Magento pre-launch checklist

Montreal, Québec, Canada, February, 28th 2014

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Three types of problems

Things you should do long before launch

Things that will go wrong with store owners

Things that are good at the last moment

Speaker

Damien Seguy

dams@php.net

Exakat : PHP expert services

E-commerce website in China for 3 years

We take Questions

?

Long before

That will impact store owner

or the contrary : you’ll wait for him

Change ADMIN URL

Change ADMIN URL

Change the admin URL to something else

Avoid ‘administration’, ‘__admin’.

Use another name, like the name of the department in charge, character name...

Add restriction with htpasswd and/or IP

Change Base_URL

Don’t use {{base_url}} in production

use website.dev in dev, and website.com in production

Do it at dev time, and don’t forget later

Set up SSL key

Set up SSL for admin and private. May be public

This is happening everywhere

Feel the impact at dev time

Quick auto-signed key during dev, see impact

PHP configuration

max execution time : 30

Do not use 1800 because it is needed by admin

use .htaccess to raise the value in admin!

memory_limit : 256 M

If you can, use 128M during dev.

Validate

Won’t have time at the last moment

HTML (validator.w3.org)

CSS : http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Javascript : Jslint.com

Apply to : homepage, product page, search results, a few cms pages.

Test system compilation

Test compile

Compact code for easier loading

May have impact on your code

Problems are

unusual inclusions and their path

classes name collisions

Don’t use compile version in dev, only test it....

Set up probes

Use the previous dummy store to run scenario

home page, select products, fill checkout, reach paiement

home page, fill mailing list form, success

Speed loading

http://phantomjs.org/

hand it to store owners

And don’t drop it

Favicon

Change the favicon.ico

Remove also the original icon

Small security step

Change image default

skin/frontend/default/theme/images/catalog/product/placeholder

Change logo default

Contact info

and the stores names

HTML head

HTML head

Change and set the default title

This only applies when the product has no such information

This will happen and look ... silly

Make all the others blank

404 page

404 page

No page design and dummy pictures

Change it in the CMS

Or even make it changed by some one else

Take advantage of the 404 page to display a listing, or do some searching.

Social networks

Check your social networks

Are they working ? Are they not the developper’s own?

Google analytics

Check for Analytics, base, checkout, website optimiser

Make sure it is there

Make sure it is the one intented for production

Same for module licenses

Photo inventory

Make a list of the photo names

This is a ls in the media folder

Make sure they make send

At the launch

That will help on the D-Day

Check your robots.txt

Forgotten in production

Check your robots.txt

Don’t forget things that block the robots

Use it in preprod, as you don’t want test data to be harvested

Enable Gzip

<ifModule mod_gzip.c> mod_gzip_on Yes mod_gzip_dechunk Yes mod_gzip_item_include file \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|html)$ mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$ mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.* mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.* mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.* mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*</ifModule>

Install system caches

APC for PHP : code cache

Varnish : full page cache

memcache : good for your sessions

not a cache...

Start Magento caches

Magento cache

System -> cache management

Magento index

System -> index management

Check cron

Sitemap

Logs

Reindex

Remove test data

Don’t leave old data there

Clear bills and shipping

Keep your dummy information

For probes, for online tests.

Mention it to the store owner

Backup / restore

Check back up are ready and configured

Rehearse the restore strategy

What happens if you have to restore data that where already moved ?

Thank you!

http://www.slideshare.net/dseguy/