AIAIO: Our Blog

At Ai, we have sites that use various versions of Django, so there is a need to switch packages. On my mac I use virtualenv to handle this, but I’ve never quite gotten it to play nice with windows, and just switching Django versions has sufficed so far.

1. Download junction (think symbolic links for windows). Put the executable somewhere in your path. I put it in my Python scripts folder (C:\Python26\Scripts)
2. Plan out your directory structure: Make sure you don’t have any stock django eggs or folders in your site-packages folder
3. Create a django_veresions folder in site-packages (C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django_versions)
4. In this folder I put my different django installs

    C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django_versions\1.1\django
    C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django_versions\1.3\django
    C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django_versions\1.4\django
   

5. I also put a txt file inside the django folder to easily see what version is there (this will be helpful later to double check)

   C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django_versions\1.4\django\1.4.txt

6. Create a file called djangoversion.cmd and drop it in C:\Python26\Scripts

   junction -d C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django
   junction C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django_versions\%1\django

7. The first line removes any links that may have been there. The second line creates a new link to the version you’ll pass in.
8. Now, to switch versions, just run this from the command line:

   djangoversion 1.4

   PS C:\Users\tbroder> djangoversion 1.4
   
   C:\Users\tbroder>junction -d C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django
   
   Junction v1.06 - Windows junction creator and reparse point viewer
   Copyright (C) 2000-2010 Mark Russinovich
   Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com
   
   Deleted C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django.
   
   C:\Users\tbroder>junction C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django_versions\1.4\django
   
   Junction v1.06 - Windows junction creator and reparse point viewer
   Copyright (C) 2000-2010 Mark Russinovich
   Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com
   
   Created: C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django
   Targetted at: C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django_versions\1.4\django
   PS C:\Users\tbroder>
   

9. Switch as needed

I tend to listen to a decent number of podcasts. Usually while doing the dishes, running, or something or other in the park.  Some are book/comic related and help me keep up to date with what’s coming out and how some books were that I didn’t have time to read.  Others are tech and help me get other opinions on the new libraries or trends.  I’ve found a number of fun libraries/how-tos from listening. Check them out below, what do you listen to?

Tech

• Sitepoint – Web Dev news, tutorials, interviews

  http://www.sitepoint.com/

• Official jQuery podcast* – Javascript library
  http://podcast.jquery.com/
• yayQuery* – Front End Dev podcast

  http://yayquery.com/

• djangodose* – Had great news about jquery, but I think its dead
  http://djangodose.com/
• techzinglive – Random tech/hacker news
  http://techzinglive.com/
• The Dev Show – Ruby,Php, Java, Javascript
  http://5by5.tv/devshow
• The changelog – Open source news

  http://thechangelog.com/

• ATX Web Show – web stuff
  http://atxwebshow.com/
• The javascript show* – great js news and library coverage
  http://javascriptshow.com/

Non Tech

• iFanboy* – Comic book news and reviews
  http://ifanboy.com/
• Sword and Laser* – Science Fiction and Fantasy book club
  http://www.swordandlaser.com/
• 11 O’Clock Comics – Comic news and culture
  http://bullpenbulletinspodcast.com/
• Word Balloon – Comic creator interviews

  http://wordballoon.com/

• Fuzzy Typewriter – Random media / culture

  http://fuzzytypewriter.wordpress.com/

* I listen to every episode, others I cherry-pick

Have you ever wanted to create a stateless request in Magento? Something that doesn’t touch any of Magento’s sessions?  We were having issues with some of the ajax calls on our cart and checkout pages mucking with the user’s cart and had get stateless on these calls.  The issue we were having was our checkout page was loading, then a javascript include was going out and bringing code from a 3rd party relevance engine into our dom, which was in turn calling back an ajax request to our servers.  This issue with this being that at the start of the page load, the checkout session was being set to a certain state.  This state was then being sent through the rest of the page load, and the ajax calls. Unfortunately, by the time the ajax call got back to our server, the session was different in both locations, creating a race condition.  The ajax request usually won, removing the work the full page load had done with trying to process checkout.  The good news was there was nothing in the ajax call that needed to touch the session, it was just some data lookup. So, nix the session part of that call, and our troubles should be over… Magento’s api controller is the only place that implements a stateless request this but its fairly easy to do (after a bit of digging).

