magneto cache_dir is not writable

Please note that this is a last resort fix, you should probably find out why your server is giving an error. Because when you get this error it means that something at root level is not writable, which can mean a bigger issues. For example, in my case our antivirus failed to load properly and made the tmp file un-writable.

First create a directory called tmp.

Navigate to app/code/core/Zend/Cache/Backend/

Edit File.php

Change:

to

For Magento Version 1.4.1.0

Navigate to lib/Zend/Cache/Backend/

Edit File.php

Change:

to

Fix provided from this post:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/57578/

Find the pesky code:

and change it to:

By removing type=”button” the error seems to correct itself.  After removing the type, the button magically started working again!  I know this treating the symptom not the problem, but hey it works.

Anyway if you want to change the order grid from this:

To this on your magento web site:

Just follow these few easy steps.

Step one create a new directory on your server at app/code/local/Mage/Adminhtml/Block/Sales/Order

Here we will be creating a file called Grid.php.

First navigate to app/code/core/Mage/Adminhtml/Block/Sales/Order and copy\paste Grid.php into the directory you just created.

Now open up app/code/local/Mage/Adminhtml/Block/Sales/Order/Grid.php

Look for the following:

Now change it to :

Next find:

and make it:

Finally find:

Change it to:

That is it, if you wanted to add lets say product weight you would use the following:

Let’s say for some reason when you are doing searches in your brand new boxes and you get an error like

This means you did not add a filter type properly go back a line like this:

This should fix the error and fix your magento web site’s order grid!  Now you should be able to sort by sku, address, name, e-mail address. Shoot you can easily add the telephone number to this order grid if you want!

In case you are wondering I referenced these posted.  It took me a while to get the SKU’s to play nicely with all of the other information.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9027741/magento-sqlstate42s22-column-not-found-1054-unknown-column-billing-name

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8764543/magento-sales-order-grid-shows-incorrect-number-of-records-when-added-names-and

For example, I want an admin group to be able to go into the backend and edit the “Store E-mail Addresses” but I don’t want them to be able to edit anything but the fields “Custom E-mail 1″ and “Custom Email 2″. Well I have down and dirty way to limit fields from your admin users. Follow my steps and you will be able to limit the system configuration on your admin web site past the out of the box norm.  This tutorial requires you to know a bit about css and php.

Step one, create the user that you want to limit. To do this login as your super-admin, that admin that has permissions to every section of the magento backend. Navigate to System > Permissions> Roles. Next Click on “Add New Role”. Name the role to anything you want like “limitedadmin”. Then click on the “Role Resources” tab and select the resources you want the admin to have access too. For me in this example I want to limit my admin to only the “Store Email Addresses” located in the “System > Admin” section. To this I uncheck all of the resources except “Configuration” and “Store Email Address Section”. Next hit Save. You are done with step one… Yay!

Step two, give a user the new admin role. To do this go to “System > Permissions > Users”. Click on “Add New User”. Enter in the require information and then select “User Roles” .  On the next page you might see a few user roles make sure you select the one you just created. So for me I selected “limitedadmin”.  Then hit “Save User”. You are done with step 2!!

Step three, find out what your default admin user role. To do this go to “System > Permissions > Roles”. Next where you see the list of roles, on the left hand side you should see a section that says “ID”. Write down the role name that has an id of “1″. Now you are done with step three and we can start coding!

Login to your ftp and navigate to the following directory:
/httpdocs/app/design/adminhtml/default/default/template/page

You are going to be editing the file head.phtml. Make sure you back this file up before you edit it.
Open the file and paste in the following code at the very very bottom of the file:

<?
$roleId = implode(”, Mage::getSingleton(‘admin/session’)—–>getUser()->getRoles());
$roleName = Mage::getModel(‘admin/roles’)->load($roleId)->getRoleName();
if ($roleName != “your-super-admin-role-name-here”) {echo ”;}
?>

Where you see your-super-admin-role-name-here change that code with the role name you wrote down before. This should be your master admin role and make sure you keep the quotations around the name. Basically we are telling the system that when you login if you NOT the super admin role then post a css file called css_not_super_admin.css in the page’s head. The css file will be located in the base skin url of your admin site and is where we will be editing the display of the fields. Now save the file and upload it to the server.

Next navigate to the following in your ftp client /app/code/core/Mage/Adminhtml/Block/System/Config/Form find the file Fieldset.phtml and copy it to your local machine. We will be editing this file but placing it in the app/code/local directory of the site. Why? Because you don’t want to mess with the core files. If anything happens to them you are screwed. So next navigate to app/code/local.

Now if you see the this directory then navigate to it: /app/code/local/Mage/Adminhtml/Block/System/Config/Form

If the follow directory doesn’t exist on your server then make it!  Go to your ftp client and navigate to app/code/local.  Then add the folder Mage, then go into Mage and add the folder Adminhtml… Continue this until you make the directory Form. Copy the Filedset.phtml into the Form directory.

