Magento Hosting BLOG

Blog about Magento, Technologies and Hosting Service

Magento Hosting - Installing Magento Extension Properly

clock February 8, 2013 06:34 by author andy_yo

Many customers got the problem during installing the extension because they did installation in wrong way. So in this article We will show you the right way to install a magento extension properly.

About ASPHostPortal.com
ASPHostPortal.com is Microsoft No #1 Recommended Windows and ASP.NET Spotlight Hosting Partner in United States. Microsoft presents this award to ASPHostPortal.com for ability to support the latest Microsoft and ASP.NET technology, such as: WebMatrix, WebDeploy, Visual Studio 2012, ASP.NET 4.5, ASP.NET MVC 4.0, Silverlight 5 and Visual Studio Lightswitch. Click here for more information

 

When installing an extension, you should follow these steps:

1. Backup your site before installing any extension. Some extension might crash your site if you install it in wrong way or it contains the bad code.
* if it is posible then install and review the extension on a stagging server or development site first. This will help you to avoid down time of live site if there is a problem during installing the extension.

2. Make sure you enable magento cache. To do this, go to Admin -> System -> Cache Management
This is also an importance step that some customers missed. If the cache is disabled then magento can start setting up during uploading the extension files. Some importance files might have not uploaded yet and causes the system do setting up in wrong way.

3. If you install the extension via magento connect then go to Admin -> System -> Magento Connect -> Magento Connect Manager. There are some articles show you the detail steps in this way so I will don’t discuss further.
In almost cases you will need to install the extension manually via FTP or SSH. By this way you will need to upload the extension files to your magento location. All extension files should be organized in these folders: app, skin, js and no file should be replaced for the first time you install the extension.

* If you see another folder than app, skin or js folders, be careful before you upload it. Ask the extension provider for making sure it is nescessary and will not effect to your system.

* If the system alerts a file might be replaced in the first time you install the extension, be careful because you might replace the core file and it will crash your site.

4. When all extension files are uploaded, you will need to check the template and skin files to see if they are placed in right folder. Your custom theme might be in these folders:
- magento/app/design/frontend/<theme_package>/<theme_name>
- magento/skin/frontend/<theme_package>/<theme_name>
If your extension template and skin files are in difference theme package:

- <extension_files>/skin/frontend/<other_package>/default

- <extension_files>/app/design/frontend/<other_package>/default

Then you will need to copy these folder to your theme package.

* Some extension might just work in backend and does not have template or skin files. So don’t worry if you don’t see them.

5. Now you can refresh or disable the cache to let magento run extension setting up and start configuring the extension.

6. Logout and login the backend again. Some customers leave this step so they get access denied or 404 error page when accessing the extension configuration panel.

7. Some extension can start working now but some need to do certain configrations in backend or in adjust the custom theme. Follow the user guide of the extension to configure the extension.

8. If you need to customize the extension template or skin, you should copy the files to your custom theme folders. If you do it in the default theme you might lose your work when you upgrade or reinstall the extension.

Here is just some key steps that show you how to install a magento extension properly. Some extension might need to do some special configration or adjust your custom theme so you will need to read the installation and user guide carefully. If you not sure what you are doing then stop and ask the extension provider for help or you might crash your site and lose money in down time. If you don’t have base knowledge about magento then it is better to purchase for installation service. This will keep your head free and avoid risk on your site and business.



Magento Hosting - ASPHostPortal :: How to Move Upselling Products from Content to Right Column

clock November 16, 2010 06:31 by author Jervis

A simple solution to display upselling products in right column rather than at content part by default. Follow this steps.

step 1:

go to catalog.xml

Hide this block as

<!–<block type=”catalog/product_list_upsell” name=”product.info.upsell” as=”upsell_products” template=”catalog/product/list/upsell.phtml”>
<action method=”setColumnCount”><columns>4</columns></action>
<action method=”setItemLimit”><type>upsell</type><limit>4</limit></action>
</block>–>


step 2:

Add the following code

<block type=”catalog/product_list_upsell” name=”product.info.upsell” before=”-” template=”catalog/product/list/upsellright.phtml” />

after this code

<block type=”catalog/product_list_related” name=”catalog.product.related” before=”-” template=”catalog/product/list/related.phtml”/>

step 3:

go to catalog/product/view.phtml

then remove the following line or commend it
<?php echo $this->getChildHtml(‘upsell_products’) ?>
like this <?php //echo $this->getChildHtml(‘upsell_products’) ?>


step 4:

create upsellright.phtml in catalog/product/list folder
and paste the following code fully


