Image via Wikipedia

When upgrading Magento, it doesn’t hurt to have some handy resources. I’ve pulled up a few for doing the upgrade from 1.5 to 1.6:

• Magento 1.5 – 1.6 Upgrade – The Magento Wiki
• Resetting file permissions – The Magento Wiki
• Standard procedure to upgrade Magento to the newest version – Inchoo
• Magento upgrade guide: 1.4 to 1.5 or 1.6 – Turnkeye

Some other handy links for upgrading that aren’t specifically relevant to 1.5-1.6 upgrades:

• 8 quick tips for new Magento users – Lotus Seeds Design
• Magento debug technique: Exception printing – Shahin
• Certain packages won’t upgrade – Magento Forums
• An introduction to Magento themes- Sitepoint (more because it’s just a handy link for troubleshooting themes)

And if you are running Magento on a Hostgator server, this may be handy for upgrading with SSH: How do I get and use SSH access - Hostgator support portal.

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve got a website that displays iframe embedded Youtube videos and uses Lightbox to load images up, however, the images load behind the Youtube video. I’ve come across this before on other websites but not on any of my own. I fiddled around with z-indexes for a bit but they didn’t do anything. Turns out, it’s actually a very easy fix. Just add ?wmode=opaque to the src address in the iframe.

For example:

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/hTCAeGIBaxw” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Becomes:

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/hTCAeGIBaxw?wmode=opaque” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Super easy!

I also came across this video by 360 Creations explaining it:

From what I read, ?wmode=transparent should work as well, but it sounds like it is a bit slower to render as it has to render transparency, opaque renders solid. It would be great if Youtube included this in the src address by default! It would make it so much easier for everyone.

It took me a little bit to work out the best way to do this though. With Drupal, you just download the latest files and upload them to the server, overwriting the old files (more or less anyway), WordPress now has an update button that handles it automatically. Magento I thought should have something in Magento Connect about it, but I couldn’t find anything.

After a bit of hunting around, I found Inchoo’s guide to upgrading, but the extension key he provides to use in Magento Connect simply doesn’t work. It turns out that this is because it is a Magento Connect 1.0 key. The version of Magento I have installed uses Magento Connect 2.0 though, so I needed to find that extension key. I did a little bit of hunting but ended up just modifying another extension key to:

http://connect20.magentocommerce.com/community/Mage_All_Latest

I put this in Magento Connect and off it went, happy as Larry.

For reference though if you are using Magento Connect 1.0, the extension key is:

magento-core/Mage_All_Latest

I’ve found a few posts about it that I’m going to have to have an experiment with when I get a chance and see what works. For reference though, and if anyone else is looking for this, the sites that look the most promising are:

• cPanel automated backup script
• How to schedule database backup using cron job
• Automatic cPanel backup using cron and PHP

• Drupal Windows Installation Documentation - Drupal
• Install Drupal for Windows - Microsoft
• IIS URLRewrite module - Microsoft
• ISAPI_Rewrite – URL Rewrite module for ISAPI
• Making IIS Practical in Production for PHP – By Stuart Herbert
• IIS Aid – IIS help website running Drupal on IIS
• IIS Aid PHP Installer – IIS Aid
• Installing PHP 5 on IIS in 5 Simple steps – IIS Aid
• Install and Configure MySQL 6 on Windows – IIS Aid
• Creating a MySQL database via the Command Line – IIS Aid
• Creating a MySQL user via the Command Line – IIS Aid
• Assign MySQL privileges via the Command Line – IIS Aid
• Backing up and restoring MySQL databases from the Command Line – IIS Aid
• Install and configure PHPMyAdmin on IIS – IIS Aid
• How to install PHP 5.x on Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6 – By Peter Guy
• Install Drupal on Windows 2003 – Black Mountain
• Install Drupal on a Localhost – Learn By The Drop

The easiest way to set Drupal up on Windows should be with Microsoft’s installer. It uses their WebMatrix with the Web Platform Installer and looks like it should automate the process and configure everything that needs to be configured. The problem with it though is that it uses IIS Express, which can’t run alongside IIS, and the installer cannot run with IIS, which means I can’t use it for this situation.