Now open up the Fieldset.phtml file you just copied.  and look for the following line:

$html = ‘<div  class=”entry-edit-head collapseable” ><a id=”‘.$element->getHtmlId().’-head” href=”#” onclick=”Fieldset.toggleCollapse(\”.$element->getHtmlId().’\', \”.$this->getUrl(‘*/*/state’).’\'); return false;”>’.$element->getLegend().’</a></div>’;

Replace it with the following:

$html = ‘<div  class=”entry-edit-head collapseable ‘.$element->getHtmlId().’-adminroll” ><a id=”‘.$element->getHtmlId().’-head” href=”#” onclick=”Fieldset.toggleCollapse(\”.$element->getHtmlId().’\', \”.$this->getUrl(‘*/*/state’).’\'); return false;”>’.$element->getLegend().’</a></div>’;

You will notice that we changed the div’s class code to read class=”entry-edit-head collapseable ‘.$element->getHtmlId().’-adminroll”.  Basically we are adding a class that is the elements-id hyphen adminroll. This arbitrary class will let us add css code to control elements we want to hide.  I made the system produce something arbitrary like element-id-adminroll so that it would not conflict with any other css we might already have.  Save the file and upload it to the server!

Now login to the backend of your magneto web site using the roll that you want to limit!  When you login, right click on your browser and go to view source code.  Scroll down the just above the </head> and confirm that the css code you added appears.  If it doesn’t you did something wrong.

It should look something like:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”http://www.domainname.com/skin/adminhtml/default/enterprise/css_non_admin.css”/>

This will give you a hint on where to add your css file.  So in this case, since I am using magento enterprise addition, it is located in the enterprise directory.  For your web site it might be default/base or default/default.  Once you find out what directory you need to place your css navigate to it using your ftp client.

Once the directory create a new .css file named css_non_admin.css.  Now you can use basic css to limit what fields you the admin to see.  So for me I used the following…

/* Store E-mail Addresses */
#config_edit_form .trans_email_ident_general-adminroll, #config_edit_form .trans_email_ident_sales-adminroll, #config_edit_form .trans_email_ident_support-adminroll {display:none !important}

Now when I navigate to the score e-mail addresses when using my non-super admin on my Magento web site I only see the fields custom e-mail 1 and custom e-mail 2.

I hope this helps your magento experience!

First navigate to your skin template’s contact form files for me it is app/design/frontend/base/default/template/contacts

Once in that directory copy forms.phtml and name it something like form-wholesalers.phtml

Next open up this new .phtml file and scroll down to the bottom till you see:

<input id=”hideit” style=”display: none !important;”  type=”text” name=”hideit” value=”" />

Next ABOVE that line of code add the following:

<label class=”required” style=”display: none !important;” for=”custom_redirect”><?php echo Mage::helper(‘custom_redirect’)->__(‘redirect’) ?></label>

<input id=”custom_redirect” class=”required-entry input-text field” title=”<?php echo Mage::helper(‘contacts’)->__(‘custom_redirect’) ?>” type=”hidden” name=”custom_redirect” value=”<?php echo Mage::getBaseUrl(); ?>your/redirect/url.html” />

Basically we are simply creating a input called custom_redirect. We are hiding it from the public so that on one can see it. You will see in the code a part that says your/redirect/url.html. Here you can add the url you want the form to redirect to once it is posted. For example if I wanted the site to redirect to milessebesta.com/thank/you.html it would be:

value=”<?php echo Mage::getBaseUrl(); ?>your/redirect/url.html” />

Next save the file and go to app/code/core/Mage/Contacts/controllers and open the IndexController.php file.
IndexController.php controls the actions of your contact us form. So in it we are going to make some changes. Make sure you copy this file incase anything strange happens. Always make back-ups.

Scroll down and find the following code:

if (!$mailTemplate->getSentSuccess()) {
throw new Exception();
}

$translate->setTranslateInline(true);

Mage::getSingleton(‘customer/session’)->addSuccess(Mage::helper(‘contacts’)->__(‘Your inquiry was submitted and will be responded to as soon as possible. Thank you for contacting us.’));
$this->_redirect(‘*/*/’);

return;

This section controls what your system does once a contact us form is successfully ran. Now if you wanted to redirect all of your contact us forms to let’s say thankyou.hmtl you could just change
$this->_redirect(‘*/*/’); to $this->_redirect(‘thankyou.html’); but that is too limited for us. We want to be able to make 100′s of forms and send them to all different thank you pages. To do this we need to change this section.