As long as Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Action is a parent in your controller’s hierchy, you are good to go (it probably is).  This class has a const FLAG_NO_START_SESSION which looks promising. Digging into the code a little we see that it controls whether cookies are processed or the session is started:

<?php
...
        if (!$this->getFlag('', self::FLAG_NO_START_SESSION)) {
            $checkCookie = in_array($this->getRequest()->getActionName(), $this->_cookieCheckActions);
            $checkCookie = $checkCookie && !$this->getRequest()->getParam('nocookie', false);
            $cookies = Mage::getSingleton('core/cookie')->get();
            if ($checkCookie && empty($cookies)) {
                $this->setFlag('', self::FLAG_NO_COOKIES_REDIRECT, true);
            }
            Mage::getSingleton('core/session', array('name' => $this->_sessionNamespace))->start();
        }

By adding to the preDispatch() method of our Action or Controller we can toggle this:

<?php
class Ai_AjaxCatalog_Controller_Action extends Mage_Core_Controller_Front_Action
{
	public function preDispatch()
	{
		$this->setFlag('', self::FLAG_NO_START_SESSION, 1); // Do not start standard session
		parent::preDispatch();
		return $this;
	}
}

Now, any action in this controller will be stateless and not effect any sessions.

Ever want to open all the Jira’s on the screen (search and filter views) in new tabs? Jess does, I do, and you should too!

For firefox and chrome we now have the JiraTabs bookmark button.

Drag this link up to your bookmarks bar: JiraTabs. Then, whenever you are on a filter or search view of Jira’s, click the button and all the jira’s on your screen will open up in new tabs

Demo:

Any updates will be made here.

We’re ajaxing part of the Magento shopping cart so we need to modify/extend some of the cart controller functionality. Sometimes when modifying controller’s you have to worry about updating the routes. For this, we don’t need to, we still want all the urls to be used the same way.

app/code/local/Ai/Checkout/etc/config.xml:

<config>
    <modules>
        <Ai_Checkout>
             <version>0.0.1</version>
        </Ai_Checkout>
    </modules>
...
    <frontend>
        <routers>
            <checkout>
                <use>standard</use>
                <args>
                    <module>Ai_Checkout</module>
                    <frontName>checkout</frontName>
                </args>
            </checkout>
        </routers>
    </frontend>
</config>

app/code/local/Ai/Checkout/controllers/CartController.php:

require_once Mage::getModuleDir('controllers', 'Mage_Checkout') . DS . 'CartController.php';

class Ai_Checkout_CartController extends Mage_Checkout_CartController
{
   public function updatePostAction()
    {
    	Mage::log("NEW CONTROLLER", null, 'tim.log');
        try {

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

• April 21, 2011. Judgment Day. Kyle Reese and Derek Reese witness the launch of U.S. missiles while playing ball in their yard.^[1]

As a result of temporal interference by Sarah Connor, her son John, Miles Dyson, and the T-800^[2] destroyingCyberdyne headquarters and all backups of the research in 1995, the date for Judgment day is moved back to here.^[3] Skynet is destined to go online a few days earlier on April 19, 2011 at 20:11

I started using Remember the Milk recently but didn’t want the gmail gadget to be so far down on the left hand side of my screen. There is no built in way to move gadgets to the right hand side with the exception of chat (labels used to do this but was removed in favor of drag in drop back in late 2009).

If you don’t have anything in the right hand column, enable Right-Side Chat from Gmail Labs. We are going to add in some custom css to gmail so install either Stylist for Chrome or Stylish for Firefox.

Add the following style:

div.TZ:nth-child(8) {
    position:absolute !important;
    right:0px;
    top:165px;
    width:164px;
}

In chrome you can also restrict the domain to mail.google.com. For me, the Remember the Milk gadget was the 8th child. Play with this until it looks right for you. You may also have to play with the “top” element depending on how much room your chat gadget takes up

I’ve been loving my Kindle 3 since I upgraded from my sony reader. There are so many options for getting various reading materials onto it. Here are a few of the ones I like the best:

• Want to get some RSS feeds onto the Kindle? (12 feeds for free) KindleFeeder is the way to go. It also has a bookmarklet for capturing and sending whole pages from your browser.

  I use this to send articles in Google Reader that I want to read later to my Kindle. I use my starred items to do this. Starred items have their own RSS feed which you can put into kindlefeeder. For information on how to get the link to the RSS of your starred items, click here.

• “Send to Kindle” for chrome is a button that will send the content of the page your are currently viewing.
• The third method is the built in free Kindle email address that isn’t broadly advertised: your.name@free.kindle.com will beam most docs that you mail it to your Kindle over wifi (does not work with 3G)
• Calibre is great for managing what is on your Kindle and converting just about any file format to .mobi (a format the Kindle can read)

This has helped me immensely in situations like “Where is this getting called from??!?”

