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.

If you try importing a mysql database backup file greater than 2 MB then you may receive an error – “No data was received to import. Either no file name was submitted, or the file size exceeded the maximum size permitted by your PHP configuration. See FAQ 1.16.”. No Worries! you just need to make few changes to your php.ini file.

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.

You would have come across websites that provide an easy way to scroll to the top of the webpage as you move down the page, its really a good idea if the webpage is long and you want to provide a better user experience. In this article, we will show you how to add a smooth scroll to top effect using jQuery.

We will create a button on the footer of the page which when clicked will scroll the page to the top smoothly, we will use css to postion the button at a fixed position on the bottom right of the page and jQuery to provide the scrolling effect and make the button visible only if the page is scrolled down, instead of being always visible.

Step 1: Add button link
Place the following code just before the closing </body> HMTL tag

<a href="#" id="scrolltotop" title="Back to top">Back to top</a>

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

During development and testing of your Magento based e-commerce website you do a lot of test orders. Before going live you want to delete all of them but unfortunately you have no option in Magento admin to delete the orders, you can only change the orders status to “Canceled”.

You can log in to phpMyAdmin or MySql console, select your database and then run queries to delete you orders in Magento. Alternatively you can try Magento Connect extension “Seamless Delete Order”. It allows you to delete order from Magento admin, it adds a “Delete Order” option in the Actions dropdown on the Sales Order Grid Page.

Many people having a large catalog have faced a problem in Magento “Catalog Management” that they are not able to  assign more than 1000  products under a category using the Magento admin category management interface.

The category management interface allows you to select as many products as you want.  If you have selected more than 1000 products and then you click on the “Save Category” button, the forms submits without any error displayed on the frontend. But if you see the products actually assigned to category in the grid displayed,  it may happen that all the ones you selected have not been assigned to the category but only the first 1000 selected are.

The issue is logged in Magento bug tracking list – Issue #27321 Can’t save categories with more than 1000 products [http://www.magentocommerce.com/bug-tracking/issue?issue=13203]

After setting up the Magento Community Edition (ver. 1.7.0.2) on my local machine for development, I found that I am not able to login in to the admin section. I entered correct username and password but  it redirected me back to the same admin login page with no error message. If I enter incorrect login details it does give me the error “Invalid User Name or Password”. I am using Windows Xp and Xampp Version 1.8.1 (Apache 2.4.3, MySQL 5.5.27, PHP 5.4.7) and I was accessing my Magento admin using url “http://locahost/magento/index.php/admin”.

One of my friends faced the issue that he was able to login in Firefox  but not in Chrome.