To remove index.php from the Urls in Magento, I enabled web server rewrites from Magento admin. I cleared the Magento cache and refreshed the home page. The home page loaded well and index.php was removed from all the links on home page but when I clicked link on any home page it gave me 404 error.  If I added index.php to the page URL in browser manually it loaded well. I had Apache running on Ubuntu.

It is advised to disable unused modules in Magento for website optimization. Also while troubleshooting issues we can temporarily disable module(s) to see which module(s) is/are causing the issues.

Let see how we can disable the modules in Magento:

1. Login to Magento admin and go to Admin >> System >> Configuration. On the left hand side click on the Advanced section under Advanced tab.

In Magento when you log in to admin, many times you would have seen a pop up window with messages like a new magento version is available, a security fix is available etc. These are the notification message from Magento webiste.

You can view all these messages received in admin by going to Admin >> System >> Notifications; the popup displays the latest message received.

Magento is an open source e-commerce platform built on PHP/MySql. It uses parts of the PHP Zend Framework. Like any other software, Magento also has certain system requirements which must be met in order to install and run it.

Lets go through the list of requirements which must be met for successful setup and functioning of Magento.

All of our custom developed modules are stored in the app/code/local folder. If in case an error has not been logged in error log files and to troubleshoot we want to check whether one of our custom modules is causing problems or not, so in that case we should first disable all local modules and see if the site is working or not.

Customers can be added as well as deleted from Magento admin. To delete customers login to Magento Admin and in the menu select Customers >> Manage Customers.

This displays the customers listing grid. Now select the customers you want to delete by checking the checkbox in each customer row and then in the actions drop down select “Delete” and click the “Submit” button. Also you can click on the “Edit” link to open the customer edit screen; the edit page has a “Delete” button, click it to delete the customer.

If you are comfortable working with database then you may run queries using MySql client to delete the customer data but be sure to take a database backup before working on it so that you can restore it if anything goes wrong.

We were duplicating a Magento install, so we copied Magento source code from live server to the new server. We had Ubuntu in our new servers. After setting up new server we noticed that Magento cache and sessions files were created in /tmp/ Ubuntu folder.

When we took backup of live server we had excluded the var folder. While debugging we noticed that {{MAGENTO_ROOT}}/var folder was not created because of permission issue. So, we created the {{MAGENTO_ROOT}}/var folder and set its permissions to 777. The issue got resolved.

By default Magento stores the region/state information only for some countries – Austria, Canada, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, United States. So on the checkout and registration pages Magento will display the state/region dropdown for only these countries and for other counties region/state will be shown as a textbox.

If you developing an e-commerce website with target audience as your country only then you will definitely want to show a nice region/state dropdown on the frontend of Magento for your customers.

If region/state data is not available for your country in Magento then the solution is to add this information to the tables in your database. Magento will pick up this data on its own and populate a drop down list.

We had a separate node for Magento admin and we had to upgrade its hardware. So we prepared a new machine with all the required hosting software and then setup magento code from old box on this machine.

When we visited the Magento admin URL we found that the CSS was not loading. Inspecting the HTML source we found that Magento was trying serve CSS files using the system file paths instead of URLs.

Using Mysql client we verified the Secure/Unsecure base URLs in the` core_config_data` table. We ran the following queries:

SELECT * FROM `core_config_data` WHERE path like 'web/unsecure/%' or path like 'web/secure/%';
SELECT * FROM `core_config_data` WHERE path LIKE 'admin/url%' ;

Magento maintains several log tables for tracking purpose like customer access, products viewed, products compared etc. These tables grow in size day by day so if you have a large numbers of visitors on your website the size of these log tables may become large enough within a week slowing down your database. So you should perform database log cleaning on a regular basis – daily/weekly/monthly depending upon your website traffic.

There are three ways to clean out these tables:

1. Log Cleaning in the Magento Admin

2. Shell Utility log.php in the ../shell directory, and

3. Manually via phpMyAdmin or mysql client