2023

Project Management Methodologies

Agile, Scrum, and Waterfall are three of the most popular project management methodologies used in software development. Each of these methodologies has its own advantages... May 2023 · Notes

Data Intellect

Data Intellect is the new name for AquaQ Analytics a provider of specialist data management, data analytics and data science products and services. Data Intellect... May 2023 · Portfolio

Popular Payment Gateways

Ecommerce payment gateways are critical components of any online store, as they enable merchants to accept payments from customers securely and conveniently. There are many... April 2023 · Magento

Latest web image formats

There are a number of new image formats that have been developed in recent years to improve the performance and quality of images on websites.... March 2023 · Notes

Using OpenAI tools in ecommerce environments

OpenAI is a leading artificial intelligence (AI) research organization that has the potential to revolutionise the ecommerce industry. By leveraging OpenAI’s cutting-edge AI technologies, ecommerce... February 2023 · Notes

Why is WordPress still so popular?

WordPress WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) in the world, and there are several reasons why it is so widely... February 2023 · WordPress

Mobile-first Web Design

Mobile-first web design Mobile-first web design is a design approach that prioritises mobile devices when designing a website. Instead of designing a website for desktop... January 2023 · Notes

2022

Web development in Northern Ireland

Web development in Northern Ireland is a thriving industry, with many talented and skilled individuals and companies offering a range of services. Northern Ireland is... December 2022 · Notes

Getting Started with Magento Open Source

Magento Northern Ireland Open Source allows you to build a unique online store from the ground up. Standard Features Magento Open Source includes everything you... November 2022 · Magento

Redirects

Apache, Nginx, PHP, JavaScript and Meta redirects There are two main redirect options 301 for a permanent redirect. Use this when the redirect is pointing... October 2022 · Notes

WordPress - WebP and AVIF Image Formats

An introduction to image optimisation in WordPress Northern Ireland Image Optimisation is an increasingly important step improve page speed and search engine performance of your... September 2022 · WordPress

Magento - WebP Image Format Conversion

An introduction to image optimisation in Magento Northern Ireland Image Optimisation is an increasingly important step improve page speed and search engine performance of your... September 2022 · Magento

WordPress CLI Commands

WP-CLI is the official command line tool for interacting with and managing your WordPress Northern Ireland installation in command line. WP-CLI is the command-line interface... July 2022 · WordPress

Lighthouse and Google Fonts

I recently had performance issues on Google Lighthouse due to the fonts used on the website. The Google Fonts I used were classified as a... July 2022 · Notes

Why WordPress?

WordPress Northern Ireland is currently used by over seventy-five million websites worldwide. This is primarily thanks to its flexible, customisable and user-centered admin panel making... July 2022 · WordPress

Innovate UK KTN

Established by Innovate UK the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) are all about connecting people and companies to help them reach their full potential. Members of... June 2022 · Portfolio

Mortgage IQ

Mortgage IQ know the mortgage journey can be stressful. Their dedicated team go the extra mile to ensure your complete satisfaction, from your application to... June 2022 · Portfolio

IQ&Co

IQ&Co are a financial planning business that serves the people in every city, town and community of Northern Ireland from every walk of life and... June 2022 · Portfolio

Set-up a Rackspace CDN service

Quick guide for setting-up a CDN on Rackspace. CDN Set-up Log into your Rackspace MyCloud account. Click into Storage > CDN then “Create Service”. In... May 2022 · Notes

Web Image Formats

The image file formats that are most commonly used on the web are listed below. Classic Image Formats These are the classic image formats universally... April 2022 · Notes

Aheadworks switch to subscription model

Aheadworks will be removing Composer keys and download access for existing customers and switching entirely to a subscription model. From February 2022 Aheadworks announced it... March 2022 · Magento

ProtonMail secure email

ProtonMail is an encrypted email service that takes a radically different approach to email security. In 2014 the Swiss company ProtonMail became the first email... February 2022 · Security

Magento Store Hierarchy

Before you start building-out your Magento website you must first plan your store hierarchy. Magento’s hierarchy is referred to throughout your store’s configuration. Each store... February 2022 · Magento