Here is the code we want:

if (!$mailTemplate->getSentSuccess()) {
throw new Exception();
}

$translate->setTranslateInline(true);

if (isset($post['custom_redirect'])) { // If custom_redirect is set
$redirect_url = $post['custom_redirect']; // Get the URL you want to redirect to
$redirect_too = (explode(“.com/”, $redirect_url)); // Explode the Url
Mage::getSingleton(‘customer/session’)->addSuccess(Mage::helper(‘contacts’)->__(‘Your inquiry was submitted and will be responded to as soon as possible. Thank you for contacting us.’));
$this->_redirect($redirect_too[1]); // Redirect to everything everything after .com
return;

} else {

Mage::getSingleton(‘customer/session’)->addSuccess(Mage::helper(‘contacts’)->__(‘Your inquiry was submitted and will be responded to as soon as possible. Thank you for contacting us.’));
$this->_redirect(‘*/*/’);

return;
}

First we see if we have set a custom_redirect form, it it exists then it moves on, if not it takes us to the default contact us page. We do this through this line of code:

if (isset($post['custom_redirect'])) { // If custom_redirect is set

Next we get the custom redirect url and set it to $redirect_url through the following:

$redirect_url = $post['custom_redirect]; // Get the URL you want to redirect to

Next we break the domain apart by finding the .com/. We have to do this because our $this->redirect needs to be to a directory not the full url. If we add the full url we will get an error.
So we explode the string $redirect_url by searching for .com/. So for milessebesta.com/thankyou.html we only want thankyou.html. That is why we must explode the the domain string. We do this by using this:

$redirect_too = (explode(“.com/”, $redirect_url)); // Explode the Url

Next we add back in the default session information in case you want to use that silly green box on your thank you page for some reason. That section is this code, most of us won’t need it:

Mage::getSingleton(‘customer/session’)->addSuccess(Mage::helper(‘contacts’)->__(‘Your inquiry was submitted and will be responded to as soon as possible. Thank you for contacting us.’));

Next we enter our redirect. We tell the system to use everything after “.com/” in a domain name through the use of $redirect_too[1] we place this within $this->_redirect(); because that is the code magento requires. Here is the complete line:

$this->_redirect($redirect_too[1]); // Redirect to everything everything after .com

Finally we execute the return; and close the if statement through }.

Now we are basically done with the coding. But, we need to add the form to a page to test it! So login to your magento backend and go to the cms section. Add a new page and name it whatever you want so for me it would be wholesalers.html

In the body of the page enter the following:

{{block type=”core/template” name=”contactForm” form_action=”/contacts/index/post” template=”contacts/your_form_here.phtml”}}

Replace the your_form_here.phtml to whatever custom form you created so for me it would be form-wholesalers.phtml.

Save the page. Next create the thank you page you wanted to the direct to, like thankyou.html, if it doesn’t exist already, and put the information you want on it. Next navigate to your custom form page and test it! If done correctly it should take you to your custom thankyou page.

If you have any questions please ask! If you would like to know how to make custom fields for your custom form check out this link http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/4_-_themes_and_template_customization/contacts/add_fields_to_contact_form

First dump all of your mysql databases into a temporary directory as sql.gz archived files. Make sure the sql.gz file is the same name as your database name.   Meaning if the database name is milesanimates then make sure the archived file is titled milesanimates.sql.gz.  This command only works if the  mysql database archived as a .sql.gz file.  It takes the name of the file and stores it into a database named the same.  CD into the directory and run the following command.

ls *.gz | awk -F. ‘{print $1}’ | while read A; do zcat $A.sql.gz | mysql $A; done

If it doesn’t run correctly it means that the database doesn’t exist on the server. If that is the case then run this command first to create all of the databases.

ls *.gz | awk -F. ‘{print $1}’ | while read A; do echo “mysqladmin create $A”; done

I hope this makes animating arcs a bit easier for you.

Happy animating.

Before:

Afters sliding the right key over one:

As you can see the green tick slides into an gross position. It isn’t on an actual frame. To prevent this from happening you have to do a little mel scripting magic.

Here is how you can fix the problem if you like colored in-betweens like I do.

First open maya and go to Window > Settings > Hotkey Editor. Under Categories find “Animate”, highlight it.

Next on the bottom right hand side of the “Hotkey Editor” window click “New”.

Name the new hotkey something like “AddColoredKey”. Under description “Change key to special color”. Choose “Mel” as the language. Then in the command box copy and paste this code:

performSetKeyframeArgList 1 {“0″, “animationList”};
keyframe -time `currentTime -q` -tds 1;

This code first creates a key and then changes the key color using the -tds command.

Hit “Accept”.

Next assign this new hotkey to a key you want for me I picked “i” because it makes sense, i is for in-between. To do this in the “Assign New Hotkey” box on the top right hand side enter “i” into key. Then click “Assign”, you might get some messages saying that you will overwrite current hotkeys, if you want to overwrite them, which I do for “i” since I never use that command hit okay.

Finally make sure you hit “SAVE” on the bottom left hand side.

Now you should be able to go into the animation timeline and hit the letter “i” on your keyboard. This should enter in a green tween key. You can now slide the other keys around without having it effect the positioning of the in-between.

Happy animating.