Items filtered by date: December 2014

The following are all free programs that can be used to replace outlook.

Thunderbird

This is the most popular free email client solution on the net and is updated on a regular basis. To set Thunderbird up with a calendar can take a bit of time and will require some IT skills. I am sure over time it will get improved and the installing of the calendar will get easier.

• completely free for home and business
• lots of settings and can be tricky to set up
• no inbuilt calendar (see below)
• an integrated calendar can be added by using the standalone cross platform calendar program, Sunbird. Sunbird can then be intergrated into thunderbird by using the extension Lightening. This extension does heavy integration so it performs like outlook.
• it is possibly to import outlook addresses and emails into thunderbird via the inbuilt wizard. Disable antivirus and firewall as this could cause issues (M$ av did, it causes the import to hang/get stuck)
• to get calendar items into Sunbird/Lightening you need to export from Outlook in ICS (prefered) or CSV format and then import into Sunbird
• to show the calendar tab, top right there are some icons, the one that looks like a calendar click it to show the calendar
• when setting up an email profile in thunderbird to complete the email account setup without veryfying details, click advanced config
• signature handling is a bit shit - you can only specify 1 signature, the rules on how the signature is attached is shit
• the creation and manipulation of emails is limitid to almost text only, no proper WYSIWYG
• it is possible to export data if you want to move client at a later date

EM Client

This client is free with caveats and there is a pro version, however it looks exaclty like outlook including a calendar and you can completely import all of your outloook in one import wizard which consists of a few clicks. For free this is fantastic and easy to use.

• Free version only allows up to 2 email accounts, this is fine for most.
• when you install the free version you get 30 free trial of the Pro version. After this you need to install a license file for both the Free and Pro versions. To get a Free licsense you need to apply on the website and fill in a questionaire, this questionaire needs to be filled in once a year to renew the license.
• Pro version is not limited
• the 2 licenses are. Free/Home/Personal/Non-Commercial and Company/Commercial
• identical to outlook in useability and feel
• imports all settings ie accounts, signatures, emails, calendar items and more
• import wizard is a few click to perform a full import
• it is possible to export data if you want to move client at a later date

Zimbra Desktop (by VMWare)

This is Ajax based client which acts as a normal client unless you want to use the advanced Zimbra Account with an appropraite server. The local and the cloud repository sync with each other when using a Zimbra account. This would not be an ideal outlook client replacement at the minute beacuse of the time involved migrating to this from outlook, but it could be a very good email client on its own. Importing and exporting could be tricky

• You can use Zimbra Client for normal email accounts (ie not Zimbra accounts) and it only stores your files locally and as such acts as a normal email cleint
• can be cloud based with synced local repository if you use a zimbra account and am appropriate server
• can send in both html and plain text (this is default)
• has calendar
• GUI seems web based
• Open Source Edition (Free) and Paid versions, compare editions here
• searching in the trash and spam folders is off by default
• can handle signature properelyy and supports HTML and plain text signatures
• can add social media feeds (Twitter/Facebook.Digg)
• briefcase feature
• tasks
• email/address book/calendar/tasks/briefcase export feature. Proprietry Format
• import Feature but unkown what it will import, it might only be previous Zimbra backups
• Zimbra Desktop FAQ is here
• works by running its own webserver @ http://127.0.0.1:49832

Other Clients That have been looked at

• Opera Mail - built into opera and is fiddly
• SeaMonkey  - more a pack of cutomised mozilla product, no calendar
• Spicebird - not updated often but could be because it is a new project
• PhoenixMail - old and outdated
• Pegasus Mail - modern client but no calendar
• Microsoft Entourage 2008 - mac only
• Evolution 2.28.2-1 / Evolution Groupware Suite - looks like outlook, only for linux
• Windows Live Mail - basic email client but is reliable, is part of Windows Live Essentials
• Incredimail 2 - advertising and stupid icons etc.. some people might use it at home, free version has adverts on emails,
• FreeMailCommander - free and paid versions. free version is ok for home people but does not support signatures unless you get the paid version, not bad looking but layout is a bit messy
• Claws Mail - This is an open source client that has an active community and is kept upto date. It is ported to most platforms and has calendar and address book plugins amongst others.

To export outlook 2010 calendar

1. select calendar and then the file menu
2. save calendar as file, make sure you set all items to export, this will export a ics format

Changing the Magento Admin URL is not simple and if done wrong can kill your site so check on your DEV site first.

Note: Do NOT use the web interface in the Magento Admin Panel to change the admin URL, as this is known to cause severe problems. (at time of writing)

Change Admin URL

• The admin URL is set in the local.xml file
  • default 0 admin/url/use_custom
  • default 0 admin/url/custom
• And under System->Configuration->Admin->Admin Base URL I have set 'Use custom admin URL set to “Yes”  - Check this
• Clear the cache

Links

• How to change the Magento Admin URL / Path
• Magento admin URL change
• Change Admin URL Manually
• Magento. How to change admin panel URL - Template Monster Help

And this forum thread is just incase things have gone wrong

• Help! changing admin url broke admin

I am looking over my test sales and i see i am missing order numbers…

my last order number is 100000038 and the one before that is 100000036

what happened to 100000037 ?

