” in it.
The use of “*”,”+” and ”?” (zero or more, one or more and zero or one)
“ab*” – matches a string that has an ‘a’ followed by zero or more b’s (“a”, “ab”, “abbb”, etc.);
“ab+” – matches string followed by one or more ‘b’ (“ab”, “abbb”, etc.);
“ab?” – there might be a ‘b’ or not;
“a?b+$” – a possible ‘a’ followed by one or more ‘b’s ending a string.
Specify range of number of occurrences
“ab{2}” – matches a string that has an a followed by exactly two b’s (“abb”);
“ab{2,}” – there are at least two b’s (“abb”, “abbbb”, etc.);
“ab{3,5}” – from three to five b’s (“abbb”, “abbbb”, or “abbbbb”).
Note : the first value of a range should be specified (i.e, “{0,2}”, not “{,2}”).
Specify range of occurrences of a sequence
“a(bc)*” – matches a string that has an a followed by zero or more copies of the sequence “bc”;
“a(bc){1,5}” – one to five occurrences of “bc.”
Using OR (|) operator
“euro|dollar” – matches a string that has either “euro” or “dollar” in it;
“(b|cd)ef” – a string that has either “bef” or “cdef”;
“(a|b)*c” – a string that has a sequence of alternating a’s and b’s ending in a c;
Using period(.) operator
“a.[0-9]” – matches a string that has an a followed by one character and a digit;
“^.{3}$” – a string with exactly 3 characters.
Bracket (“[]”) expressions
They specify which characters are allowed in a single position of a string
“[ab]” – matches a string that has either an a or a b (that’s the same as “a|b”);
“^[a-zA-Z]” – a string that starts with a letter;
“[0-9]%” – a string that has a single digit before a percent sign;
“,[a-zA-Z0-9]$” – a string that ends in a comma followed by an alphanumeric character.
In bracket expressions the symbol “^” brings a negative effect. Ie. It matches string that is NOT IN specified list.
“[^a-zA-Z0-9]” – means a string with character not in the character range specified.
Some useful regular expression patterns
i. regular expression pattern to replace/match the special characters in a string. It is really helpful when you want to rename files without special characters and check the presence of special characters in a string.
pattern : “%[^a-zA-Z0-9]%”
code sample:
<?php
$string = ‘$%abcd*.06′;
echo preg_replace(“%[^a-zA-Z0-9]%”,’_',$string);
//output : __abcd__06
?>
Also if you want to give exceptions for any of the special characers, just include them inside the bracket after the symbol “^”
pattern : “%[^a-zA-Z0-9.$]%”
code sample:
<?php
$string = ‘$%abcd*.06′;
echo preg_replace(“%[^a-zA-Z0-9.$]%”,’_',$string);
//output : $_abcd_.06
?>
ii. Regular expression patterns to match a valid email address
pattern : “^[a-zA-Z0-9._-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+\.[a-zA-Z.]{2,5}$”
code sample :
<?php
$email = ‘your-name@domain.com’;
echo eregi(“^[a-zA-Z0-9._-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+\.[a-zA-Z.]{2,5}$”,$email );
//output : 1
?>
I will add some more commonly used patterns soon.
Useful links
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-php-regex1/
http://in3.php.net/manual/en/book.pcre.php
Filed under: PHP | 1 Comment
Tags: php, regular expressions
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