So far, I’ve tried the IIS Aid PHP installer, which seems to work for the most part, however, I’m having FastCGI errors left right and centre with it crashing constantly. Unfortunately the IIS Aid installer doesn’t seem to work when using ISAPI instead of FastCGI, so I’m not up to installing and configuring PHP manually using FastCGI, and if it’s still unstable, ISAPI.

Another option is to look at running Apache on a different port to IIS, but I would rather not go down this route if I can avoid it.

It’s a real pain. If you have any experience with this, tips or advice would be appreciated!

Some of the Creative Commons images on Flickr are fantastic! Here is my top 10 (in no particular order), click on the images to check them out full size at Flickr and check the Creative Commons license:

“Quality Coffee” by sh0dan.

“My coffee’s design for the day at Fluid” by ~ggvic~

“Coffee” by Rob Qld

“Used coffee mug” by odolphie

“Fresh Cup” by mikecpeck

“Tea Cup” by *saxon*

“Golden Gate” by CarbonNYC

“Coffee” by mcveja

“A moon in my coffee” by fdecomite

“Coffee…mmmm” by L. Marie

ThinkPublic have produced a video that does a great job of explaining what Co-Design actually is, and how it works.

Check it out:

There is a section on their website that has an extensive set of stylesheets that is around 3,500 lines long. Combined with the stylesheets for the rest of the website, the total is about 6,500 lines.

The design was all finished and looked great in Firefox, Chrome, Opera, IE 7 and IE 8. However, then I did up the set of styles I mentioned that ended up totalling 3,500 lines. Due to the way I lay out my stylesheets, these started at about line 2,000. Which meant about 1,000 lines were after them.

While I’m working on something new I test in Firefox with Firebug and then once I’m finished I adjust for IE. So all of a sudden when I tested in IE 7 and 8, they are not displaying things correctly, including things in the design that were working previously. Using IE’s built in developer tools I was able to see that there were stylesheets simply not being applied to things that they should have been after about the 4,500 – 5,000 line mark. The entire stylsheet was loaded though and could be viewed.

I began tweaking things in the IE specific stylesheet since I couldn’t get it to work by editing the regular stylesheet. Once I realised that I could copy things directly from the main stylesheet into the IE one and it worked without tweaking, I started to think something odd was going on.

Cutting the extra 3,500 lines out put the site back to normal in IE, except for what those things affected.

If I put those lines in a separate stylesheet, everything worked perfectly fine again.

So it seems to me that for some reason IE just will not read more than around 4,500 to 5,000 lines in a stylesheet. It could perhaps also be total characters, however I didn’t test to find at exactly what point it stopped reading so I can’t be sure.  Fortunately, simply adding in an extra stylesheet did solve the problem, and given the nature of the extra CSS, it probably should have been done that way in the first place so that it could be loaded solely on the pages that actually need it. It should be noted that the total lines are still the same, they are just split between two stylesheets now, one of which is only loaded on certain pages.

I did a quick search for this but didn’t really come up with anything similar elsewhere, so if you have had a similar issue, I would love to hear about it!

It seemed to be consistently about the same place in both IE7 and IE8, so hopefully it won’t find it’s way into IE9.

John Bortolin Wedding Photography Home Page

I revamped the website for him, cleaned up some of the design issues and produced a gallery system that is clean and efficient, showcasing his landscape, portrait and wedding photographs.

His website now has a back end that allows him to upload and re-order photographs as he desires, the end user see’s clean gallery pages along with a clean website that has minimal use of text, focusing primarily on his photographs.

Similarly the contact and booking inquiry section of his website has been improved and streamlined so that the same form is used for both purposes, subsequently simplifying the process for users and allowing us to remove an unneeded page.

Previously the navigation gave the users the following page options:

• Weddings
• Portraits
• Landscapes
• Booking Inquiries
• Contact

After the design revamp and improvement of the contact form to handle all inquiries, we have no included a testimonials and links page where testimonials can be displayed and links to other relevant businesses and services can be shown. Particularly other wedding services.

The new website now shows the following page options:

• Weddings
• Portraits
• Landscapes
• Bio
• Testimonials
• Links
• Inquiries

It also has links to home and contact in the header section of the website which had previously been overlooked, thus allowing users to return to the slideshow on the home page without having to retype the website address manually.

