(Not) All Quite on the Western Front

Open Source

It’s been over two years since I last wrote here but that’s not because I’ve not been busy. In fact, I’ve never been busier! Professionally a lot has changed since July 2019. The most important change was my decision to close Fresh Web Services and start work as Community Manager at Alfresco.

Alfresco is an open source document management system, with a free Community Edition and a paid Enterprise edition. I started working there at the back end of 2019, tasked with rejuvenating their community. It was difficult but also great fun, and I found myself working with some exceptionally bright people during some incredibly turbulent times – what with the pandemic and then the purchase of Alfresco by the much larger Hyland Software.

After almost two years as Alfresco Community Manager, I left to become Head of Community at Snowplow Analytics. This again has been an exciting challenge, as I look to build out a team and strategy to grow our community and to consolidate our open source offering. Once again I’m surrounded by brilliant people and a really supportive leadership team.

So, as we approach the end of 2021, I’m looking forward to the challenges of the coming year and hoping that 2022 is better for all of us.

Season’s Greetings to you all.

Magento 2 – AND | OR Search Operators

magento, Open Source
Seek & ye Shall Find – or not

In Magento 1 (M1), it was possible to change the search operands from with the admin UI. Within System > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog Search was a Search Type setting with the options of Like, Fulltext and Combine (Like and Fulltext). In this simple way you had control over the way the default Magento search engine worked.

Continue reading Magento 2 – AND | OR Search Operators →
July Day UK 2017

Joomla Day UK 2017

joomla, Open Source

This year’s UK Joomla Day is on 8th July at the Ilec Conference Centre, in west London.

There’s a varied programme of talks on topics such as the new custom fields in Joomla, Joomla & SEO, and a chance to sit the new Joomla! administrator certification exam.

So, if you’re a Joomla! designer or developer, a Joomla! webmaster or own a Joomla! website, there’s plenty of good stuff on offer. These days are also a great opportunity to meet other Joomlers and take part in the wider Joomla! community.

Perhaps we can meet up if you’re going?

Magento Custom Options

Using Magento’s Custom Options

magento, Open Source

While delivering some Magento training, I was demonstrating how to create Configurable Products and one of the trainees visibly wilted at the thought of creating hundreds of child products to meet her multi-variant product catalogue. However, as she didn’t need to manage stock (as her products were unique, one-offs), I reassured her that she could use Custom Options on a simple product to represent the multi-variants.

So, let’s see how this might work in Magento.

Continue reading Using Magento’s Custom Options →

Testing Paypal Pro & Magento

magento, Open Source, ,

Within Magento CE you are able to display certain checkout functionality based on the location of the customer. For example, you’re might want to offer flat rate shipping only to customers in  your country. To do this you just select the desired country from the Ship to Specific Countries for that particular shipping method.

You can then test this by  choosing to ship to another country and making sure that the flat rate shipping option is not available in the checkout.

You are also able to do something similar with payment methods. I was recently testing that Paypal Pro was only available to customers within the EU. However, I found that Paypal was available to customers shipping anywhere in the world.

The answer was actually pretty obvious really. Paypal looks not at the chosen shipping country but rather the customer’s residential country. I’d been testing using a UK customer  and Paypal was available no matter what shipping country I selected in the checkout. Testing with a non-EU customer and I got the desired behaviour – Paypal was not available as a payment method, even if I was trying to ship to the UK.

So, the Paypal Pro payment method at least tests on the customer’s country of origin rather than destination in determining whether the payment method should be available.