GigglingCorpse

Ecommerce — people love it, but whenever possible I’ll pass it off onto an existing system; make my money skinning it, and avoid any responsibility for issues that may arise. And, to be honest, unless something very different from the usual is required, learning to use an existing system is probably much more cost-effective than having one custom build specifically for ease of use.

Magento Commerce is the system I tend toward. I’ve installed it three times, on dreamhost servers, and not once without incident. Dreamhost and the Magento installer bicker and spit in a manner similar to fueding kittens well versed in human language.

It was on the third occasion that I realized I really had no idea how I’d successfully installed the first two. Frustrating, but we can avoid that in times to come with this very post.

Installing Magento 1.2.1.2 on Dreamhost

Problems arise during the table creation phase of the Magento install. For some reason, the script appears to run more than once — maybe it’s timing out?

And, oh man, does Magento ever not like the idea of creating tables that already exist. Tables that it created seconds earlier.
Guys, it was being completely unreasonable, and moreover sometimes we totally just know better than other people or in this situation programs.

The trick is making them do what we want. In this situation, I modified the SQL in app\code\core\Mage\Sales\sql\sales_setup\mysql4-install-0.9.0.php.

Using find/replace, I swapped all instances of CREATE TABLE with the more dreamhost-friendly CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS.

And with that, the installer thought the words “oh, these tables already exist. Sweet, i don’t even have to do anything now.” More appealing to us than the “Oh god there are already tables here what is going on???” and its ensuing panic attack which came before our alterations.

Business, Discoveries, being helpful to people less experienced than myself in the ways of the world; mostly in the ways of the web actually Dreamhost

Bradicon has been, what’s the word, receiving use? And that, among other things, left Nine more than a little anxious for space.
In the meantime, I’d chanced a glance at the new WordPress back-end. And it put the GC to shame. Shinier and newer than that dust-covered thing called a WordPress installation that was running the GC.
I think you can see where I’m going with this. When Life presents two rabbits, and but a single Frisbee, what else can you do?

The first step: editing the DNS file. Some Putty, and a little Emacs later, and certain subdomains were pointed toward Dreamhost.

Everything went smoothly, until the point where it did not. And not for the first time, Dreamhost couldn’t help breaking.

I don’t know why I seem to run into so many problems with them. Maybe I just try to do weird things. But, oh, well. I figured that like the other times, if I waited a few days it would fix itself. And good news, it did! Just two days later.

So now the GC is on Dreamhost! (it’s still on Nine, for now)
Certain things don’t work (the galleries, mainly) and it definitely needs to be re-styled. But perhaps in time it will become again the GC we’ve all grown to love, or, failing that, tolerate.

Uncategorized Dreamhost, Giggling Corpse