In this blog post I will demonstrate how to use the Free Gift Promotions Extention sold in our online store to effect issueing your customers with a coupon code when they sign up to your store newsletter.

This example will generate a coupon in the Gift Promotions module 'on the fly' and issue that to your customer via email after they have signed up to the newsletter.

This is just one small example how you can use the Gift promotions extension to boos activity n your site - Everyone loves a free gift!

I firmly believe that you should try not to use the magento admin to make configuration adjustments.

The main mindset behind this is to prevent changes made in a development environment, not to go live with your deployment of code. 
It can be quite embarresing when your new super duper module works incorrectly on live, just because you forgot to configure live the same as your dev system.
A simple yes/no config change forgotten can make the world of difference on a new feature

One of the most time consuming, and frustrating tasks (purely becuase it is so mundane) is for a developer is to export external system databases, and re-import them for debug work.

In magento land, you need to alter a lot of database config values to make the imported database run in your dev environment.

This article describes a snaphot tool I created to allow quick, easy import and export of external magento databases into my development environment.

The standard magento way to sync orders placed, to external systems, is to use the 'sales_order_place_after' event. (This is even a question in the magento certification exam)

I have a problem with this: latency at checkout!

Using this (presecibed) method to sync your orders, you can add at least 3+ seconds (and as long as xx seconds) to the checkout process. That is unwanted lag, and delay for your customers, just to se their success page display.

It is possible to target mobile devices to load a seperate mobile theme. This method is becoming a bit 'old-school' since responsive themes are the 'new wave' of targetting all device types.

So you have an awesome, popular website,  be it e-commerce based, or just information based. No matter how awesome your site, one of the leading factors to break the awesomeness is site speed. Plainly put, if customers find the site loading time frustrating, they will move on to another site. 

So, how to improve your site performance?

One of the best ways will be to hook up with New Relic

Magento generally logs events to either system.log or exception.log, but what if you want to do some additional action when those logs are written to? 

A recent botnet attack on a site I manage createded a massive amount of emails in the mail queue.

A site I am managing recently came nder a massive DDOS attack from around the globe.

To limit the attack, I used fail2ban to setup a ban system to help mitigate the issue.

Magento's grid functionaly has a hidden, a d not well documented feature to allow you to trap double click events on a grid row.