WordPress Development Belfast, Northern Ireland

If you are a business in Belfast or Northern Ireland who is looking to expand your presence online, WordPress Northern Ireland is a great platform... January 2022 · WordPress

2021

Shopify: Add Breadcrumbs to Liquid Templates

How to add breadcrumbs to your Shopify Northern Ireland liquid templates Breadcrumbs are a secondary navigation aid that helps users easily understand the relation between... December 2021 · Shopify

Optimising Magento 2 in Easy Steps

Some (fairly) simple step-by-step instructions to ensure your Magento Belfast 2 store is running the best it can. While most of these options should only... December 2021 · Magento

The Future of Magento

The Mage Open Source Community Alliance have published an open letter to the Magento community to announce a new initiative designed to focus on ensuring... September 2021 · Magento

Google Sheets to PHP Array

This PHP function accepts a public Google Sheets URL and converts it into a PHP array. You can use the array to either display the... August 2021 · PHP

Apache VirtualHost with Reverse Proxy

This post documents the process of setting up a reverse proxy to load one (Origin) website in the subdirectory of another. During this process the... August 2021 · Notes

OSI Europe

OSI Europe part of the OSI group, the premier global supplier of custom value-added food products. July 2021 · Portfolio

Magento 2 Blog Extensions

While Magento Belfast isn’t the go-to platform for blogs it can be useful for store owners to have a quick and easy way to post... July 2021 · Magento

AOS: The Animate On Scroll Library

AOS is a simple CSS/JS based animation on scroll library by Michał Sajnóg. Easy to install and highly configurable. This is a basic introduction, there... July 2021 · Frontend

Upcoming changes to eBay's PayPal Payments

Over the course of 2021 eBay will be incrementally changing how it works with sellers. Changes include updates to the fee structure, how fees are... June 2021 · Notes

What does Shopify do?

Shopify Belfast is an ecommerce platform that hosts your website for selling products and services. It helps organize the layout of your store's appearance through... May 2021 · Shopify

Choose a better browser

A run down of the most popular web browsers including Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Opera as well some alternate options if you'd like something different.... May 2021 · Notes

Notes: Magento 2 Directory Structure

Magento 1 A brief reminder of the Magento 1 folder structure: app/code followed by either /core for core files /community for third party extensions /local... April 2021 · Magento

Magento 2.4.2

The latest version of Shopify Northern Ireland has been released - Magento version 2.4.2 is the usual mix of security updates, performance and some improvements... March 2021 · Magento

PHP cURL Requests with JSON or XML

The following post will explain how to use PHP/cURL to retrieve data in JSON or XML and process it for using in your PHP application... March 2021 · PHP

Global Payments: Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) and 3D Secure 2

The roll out of 3D Secure 2 has been a long drawn-out process not helped by the COVID–19 pandemic. Part of the update has included... February 2021 · PHP

Shopify: Create a Discount Code

A quick guide to help set-up a discount code in a Shopify Belfast store. First login to your Shopify store admin area and click on... January 2021 · Shopify

2020

What is Magento Open Source?

Previously known as Magento Community Edition, Magento Open Source is the ecommerce platform. Adobe which acquired Magento in 2018 has confirmed the open source edition... November 2020 · Magento

WordPress - Rename the Posts section in Admin

The PHP script below can be added to the WordPress Theme functions.php file. It will rename the standard “posts” section to “stories”. Replace ‘stories’/’story’ with... October 2020 · WordPress

Moving on from Magento: OpenMage and Mage One

While many companies have already upgraded to Magento 2 or moved on to alternative ecommerce platforms like Shopify, many smaller companies or larger companies with... September 2020 · Magento

Notes on Transferring a WordPress site to AWS

Some notes on transferring an existing WordPress site to Amazon Web Services and some common issues. MySQL Import Fail If the import fails on import... August 2020 · WordPress

Coronavirus: Ecommerce in a Pandemic

Online sellers need to keep on top of the impact COVID—19 is and will continue to have on retailers. The links below are some thoughts... April 2020 · Magento

