Here is what to do if you get the following error in your magento backend:

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/

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05/14/12 by Miles

I had a client come up to me which a strange magento situation.  The template or extensions they installed seamed to have broken the coupon code submit button on their cart page.  People could not submit a coupon code by clicking the “Apply Coupon” button.  They had to hit enter.  The clients could not find the javascript that was producing the error.  So, I was contacted to provide them with a magneto workaround.  The solution is quite simple.

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05/04/12 by Miles

Sometimes magento’s default back-end order grid doesn’t cut it.  I recently had a customer that wanted to be able to sort orders by sku, shipping address, shipping state, and customer e-mail address on their magento site.  Why did they want to do this?  To quickly generate reports I guess, who knows? By default you can’t sort by these items.  You have to add the fields to magento which can be some what tricky.

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

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04/25/12 by Miles

Magento enterprise has some amazing features out of the box that allow you to restrict roles to specific web sites and sections. Unfortinately the system out of the box doesn’t let you micro manage the configuration fields. Imagine that you have a senario where you want an admin user to be able to edit certain configuration fields, but not all of them. Out of the box magento lets you limit the roles to certain sections like “Store Email Addresses” or “Contacts” but it doesn’t let you limit each individual item.

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!! Read More

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03/09/12 by Miles

Sometimes people want to be able to add html code directly to the short description section of a product on a magneto shopping cart.

For example someone might want to bold a product feature in the description.

To allow users to do this there is a simple fix.

Step 1: Login to your magento backend and go to Catalog > Attributes > Manage Attributes

Step 2: Find the attribute entitled “short_description” click on it.

Step 3: Change enable “WYSIWYG” to yes then save the attribute.

Depending on the magento you are running this might do the trick.  This often will work great for the single product view but when looking at a category page it will not render the code properly. If your the category list page still looks funky then you have three more steps to do!

Step 4: Open your ftp and go to /app/design/frontend/default/yourtemplate/template/catalog/product/list.phtml

Step 5: Find the line

<?php echo nl2br($this->htmlEscape($_product->getShortDescription())) ?>

Changing to this…

<?php echo nl2br($_product->getShortDescription()) ?>

Step 6: Save the file and get yourself a reward… your done.

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11/14/11 by Miles