richardferaro.com is now live!

Hello guys! I’ve decided to transfer my blog to a private hosting. I won’t be updating this blog so please update your bookmarks and post your comments and inquiries here

Thanks for reading my blog and I hope you will continue to read and follow through in my new home 🙂

How to fix the ‘The plugin does not have a valid header’ error when activating a WordPress plugin

You want to extend WordPress’ functionality and decided to download some plugins found in the Official WordPress Plugin repository. After searching the repo, you’ve found two plugins that accomplishes the tasks you needed to implement in your blog. Downloading the plugins gives you two ZIP files that when double-clicked, shows you the contents in the following format:

plugin-a.zip

plugin-a-folder
---- plugin-a-main-file.php
---- plugin-a-readme.txt

plugin-b.zip

plugin-b-folder
---- plugin-b-subfolder
-------- plugin-b-main-file.php
-------- plugin-b-readme.txt

Back in Manila!

As a treat, here are some of the photos I took while on vacation 🙂

Sunset at Paguriran Island

Will be back next week!

Hey guys, I’ll be on vacation starting on Monday. Will try to answer your inquiries if I have an internet in the area (which I doubt.) Be back on Thursday!

Mage Enabler is now available for download in the Official WordPress Plugin repository!

I’m soooo happy to see my very first plugin to be released for everyone to use. I hope it will help a lot of Magento and WordPress users!

Click! click! click!

Mage Enabler: A plugin to run Magento’s session within WordPress

Update (May 12, 2010): Mage Enabler is now available in the Official WordPress Plugin repository. Get it here!

It’s been a while since I posted my tweak that allows Mage object to be utilized within any WordPress installation. The tweak requires the blog owner to modify functions.php as stated in my post. I’m inspired by the feedback of the readers who used the tweak so I decided that a plugin that does the same thing should be made to prevent modifying the WordPress core files thus preventing the tweak to cause inconsistencies when an upgrade is necessary.

WordCamp Philippines on October 2010!

I’m sooo excited about this! For those who don’t know what WordCamp is, here is an excerpt from their site:

WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress.

WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. WordCamps are open to WordPress.com and WordPress.org users alike.

It is scheduled on October 2 this year and they haven’t publish any details yet, but what the heck! I’m still going! So fellow WordPress bloggers, hop on to our mothership!

How to use Magento’s session within WordPress

Update (May 11, 2010): I created a WordPress plugin for this one. Check it out here.

You have a free WordPress blog that has been online for sometime. You love its simple yet powerful way of managing your content so you’ve decided to have it hosted to a different provider in order to have a more granular control to its code and functionality. Eventually, you needed cash to support the hosting expenses so you decided to utilize your blog for e-commerce use. That’s when Magento comes in to the scene. You want to find a way to use Magento as your backend while pulling your catalog and customer information to be posted to WordPress site. This is what my article is for.

How to run Magento (version 1.4.0.1) session into an external site?

This post is an update for my blog entry on how to extend the Magento session to an external site but instead of using the version 1.2.1.2, I used the the latest stable version as of this writing which is version 1.4.0.1. The script below also implements the login() and logout() method the Magento way as well as extracting the customer data (firstname and lastname) using getCustomer() method.

How to Fix Magento’s Admin Login Failing (no error message) on Localhost

You want to install a new Magento instance (version 1.4.0.1 at the time of this writing) in your machine. You followed every steps from downloading up to the setting up of your admin account. Everything went fine so you assumed you’re good to go. You tried to login using your admin account… nothing happened. You tried again… Same login screen with no error whatsoever. You wonder what went wrong. You checked the files and the database as well as clearing the cache. You even tried resetting your account’s password found in the Magento’s admin_user table using the MD5 function thru phpMyAdmin but to no avail. You gave up and tried to reinstall everything only to be greeted by the very same login screen after clicking the Login button.