<?php if(count($this->getItemCollection()->getItems())): ?>
<div class=”box base-mini mini-related-items”>
<div class=”head”>
<h4><?php echo $this->__(‘Upselling Products’) ?></h4>
</div>
<div class=”content”>


<ol>
<?php foreach($this->getItems() as $_item): ?>
<li<?php if($_item->isComposite() || !$_item->isSaleable()): ?> class=”super-products”<?php endif; ?>>
<div class=”product-images”>
<a href=”<?php echo $_item->getProductUrl()?>” style=”margin-left:0px;”><img src=”<?php echo $this->helper(‘catalog/image’)->init($_item, ‘thumbnail’)->resize(50) ?>” alt=”<?php echo $this->htmlEscape($_item->getName()) ?>” width=”50″ height=”50″ /></a>
</div>
<div class=”product-details” style=”margin-left:70px;”>
<a href=”<?php echo $_item->getProductUrl() ?>”><?php echo $this->htmlEscape($_item->getName()) ?></a>
<?php echo $this->getPriceHtml($_item, true) ?>
<?php if ($this->helper(‘wishlist’)->isAllow()) : ?>
<a href=”<?php echo $this->getAddToWishlistUrl($_item) ?>” class=”link-cart”><?php echo $this->__(‘Add to Wishlist’) ?></a>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>
</li>
<?php endforeach ?>
</ol>
</div>
</div>
<?php endif ?>

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.



Magento Hosting - ASPHostPortal :: How to Solve Internal Server Error on Magento Installation

clock November 5, 2010 07:22 by author Jervis

If you are installing Magento directly on your server, then you may get some errors while opening the installation wizard on your browser, i.e, 500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR. Its mainly because of the wrong FILE PERMISSIONS.
The best way to solve this issue is here,

1. Download Magento Cleanup Tool
2. Unzip magento-cleanup.php to the root directory where Magento is installed.
3. Browse to http://yourdomain.com/magento/magento-cleanup.php

Hope this help!!

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.



Magento Hosting - ASPHostPortal :: Tips to keeping Your Magento Store Secure

clock November 1, 2010 08:52 by author Jervis

Are you worried about the security of your Magento store? Magento has a number of built-in security features aimed at keeping you safe, but there are some steps you can take to make your site even more secure. Follow this ten-point security policy to protect your site from hackers and security breaches.

1. Choose a secure password

When you're choosing your Magento site's administrator passwords, choose wisely. Depending on your configuration and permissions, this password may give access to customer information and credit card data. This is probably review for most readers, but here are some guidelines for creating a really secure password:

Bigger is better. Use at least 10 characters.
Mix upper and lower case, punctuation, and numbers.
Making your password phonetic can make it easier to remember and type quickly.

2. Require HTTPS/SSL for all pages with logins

Each time you send data over an unencrypted connection you run a risk of this data being intercepted by an unwanted third-party. Login credentials are no exception. To minimize the risk of your username and password landing in unscrupulous hands, always send it over a secure connection. By always sending your login information over an encrypted connection, hackers are limited to expensive and extremely difficult brute-force attacks.

How to require HTTPS/SLL in Magento
In Magento you can require secure logins by selecting "yes" for both "Use Secure URLs in Frontend" and "Use Secure URLs in Admin" by going to the "Secure" section of the "Web" tab in the system configuration. In order to access the system configuration, go to the "System" menu and select "Configuration."



Set "Use Secure URLs" to "yes" for both the frontend and admin

3. Don't use your Magento password for anything else

Do not use your Magento password with any other web services (such as email) or any other sites (such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc.). Third-party sites may not require or even support HTTPS/SSL to login, breaking rule number two. In the event that a third-party website is hacked, your password may be vulnerable.

4. Use a custom admin path

By default, you access your Magento admin panel by going to your-site.com/admin. Having the path to your admin panel path easily guessable means that someone or something (i.e. a password-guessing robot) can snoop around and try to guess your password. By having your admin path be a secret code word instead of the default /admin, you can prevent users from guessing your password or using it if they do somehow get a hold of your password.

