marramgrass

Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight
Got to kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight

Bruce Cockburn, Lovers In A Dangerous Time

Spotted this while scraping the ice off the car a while back.

I hope they get on as well as this in 10/20/40 years’ time.

References

• Overview: How Multiple Websites & Stores Work
• MultiStore and Multiple Domains problem – /app/Mage.php was not found
• How To Setup Multiple Magento Stores
• Magento for Designers: Multi-Store Functionality

Notes

• This assumes a standard LAMP setup. In our case, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Apache 2, MySQL 5 and PHP 5.3.
• It’s necessary to create some symlinks on the filesystem, so you’ll need access to do that. You don’t really want to be trying to run Magento
  on a shared host anyway, so this shouldn’t be a problem.
• The stores are on different domains, although the principles are the same if it’s a subdomain, subfolder or other configuration.

Magento is powerful and flexible, but not terribly well documented, so figuring out the best way to accomplish something can take some digging
and some experimentation. I needed to set up two stores to run off the same Magento installation as two catalogues (one a subset of the other)
from the same retailer.

There are two broad approaches:

• A single VirtualHost with aliases for the various domains, with logic added to the root index.php to decide which store to load.
• A VirtualHost for each domain, linked to one core Magento installation.

I took the multiple VirtualHosts approach, as it seemed a little more logical to me (a matter of taste, really). It has the advantage of each
domain having its own .htaccess, which might be handy if you’re doing other things alongside Magento.

When running multiple stores from one Magento instance, they all share the same back office and catalogue. Once you set up a second website,
store or view then anywhere they need to differentiate the option appears to use the default config or to apply a site- store- or view-specific
setting. This means that themes and extensions for the various stores all live together.

A side note: websites, stores and views

You’ll need to decide whether your new store is a whole new website or a new store of the same website. Broadly
speaking, from the point of view of what the customer sees:

• Websites are separate entities
• Stores are distinct but share customer accounts and shopping carts
• Views may be the same store in a different language or layout

Although that’s pretty configurable. Websites can be set to share customer accounts, for example. And, again, they’ll all share the same admin and
catalogue.

In this case, we went for two distinct websites.

The method

1. Create a new root category for your new website. You can put a full category tree under it and add products to the categories.

2. In the control panel, go to System > Manage Shops and create a new website, then shop for that website and view for that shop. Take note of the
   code you assign to the website – you’ll need it later. Assign your newly-created root category to the new store.

3. Create a new VirtualHost for the new website. Note that the Magento files will need to be accessible to PHP from this VirtualHost,
   so pay attention to any restrictions on your server.

4. In the new VirtualHost block, you need to set two environmental variables:
   
   SetEnv MAGE_RUN_CODE "your_new_website_code"

SetEnv MAGE_RUN_TYPE "website"
   
   If doing this in the VirtualHost is a problem, your server configuration may allow you to do it in the .htaccess file below.

5. Copy index.php from the document root of the existing site to the document root of the new site. Find and modify the following variables to point
   to the files in the Magento installation:
   • $compilerConfig
   • $mageFilename

6. Copy .htaccess from the existing document root to that of the new site. Check it for any hostname-specific rules that have been added, and
   modify them as necessary.

7. Create symlinks of the following folders in the existing site’s document root to the same locations in the new site’s document root:
   • app
   • errors
   • includes
   • js
   • lib
   • media
   • skin
   • var

   For example, ln -s /path/to/existing/document/root/app /path/to/new/document/root/app.

8. In the control panel, go to System > Configuration > Web, select hte new website from the dropdown in the top-left corner, uncheck
   Use Default by the Unsecure and Secure Base URLs, then correct the URLs set to those of your new website.

9. Reindex everything.

10. Optionally set the theme for the new site under System > Configuration > Design.

11. Job done.

If, after doing this, the home page of the new website is showing a default Magento 404, then check that the code for the new website
is set exactly the same in the control panel and in the server environment variable. A typo in the control panel setting lost me 45 minutes.
That was frustrating.

Also note that as we’ve edited a core file or two (index.php and maybe .htaccess), keep an eye on them if you upgrade your Magento instance.

Ten years ago today I married the best person I’d ever met.

Ten years later, she still is. I don’t expect that to change.

Ten years includes some of the best times in my life, and some of the most difficult. At the highest and at the lowest, I haven’t been alone. The person I have most wanted to have there to share the joys and to help me through the sadnesses has always been there. No exceptions.

Ten years ago, I felt like a child pretending to grow up. I still do. I don’t expect that to change, either.

I have ten years’ more knowledge and experience of the fact that nobody’s perfect. Especially me.

Ten years have proved to me what I believed then: life is hard, but worth it.

After ten years, there are now four of us. And a dog.

Ten years ago I couldn’t have imagined what life would be like now. And I love it.

Ten years ago, I loved her.

Ten years into this, I love her, but I understand better than I did then what that means.

Ten years have been spent realising and marvelling at how lucky I am.

Ten years is a long time. Ten years is no time at all. It’s the beginning.

The man holding a sword near Barnes’s throat was a creature worn down almost to the nub, like a pencil eraser with just enough pink rubber left to make one final correction.

Yikes.

Mother: “What are you eating?”

Child: “A little bit of snot.”

A birthday, and the attendant (generously given, gratefully received) gifts have led to a few new things to feed my not-so-modest stationery addiction. Pictured here, a hint of the Field Notes subscription and the new most stealthy and gruntingly manly fountain pen to join my pen case, the limited edition, all matte black Pilot Capless (Namiki Vanishing Point in some markets) retractable, clicky goodness. It’s very nice, and really needs to be seen in person. Black as black as black.

Born on Monday morning, all 6lb 2oz of him.

Further to my previous post, I ended up going with Nettica. A friendly enough control panel, and a quick and easy to base service makes for sufficient happiness.

I did have my first experience with their support team today (I should clarify that it wasn’t a problem needing solved; rather, it was to do with transferring DNS for a domain between two Nettica accounts), and they were quick and helpful. Happy there for now, then.