Finally the bio page has been revamped to provide not only more current information but a cleaner page that better suits the image John wants to portray to his clients.

Gallery System

The gallery system uses a combination of jCarousel to handle image browsing with Lightbox to display larger versions of the images. I will go into how this has been put together at some point.

The Galleries

There are three main galleries as mentioned earlier, wedding photography, portrait photography and landscape photography. So without further ado, here are some screenshots of them for you:

Wedding Photography

Wedding Photography Gallery by John Bortolin

Portrait Photography

Portrait Photography Gallery by John Bortolin

Landscape Photography

Landscape Photography Gallery by John Bortolin

My primary work area:

Where most of it happens.

Most of the work areas shown on Onextrapixel seem to me to have been tidied up before hand, this is mine though, how it is 90% of the time. I do every few weeks have a tidy up, but for the most part this is it, filing and everything.

The machines you see are as follows:

Macbook Pro

This goes everywhere with me and probably gets more use than the workstations! I love it and it is great for most purposes. It is a 15″ Unibody Macbook Pro with an Intel 2.4ghz Core 2 Duo and 4gb of RAM.

Mac Pro

My favourite machine of the lot and now my primary workstation, this is a beautiful computer to work on. It is an 8 core machine with 2x 2.8ghz Intel Xeon CPU’s with 8gb of ECC Registered Memory. The screen I’m using for it is a 23″ Samsung (beautiful screen).

This is the beast that does all the heavy lifting. All the big graphics jobs are done on this machine. It also has a Logitech Di Novo Keyboard for Mac (much nicer than the standard Apple wireless keyboards and feels a lot like the Macbook Pro keyboards) and Apple Magic Mouse (multi-touch for a desktop computer = awesome), so it’s just like using a Macbook Pro, but with more power than you know what to do with.

Windows 7

The third computer you see is my old workstation which is now running Windows 7. I haven’t gotten rid of it yet simply because it is still a nice computer. It’s running a 2.4ghz Intel Core 2 Quad (Q6600 from memory) with 4gb of RAM, so it is still quite fast, even faster now with Windows 7. It’s complimented with dual 19″ Samsung LCDs.

I use it primarily for email management and testing on Windows. I do run Windows virtual machines on both my Mac’s, but sometimes it’s just quicker and easier to use this computer. It is also where most of the games are played (when I occasionally have time to play them).

What else is there?

Hidden in the recesses under the desk is also a Thecus N4100Pro NAS which handles data and most of the backups for all the computers. You’ll also see I have lots of filing and an Epson Multi-Function Printer. I did have a whiteboard, but I honestly don’t know where it is. I put it somewhere before I went on holidays over Christmas. It’s now MIA. Kicking around on the desk somewhere is an 8 port Ethernet switch, 4 port Ethernet Gateway and an Airport Express. There are cables everywhere beneath the desk – it’s a bit of a nightmare, especially considering there is also a NAS and a few UPS’s down there!

So that’s pretty much it, my work area. Ideally I want to put in another desk and move the Mac Pro to it and set it up with a better drawing space. As you can see my current drawing area is fairly limited and requires me to move keyboards before I can do any drawing.

I do have to admit, I like the idea of a minimalist style workspace, but there is just no chance of it happening, there is just too much that has to go somewhere in my work area!

Where else do I work?

One of my favourite places to work is actually on the sofa on my upstairs balcony. I love it up there. I take the laptop up there for a few hours at least once a day. It’s an excellent change of pace and results in some excellent design ideas. I’m thinking about starting a YouTube channel for TerraMedia which will probably be filmed on my balcony.

What do I do with all those computers?

As you may know, I am primarily a web designer. I own TerraMedia, a web design and development business where I specialise in Drupal websites and Drupal theming. My clients include small, sole trader businesses such as myself through to medium sized companies and online enterprises including e-commerce websites and online communities.

You can find me on Twitter at the following accounts:

• darksbane – My personal Twitter account.
• terra_media – My business Twitter account.

Or you can find my on my other websites at:

• TerraMedia – My business website.
• Still As Life – My general purpose blog.
• Matthewbrown.net.au – My computational arts blog (a bit neglected of late).
• Matthewbrown.id.au – Soon to be my music blog (not currently online).