How NOT to change your Magento admin path
Tucked in the "admin" section of the system configuration, the "Admin Base URL" setting looks like it offers the ability to set a custom admin URL and choose whether to use that custom URL or not. But BEWARE: this setting will break Magento by preventing you from accessing the admin panel (I've tested this and found this to be true as of Magento 1.4.0.1 and earlier).



BEWARE: Do not use the admin base URL settings; it will break your site.

How to change your Magento admin path
Although the setting does not work, there is an easy way to change your Magento admin path.

Locate /app/etc/local.xml
Find <![CDATA[admin]]> and replace 'admin' with the path you would like to use

So if your local.xml file says <![CDATA[drawbridge]]>, your admin path will be /drawbridge.

5. Close email loopholes

Magento has a really convenient feature that allows administrators to reset their password if forgotten. In order to reset your password, you need to know the email account associated with the account. Then you need access to that email account to retrieve the new password. First, choose an email address that is not publicly known. Second, make sure the password for your email account is secure. Third, make sure that if your email account has a security question that allows you to reset your password, you choose a question and answer that is so obscure that it would be impossible to guess.

6. Use secure FTP

Guessing or intercepting FTP passwords is probably one of the number one ways sites get "hacked." In order to prevent unauthorized access to your sites FTP, use secure passwords and use SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) or FTP-SSL (Explicit AUTH TLS). With SFTP, you can use Public Key Authentication to increase security even more by requiring a private key file and an optional de-encryption password to authenticate the FTP access.

7. Limit unsecured FTP access

If you do have to connect through regular (non-secure) FTP for some accounts (i.e. to upload photos), limit access for these accounts to a narrow set of directories. You can then use .htaccess and httpd.conf files to prevent scripts from running in these directories that can change other files and directories on the server that should not not be accessible through that FTP account.

If you have access to the httpd.conf file on your server, this is the best method to preventing scripts from running in a specific directory. Place this code in your httpd.conf file:

<directory path-to-directory-you-want-to-restrict="">
AddHandler cgi-script .php .pl .py .jsp .asp .htm .shtml .sh .cgi
Options -ExecCGI
</directory>

If you don't have access to httpd.conf, you'll have to use.htaccess. Include the following code in the .htaccess file of the directory you want to restrict:

AddHandler cgi-script .php .pl .py .jsp .asp .htm .shtml .sh .cgi

Options -ExecCGI

Because .htaccess does not support the tags, the .htaccess file must be placed in the directory you want to effect. Because of this, you need to set the permissions of the .htaccess file to 444 (read-only) to prevent modifications to the .htaccess file. You may also want to chown the file so the permissions cannot be changed. This method isn't fool-proof, but it's a good start to preventing naughty scripts from wreaking havoc.

Important: placing this code in a directory's .htaccess file will prevent scripts from running in that directory and all sub-directories.

8. Don't save passwords on your computer

Most modern computers and browsers offer the option to save passwords as a convenience so you don't have to enter your password every time. This is great most of the time, but can be a security problem because often saved passwords can be easily revealed in plain text. Anybody with access to the computer has access to the sensitive data. Even worse, someone could steal the computer and then use the saved passwords to access the sensitive data. To avoid unintended access to your Magento password or data, simply set your computer or browser to never save it— this might be a bit inconvenient, but it's a great security policy.

9. Keep up-to-date anti-virus software

Computer viruses and trojans can steal your data and log your key strokes. To minimize the risk of this happening, be sure to invest in reputable anti-virus software. Free anti-virus software like AVG may be great for home and personal use, but if you want indemnification or a warranty, you may want to look at commercial anti-virus software.

10. Restrict admin access to only approved IP addresses

You can use .htaccess to limit access to your admin area. In the .htaccess file for your admin directory, place the following code in order to block access to all IP addresses except those specifically listed:

AuthName "Protected Area"
AuthType Basic
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 11.111.111.11
allow from 22.2

</limit>

"allow from 11.111.111.11" blocks the specific IP address 11.111.111.11
"allow from 22.2" blocks a range of IP addresses beginning with 22.

There is a downside to restricting access based on IP: if you travel a lot you may find this method very inconvenient as you'd have to manually add each new IP address or IP range to the .htaccess file in order to gain access.

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.



Magento Hosting - ASPHostPortal :: Install Sample Data for Magento

clock October 28, 2010 08:38 by author Jervis

Follow this steps:

1) Download Sample Data zip file from Magento Website

2) Extract the zip file

3) Drop all the tables from your magento database. It would be easy to drop the magento database and then recreate it instead of dropping individual tables.