Create a helper like so:

class Timbroder_Stack_Helper_Callstack extends Mage_Core_Helper_Abstract
{
	private function get_callstack($delim="\n") {
	  $dt = debug_backtrace();
	  $cs = '';
	  foreach ($dt as $t) {
	    $cs .= $t['file'] . ' line ' . $t['line'] . ' calls ' . $t['function'] . "()" . $delim;
	  }

	  return $cs;
	}

	public function toLog() {
		Mage::log($this->get_callstack());
	}

	public function toFirePhp() {
		$stack = $this->get_callstack();
		foreach (explode("\n", $stack) as $line) {
			Mage::helper('firephp')->send($line);
		}
	}
}

That can be called from anywhere:

Mage::helper('stack/callstack')->toFirePhp();
Mage::helper('stack/callstack')->toLog();

I’ve also wrapped this into a module that you can drop right into your project. Details here

Example output:

.../app/code/community/Timbroder/Stack/Helper/Callstack.php line 16 calls get_callstack()
.../app/design/frontend/mongoose/default/template/catalog/cms/bikes_bmx.phtml line 12 calls toLog()
.../app/design/frontend/mongoose/default/template/catalog/cms/bikes.phtml line 21 calls require_once()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php line 212 calls include()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php line 239 calls fetchView()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php line 253 calls renderView()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 668 calls _toHtml()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Email/Template/Filter.php line 190 calls toHtml()
.../lib/Varien/Filter/Template.php line 134 calls call_user_func()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Email/Template/Filter.php line 501 calls filter()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Cms/Block/Page.php line 100 calls filter()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 668 calls _toHtml()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 513 calls toHtml()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 460 calls _getChildHtml()
.../app/code/local/Mage/Page/Block/Html/Wrapper.php line 52 calls getChildHtml()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 668 calls _toHtml()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Text/List.php line 43 calls toHtml()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 668 calls _toHtml()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 513 calls toHtml()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 464 calls _getChildHtml()
.../app/design/frontend/mongoose/default/template/page/1column.phtml line 55 calls getChildHtml()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php line 212 calls include()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php line 239 calls fetchView()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php line 253 calls renderView()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 668 calls _toHtml()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Layout.php line 529 calls toHtml()
.../app/code/local/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Action.php line 389 calls getOutput()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Cms/Helper/Page.php line 130 calls renderLayout()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Cms/Helper/Page.php line 52 calls _renderPage()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Cms/controllers/PageController.php line 45 calls renderPage()
.../app/code/local/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Action.php line 418 calls viewAction()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Router/Standard.php line 254 calls dispatch()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Front.php line 177 calls match()
.../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/App.php line 304 calls dispatch()
.../app/Mage.php line 598 calls run()
.../index.php line 155 calls run()

Thanks to nextide for some of the code

Magento ships with widget functionality that lets you build out data models and then reuse them on product and CMS pages. If you want to use these in a custom template however, you are out of luck. This can be done by extending the Widget Collection class.

Create the following directory structure: app/code/local/Mage/Widget/Model/Myswql4/Widget/Instance

Copy app/code/core/Mage/Widget/Model/Myswql4/Widget/Instance/Collection.php into your new directory

The Mage_Widget_Model_Mysql4_Widget_Instance_Collection comes with a store filter but thats about it. To be more usefull we are going to add a type filter, a title filter, and a sorter.

class Mage_Widget_Model_Mysql4_Widget_Instance_Collection extends Mage_Core_Model_Mysql4_Collection_Abstract
{
    /**
     * Constructor
     */
    protected function _construct()
    {
        parent::_construct();
        $this->_init('widget/widget_instance');
    }

    /**
     * Filter by store ids
     *
     * @param array|integer $storeIds
     * @param boolean $withDefaultStore if TRUE also filter by store id '0'
     * @return Mage_Widget_Model_Mysql4_Widget_Instance_Collection
     */
    public function addStoreFilter($storeIds = array(), $withDefaultStore = true)
    {
        if (!is_array($storeIds)) {
            $storeIds = array($storeIds);
        }
        if ($withDefaultStore && !in_array(0, $storeIds)) {
            array_unshift($storeIds, 0);
        }
        $select = $this->getSelect();
        foreach ($storeIds as $storeId) {
            $select->orWhere('FIND_IN_SET(?, `store_ids`)', $storeId);
        }
        return $this;
    }

    public function addTypeFilter($type) {
    	$this->getSelect()->where('type=?', $type);
    	return $this;
    }

    public function addTitleFilter($type) {
    	$this->getSelect()->where('title=?', $type);
    	return $this;
    }

    public function addAttributeToSort($attribute, $dir='asc') {
    	$this->getSelect()->order("{$attribute} {$dir}");
    	return $this;
    }
}

Now we should be able to query any widgets from any template in our system:

< ?php
$wids = Mage::getModel('widget/widget_instance')
	->getCollection()
	->addTypeFilter('masswidget/list')
	->addAttributeToSort('title', 'asc')
	->load();

foreach ($wids as $wid):
	$params = $wid->getWidgetParameters();
	echo $params['custom_param'];
	echo $wid->gettitle();
endforeach;
?>