Coronavirus: Managing your Magento ecommerce store in Lockdown

The UK has now entered lockdown with everyone being told to stay at home. The spread of coronavirus (COVID—19) continues to increase day by day... March 2020 · Magento

Magento 2: Show address fields on the user registration form

This post shows you how to add the customer address fields to the customer registration page. It uses the existing setShowAddressFields method for displaying the... March 2020 · Magento

Security: DNS over HTTPS

Whenever you visit a website, even if you are using a site with SSL, the DNS query that converts the web address into an IP... February 2020 · Security

Website Optimisation with Pingdom Speed Test

There are plenty of website speed tests out there, some are better than others. Pingdom is one of these tools, this post explains how to... February 2020 · Notes

Choose Magento ecommerce in Belfast, Northern Ireland

If you are a business in Belfast or Northern Ireland who is looking to expand your presence online, Magento is a great platform to take... February 2020 · Magento

Best web browsers for security and privacy

A few alternative browser options for those looking to protect themselves against analytics, tracking, surveillance, and even censorship. Mozilla Firefox Iridium Ungoogled Chrome Tor Browser... January 2020 · Security

2019

WordPress Security - Nginx Hardening

Techniques for hardening WordPress Sites running on an Nginx server to enhance security. Limit Access to Admin Panel Limit XMLRPC Access This will lock down... November 2019 · WordPress

WordPress Security - Hardening Introduction and Plugins

This post is designed to give an overview of some of the techniques for hardening or securing WordPress from malicious attacks and hacking. Security in... November 2019 · WordPress

Simple jQuery Cookie Pop-up

This is a simple EU cookie notification pop-up for legacy websites. All that’s required is jQuery. Add the following HTML, jQuery script and apply some... November 2019 · Notes · Frontend

Automatically Deploy website from Github

This walk through will allow you to set-up a website to automatically deploy on a remote server whenever updates are pushed to the GitHub repository.... November 2019 · Notes

Magento 2.3.3

The latest version of Magento has been released - Magento version 2.3.3 is all about security and performance. Security Support has been added to Magento... October 2019 · Magento

Setting up WordPress on Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale... October 2019 · Wordpress

Choosing the right ecommerce platform

Choosing the right ecommerce platform is an important decision for any business looking to sell their products online. The three options below are tried-and-tested ecommerce... October 2019 · Notes

Jekyll: Post Loop in Liquid Templates

Jekyll uses the Liquid templating language to process templates. This post provides a basic example to show the five latest blog posts and highlight the... October 2019 · Notes

[Notes] WordPress + React Docker Starter Kit

I’ve been experimenting with a Headless WordPress + React Starter Kit from Postlight. It’s an automated toolset to create a powerful web publishing tool. Headerless... October 2019 · WordPress

Remove outdated content from Google Search Results

From time to time unwanted pages can appear in Google Search Results. Could be a temporary page, old content or even a test page that’s... June 2019 · Notes · SEO

Magento 1: End of life

Magento 1’s expected end of life is fast approaching. Many, many merchants are still up and running on the system need to think about what... May 2019 · Magento

Magento 2 Configurable Product Import

Magento 2 allows configurable products to be imported through the CMS. Unlike Magento 1 where Magmi generally did all the hard work when it came... April 2019 · Magento

Magento Code: Magento 2 Cache Refresh Script

This is a stand alone script which can be called to refresh the cache in Magento 2 The script hooks into Bootstrap to generate a... April 2019 · Magento

Magento Code: Magento 2 Indexer Script

This is a stand alone script which can be called to reindex a Magento 2 Site The script will create a unique instance of the... April 2019 · Magento

Magento 1 to Magento 2 Migration Process (Part 1)

While the Magento 1 platform is still active and supported there’s less urgency to switch-up to Magento 2. There are benefits to upgrading to Magento... March 2019 · Magento

Magento 1 Ongoing Support and End of life

Some thoughts on the expected demise of Magento 1. Magento 1 - Official End Date The official end date of the Magento 1 project was... March 2019 · Magento

Introduction to Ubuntu MATE

As a PHP developers most of my time is spent working with Linux servers. When Microsoft introduced the Linux Sub-system for Windows I jumped at... January 2019 · Notes