4) Import sample data sql file into your magento database.

# Remember that, you have to drop all tables from your magento database before importing the sample sql file. You will get error afterward if you import the sample data without dropping tables from your magento database. Therefore, step 3 is important.

5) Go to your magento installation folder and delete local.xml file present inside app/etc folder.

6) Reinstall magento.

# After you installation is complete, you may get error something like this:
Integrity constraint violation: 1062 Duplicate entry ‘1' for key 1

Clear your browser cache or open your website in another browser and you are done.

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.



Magento Hosting - ASPHostPortal :: How to Integrate (Import) WordPress Content into Magento Blocks

clock October 23, 2010 06:16 by author Jervis

Here are the steps that I take:

1. Create a wordpress page which will have the content we want to show in Magento. The trick is that we don’t want the WordPress header or footer – we just want the content. To do this we will create a new page template. In your WordPress theme directory, copy a file with a Loop in it (index.php or page.php are a good ones to start with) and rename the new file something like MagentoContent.php. Edit this new file, and place at the top something like:


<?php
/*
Template Name: MagentoContent
*/
?>

This declares MagentoContent.php as a page template file. Then remove the function calls that pull in the Header, Footer and Sidebar. They usually look like this:

<?php get_header(); ?>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

And finally customize the Loop so it retrieves just the content you want. For instance, if you want to get the three most recent posts tagged “Magento” and show the title and excerpt it would look something like this:

<?php query_posts('tag=Magento&limit=3'); ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
      <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
            <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>">
                  <?php the_title(); ?>
            </a>
            <p><?php the_excerpt(); ?></p>
            <p><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">Read more...</a></p>
      <?php endwhile; ?>
<?php else : ?>
      <p>Sorry no content found.</p>
<?php endif; ?>

Do whatever you want here though. Get to know your way around query_posts and go to town.

The final step on the WordPress side is to login to the backend and create a Page. Select the MagentoContent page template we created and Publish the page. If you used a custom post query it doesn’t matter what it’s called or what the content is. (If you actually want to bring the page’s content in to Magento, instead of the custom query, then it does of course.) Make a note of the URL of this page. If you have nice Permalinks set up and called the page Mage_content it will probably be something like this: http://example.com/wordpress/Mage_content. Visit the URL to make sure it’s returning the content you want. It will be an ugly page without the Header and Footer, but the content is what’s important. When this content is in Magento the Magento stylesheets can be used to style it.

Now, we will go with magento. For example, we’ll create one called wordpress_block.phtml and put it in the /cms folder of our theme directory. The file will just contain a short snippit of PHP code that uses the CURL library to get the contents of the WordPress page we just created (You can do this other ways, but Magneto already requires the CURL library so we know it’s at our disposal).

Technically code like this should be in a Controller function in a custom Magento extension, but it’s way faster to just throw it in the .phtml file. Here’s the code, using the WordPress page URL from our example:

<?php
$content = '';
$url = "http://example.com/wordpress/Mage_content";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
ob_start();
curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
$content = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
echo $content;
?>

Now that we have our block, just add it to a Layout file in your Magento theme (or to the Custom Layout options on an individual CMS or Category page):

<block type="core/template" name="wordpress_block" template="cms/wordpress_block.phtml" />

Happy coding!!

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com


Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.



Magento Hosting - ASPHostPortal :: How to change the Magento Admin URL / Path

clock October 19, 2010 07:32 by author Jervis

To protect your Magento backend against hackers and brute-force attacks, we recommend that you change the default URL to the Magento Admin Panel. It is a quick way to add an extra layer of security to your site.

Follow these steps to change the admin URL/path.

Note: Do NOT use the web interface in the Magento Admin Panel to change the admin URL, as this is known to cause severe problems.

Step 1 - Change Path

First, open the local.xml configuration file in your favorite text editor, or use the Text Editor in the cPanel File Manager. The file is usually located in the app/etc/ directory under your Magento installation. Locate the following code segment:

<admin>
  <routers>
    <adminhtml>
      <args>
        <frontName><![CDATA[admin]]></frontName>
      </args>
    </adminhtml>
  </routers>
</admin>

Now, replace admin with your new admin path. This should be something personal which is hard to guess, use only letters or numbers - no special characters, then save the file.

