Magento is a new, feature-rich open source ecommerce software, it is much better than ecommerce software developed with PHP such as OSCommerce, Zen Cart, X-Cart, CubeCart etc. I believe someday it will be another Zimbra.

To install Magento on CentOS 5, you need to install PHP 5.2, which is not available for current CentOS version.

1, Add Jason Litka’s yum repository to your yum repository.

rpm –import http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/RPM-GPG-KEY-jlitka

yum utterramblings http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/EL5/i386/

vi /etc/yum.repos.d/utterramblings.repo :

[utterramblings]
name=Jason’s Utter Ramblings Repo
baseurl=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/EL5/i386/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/RPM-GPG-KEY-jlitka

yum update

2, Install php-mcrypt

yum install php-mcrypt

3, Restart Apache

apachectl restart

4, Fix Zen Cart if you are running an old version of the software and you see these errors in the error log file:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function Execute() on a non-object in /xxx/xxx/zcart/includes/functions/sessions.php on line 61

edit /xx/xxx/zcart/includes/functions/sessions.php, change

    function _sess_write($key, $val) {
      global $db;
      global $SESS_LIFE;

to

   function _sess_write($key, $val) {
      // The following is only to work around a PHP 5.2.0 bug:
      global $db;
      if (!is_object($db)) {
        //PHP 5.2.0 bug workaround ...
        $db = new queryFactory();
        $db->connect(DB_SERVER, DB_SERVER_USERNAME, DB_SERVER_PASSWORD, DB_DATABASE, USE_PCONNECT, false);
      }

      global $SESS_LIFE;

5, Install APC (Alternative PHP Cache) cache

yum install php-pear

yum install php-devel httpd-devel

yum groupinstall ‘Development Tools’

yum groupinstall ‘Development Libraries’

pecl install apc

press enter when

the install stop at this line:

1-1, ‘all’, ‘abort’, or Enter to continue:

create a file /etc/php.d/apc.ini with the following lines

extension=apc.so
apc.enabled=1
apc.shm_size=30

restart apache

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

6, Create a phpinfo.php file and check if Apc is enabled

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

7, Now you are ready to install Magento

8, If your WordPress is not working after installing apc, you may want to remove apc.ini from /etc/php.d/.

9, If you see the following error in apache error log:

[warn] RewriteCond: NoCase option for non-regex pattern ‘-f’ is not supported and will be ignored

You should change the following line in your .htaccess or httpd.conf

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f [NC]

to

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

or remove the entire line

Technorati : Ecommerce, Magento, Open Source

After installing Alex King’s “Share This” plugin I found my blog site was super slow. I checked the code and found out the problem is the javascript used by “Share This” plugin was not installed locally –it was downloaded from http://sharethis.com every time the page was viewed. In another word, your web site will be slow if sharethis.com is slow.

So you should uninstall Alex King’s stuff and install Social Bookmarks Plugin for WordPress from http://www.dountsis.com/projects/social-bookmarks.

Technorati : Plugin, Share This, Social Bookmarks, WordPress

Maybe one of the plugins I installed for WordPress 2.5 is not compatible with Python or fail2ban, I got these kind of error message:

[Sun Apr 20 05:55:00 2008] [notice] child pid 11360 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Sun Apr 20 05:55:02 2008] [notice] child pid 11367 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

So I moved python.conf from /etc/httpd/conf.d to /etc/httpd directory, and now it is working again.