This typically means they started the checkout process but didn’t complete it - at that point the order# had already been assigned and is simply abandoned. That’s what we’ve found with our stores anyway.

Sometimes, when you try to add a product to your cart, it redirects you back to a Cookies Page, which is annoying.
So, here are two ways to fix this :

1. 1) Increase Cookie Lifetime

– Go to System –> Configuration –> General –> Web –> Session Cookie Management –> Cookie Lifetime = 5400
– By default, Cookie Lifetime = 3600. You can make it more than 5400 and try if it works.

2) Disable redirect to enable-cookies CMS page

– Go to System –> Configuration –> General –> Web –> Browser Capabilities Detection –> Redirect to CMS-page if cookies are disabled = No

Option 1

This tutorial will show you how to clear and disable Magento cache. You should keep cache disabled while editing the Magento core or template files

1. Open Magento admin panel

2. Go to System>Cache Management

3. Check all Cache types and in the Actions box select refresh

4. Then select all Cache types and in the Actions box select disable

5. Also click Flush Magento Cache and Flush Cache Storage buttons

Now you are free to perform any changes to the template files. 

Option 2

To refresh or clear the cache in Magento:

1. As admin login back-end > System > Cache Management
2. Flush Magento Cache
3. Flush Cache Storage
4. Select all cache and then refresh
5. Save cache settings

If you followed the steps correctly you should receive a message acknowledging that the cache has been cleared.

Cache Notes

I’m not sure what “Flush Magento Cache” does but “Flush Cache Storage” Removes all files and directories from the magento/var/cache directory or where you have it set to store.

• Flush Magento Cache - clears cache of items that relate to magento (that magento has created)
• Flush Cache Storage - clears the cache of everything that is in the cache (includes that created by other sites)

If you have Profiler enabled in Admin / System / Configuration / Developer, you will see a link on the bottom of each page “[Profiler]”, and when you click on it, will expand to table that shows statistics about times, number of execution and memory used for each watched fragment of the code. It will also show profiling statistics for main connection to database and queries.

Symptoms: TLS/SSL Socket 443 failure is preventing access to my Administrative (backend | control panel) or my Admin has been set to use secure access before TLS/SSL has been activated

1. Open your core_config_data table in phpMyAdmin.

2. Find the row with the path web/secure/use_in_adminhtml and change its value field from 1 to 0 to enable accessing admin panel from unsecure http://www.yourwebsite.com/admin url

Changing web/secure/use_in_frontend toggles customer shopping cart security, 1=on and 0=off which probably isn't of importance as you're trying to regain administrative access

3. Clear /var/cache, /var/session and after you've done the above and regained access your system, reindex your URL_rewrite index after changing settings. This is necessary because your config is cached and clearing it forces a reread of the configuration data from the core_config_data table.

You should now be able to access your Magento Admin panel by standard unsecured web access (port 80, http).

NOTE: Be aware that accidentally entering your leading https:// instead of http:// on your unsecure_base_url before you have enabled TLS/SSL on your webserver will lock you out, so if the above doesn't get you in, look for rows with web/unsecure/base_url and check for the aforementioned misconfiguration

I am completely new to Magento.
I am trying to set it up on my wamp server.

But, during installation in the Web Access Options section under the Base URL, it gives a suggestion http://localhost/magento,
yet when clicking on continue it warns with :"Please enter a valid URL. Protocol is required (http://, https:// or ftp://)”.

Just disable your javascript using web developer toolbar in firefox

or for a permanent fix

1. Go to js\prototype and open the file “validation.js”. (FYI : All the validation takes place through this script on both front end and back end)

2. Find this line and remove it / Comment it

[’validate-url’, ‘Please enter a valid URL. Protocol is required (http://, https:// or ftp://)’, function (v) {
return Validation.get(’IsEmpty’).test(v) || /^(http|https|ftp):\/\/(([A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9_-]*)(\.[A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9_-]*)+)(:(\d+))?\/?/i.test(v)
}],

3. Now continue your installation it works like a cake !!!

4. After your installation, Don’t forget to add it / uncomment it for validation of URLs in future  

or

Open \app\design\install\default\default\template\install\config.phtml and remove the class ‘validate-url’ from the base url input textbox. The textbox name is ‘config[unsecure_base_url]‘.

For more detailed information, visit our magento development blog.

www.blog.ecommercesoftwaresolutionsonline.com/archives/1014/magento-please-enter-a-valid-url-protocol-is-required-http-https-or-ftp-issue-in-magento-installation.html

New order mails: System -> Configuration -> Sales Emails -> Order -> Send Order Email Copy To.

Low stock notifications are not sent as emails but as an RSS feed: Catalog -> Manage Products -> Notify Low Stock RSS.

This is pretty easy, actually is just a Magento back-end configuration setting.

All you have to do is go into SYSTEM > CONFIGURATION > TAX ( part of SALES) and under the Price Display Settings set the Display Product Prices In Catalog to show Including and Excluding TAX.