Step 2 - Refresh Cache

The final step is to refresh your cache. Use an FTP client to delete the content of the var/cache/ directory, or use the following SSH command.

(First, navigate to you Magento root directory)

rm -rf var/cache/*

Step 3 – Complete

The change is now complete and you should try to log in via the new admin url - http://yourmagentodomain/adminpath/, replacing 'adminpath' with the path you chose in the step above. If everything went fine, you should now be presented with the Admin Panel login screen at the new URL. The old admin login URL should return a 404 error message.

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.



Magento Hosting - ASPHostPortal :: How to redirect Magento to open through www

clock October 7, 2010 05:44 by author Jervis

For SEO and usability purposes you may want to redirect your visitors to open your site only through http://www.yourdomain.com.

Some applications, including Magento, however, require additional modifications to make this redirection work properly.

First, you should open the .htaccess file in the Magento folder. In it locate the "RewriteEngine on" line and right after it add the following lines:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Once you do this, save the .htaccess file and log in to the administrative end of Magento.

Then go to the System > Configuration menu and from the left panel click the "Web" button.

Unfold the "Unsecured" set of options and change the "Base URL" option from http://yourdomain.com to http://www.yourdomain.com.

Save the changes and your Magento website will be running with www.yourdomain.com only!

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware

Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems

Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel

We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology

The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services

From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network

ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security

Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services

Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.



Magento Hosting - ASPHostPortal :: How to Change Magento Admin URL After Shop Directory Relocation

clock September 7, 2010 17:46 by author Jervis

When making Magento shop hosting migration or making simple script directory destination change, you will experience problems accessing Admin area with the new destination URL, instead you will be redirected to the initial address.
To solve the problem you need

1. In Magento database in the table named core_config_data edit path values for web/secure/base_url and web/unsecure/base_url (you can make it with the help of phpMyAdmin, for instance).

2. Clear cache (var/cache directory in Magento script folder)

3. Enter new admin URL in a browser and login


Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.



Magento Hosting with ASPHostPortal :: How to install Magento?

clock July 21, 2010 10:10 by author Jervis

Magento is a free shopping cart application which supports many payment processors and shipping methods.

Installing Magento is not a very complex task. You can check our Magento installation tutorial for more information on the installation steps.

However, many people find it hard to perform a script installation themselves. This is why many hosting providers offer automatic tools through which users can easily install an application in just a few clicks.

As one of the leading hosts on the market, ASPHostPortal offers automatic tools for easy application installation.

Our customized cPAddons Site Software tool offers everything you need to start your website right away. With cPAddons you can not only install an application in a few clicks, but also upgrade it or uninstall it without any problems. The ASPHostPortal team of specialists keeps all applications in the Site Software section up to date, with the latest security patches available. This guarantees that you will always have secure and up-to-date software on your website.

ASPHostPortal customers can easily install Magento in just a few clicks from their cPanel > Site Software. In the Ecommerce section click Magento and on the new page fill in the required details:

Admin User: the user for accessing Magento's admin area
Admin Pass: the password for the admin user
Admin Password (Again): retype the password for the admin user
Email: your email address
Installation URL: the URL for the Magento installation; choose a domain from the drop-down menu and type the name of the folder where you would like Magento installed; leave blank to install it in the domain's main folder

Click the Install button to complete the new Magento installation.

If you have an existing Magento installation and there is an available upgrade for it, it will be listed in the Upgrade section. Click Upgrade to upgrade your application to the latest version.

To uninstall Magento, simply click the Uninstall button.

If you have problems installing Magento yourself and your current host does nothing to help you, visit ASPHostPortal. We are ready to help you.

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they're really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization - as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal's top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients' critical sites and services.

 



About ASPHostPortal.com

We’re a company that works differently to most. Value is what we output and help our customers achieve, not how much money we put in the bank. It’s not because we are altruistic. It’s based on an even simpler principle. "Do good things, and good things will come to you".

Success for us is something that is continually experienced, not something that is reached. For us it is all about the experience – more than the journey. Life is a continual experience. We see the Internet as being an incredible amplifier to the experience of life for all of us. It can help humanity come together to explode in knowledge exploration and discussion. It is continual enlightenment of new ideas, experiences, and passions

Corporate Address (Location)

ASPHostPortal
170 W 56th Street, Suite 121
New York, NY 10019
United States

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