euroblaze | OXID e-Commerce User Blog

Big-G is going social and for me this marks a big moment in the history of the Internet, on par with facebook’s launch of social-media as we know it today. It sounds very negative, to say that Google has turned it’s big guns on facebook with the launch of G+, but heck I get a kick out of saying anything good about Google, because they care about the progress of the Internet in the right direction / have enriched me and my company in such far reaching ways (aside Search, we use Apps, Gmail and Analytics).

Inspite of it’s 700 million users, Facebook should be fretting about G+, and afraid right now of being displaced as the top-social-network on the planet. Infact, the most urgent and the fastest ever corporate-reincarnation should happen soon at facebook, for following reasons:

1. The tiny 8 point fonts on fb user interfaces suck. This might have been what Mark Zuckerberg used for his famed Harvard-dorm invention, but 700 million people are getting ever bigger screens and want to read easier. Change this soon or they’ll be stuck with it for a long time.
   _
2. The attitude to privacy at fb’s top management needs to radically tame down. Fb might think they want to radically open up the Internet, but it’s users are not that far on the vision. We users still want, ultimate if possible, control over our information. Social media should be a media for voluntary-sharing, not forced. And users will gravitate to platforms that respect our fundamental instincts for privacy (read G+)
   _
3. Google is combining Search with Social, and everyone knows Google has a 70-95% (depending on the geography) market-share for search. What this really means is website-owners who want to be found over Google (and believe me this is just about eveyone) have a strategic alignment with G+. They will _join G+ very fast. And by _join, I mean they will bring their _content and _users to G+. And when that happens, we can all say “game over”. You see Facebook doesn’t offer this incentive to website owners.

Now with Facebook 2.0, they have to neutralize this defecit, which they could probably do ONLY by combining their social-data with search, as in Bing and Yahoo! Infact the upside of is could be an interesting synergy of the type 1+1=3.

And we are not even factoring in Mobile here yet. If anyone wants to continue this article on how Search, Social and Mobile will overlap to shape the way we consume online-services, feel free to continue below.

In previous versions of OXID it was possible to deactivate the Guestbook from the /admin.  In the backend an oxconfig table variable was set.

Since OXID 4.5.x, most likely due to widgetization efforts in the product, deactivation of the Guestbook is not possible from /admin.  It has to be accomplished on the template by commenting out the effecting lines. For example, the calling-link in the footer can be commented out in /out/template_name/tpl/widget/footer/services.tpl

The below should work

<!-- a href="[{ oxgetseourl ident=$oViewConf->getSelfLink()|cat:"cl=guestbook" }]">[{ oxmultilang ident="WIDGET_SERVICES_GUESTBOOK" }]</a><br/-->

OXID merchants can contact us for such template modifications!

To prepare for that day of  disaster when your server crashes and your web-shop gets erased from the face of the Internet, we are happy to be giving away a free script for taking database dumps in an automated fashion (using cron) of your OXID e-Shop databases.

The script is written in Python, and has been tested to run on any LINUX machine supporting the language.

The code can be downloaded from code.google.com.

USAGE

shell$: eb_takedbdump.py -e <env> -s <shoproot>

Where

<env> = Any environment label to signify the environment where the shop is running.  Typically you’d set prod, dev, staging, vm and such values.  This value is then appended to the filename of the dump that is produced.

<shoproot> = the root folder where the core/ shop files reside (along with config.inc.php, .htaccess etc)

Working

Once the script runs successfully, you can expect 2 things:

1. A database dump file with the name dbname_env.sql (See Usage above for <env>).  dbname is the shop’s database name from config.inc.php
2. A log file called eb_takedbdump.log in <shoproot>/log/

You will have to make sure to set the permissions on database/ and log/ directories appropriately in case the script is being as a different user than the one owning the shop-directories.

REQUEST to Users

If you use the script, we would be thankful if you can mention (by email or comment below) in which server-environment and hoster you are successfully (or unsuccessfully) running this script.

We’ve got it to run on below environments until now:

1. Linux server000-han 2.6.99.8intel #1 SMP Sun Oct 30 22:38:04 CET 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux (Profihost hosting account)
2. Linux xxx 2.6.26-2-amd64 #1 SMP Mon Jun 13 16:29:33 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux (dedicated Debian 5.0.9 Server)
3. OXID Virtual Machine 2.0

Next Steps

As todos for the next version we are collecting the following list:

1. Support mentioning log-level as a CLI input parameter
2. Support a CLI parameter for rsync-ing the dump-file with an rsync-server
3. zip or gz the dump so that it’s more transportable (ex. to a back-up server by rsync et al)

Since the OXID VM is a good PHP developer tool, it would be great to have the xdebug enabled by default.  Until XDebug starts to comes pre-installed on the OXID VM, it can be installed on the VM’s in use, using:

apt-get install php5-dev

In your /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini, please insert either of these lines to load the xdebug.so shared object.

root@oxidvm:# find / -name 'xdebug.so' /usr/lib/php5/20090626+lfs/xdebug.so

zend_extension_ts=/usr/lib/php5/20090626+lfs/xdebug.so (for threaded use  of PHP) or
zend_extension=/usr/lib/php5/20090626+lfs/xdebug.so (non threaded use)

xdebug for OXID Virtual Machine

If you have product catalog that contains many articles with many variants, or variant-combinations, it may be necessary to set the parent-product as non-buyable, because only variants can be purchased.  Classical example, a t-shirt in different colors and sizes.  Unless a color and size is not selected, the product cannot be purchased!

OXID offers a configuration-setting for this purpose which would allow the shop-merchant to set up products with variants as non-purchases.  This setting is applicable shop-wide, and can be found under Master Settings > Core Settings > System > Variants > “Parent” Products can be purchased.

For more on OXID Variants, please also see Setting up Product Variants in OXID.