10 Jun

Magento: "Wrong charset, conversion from `UTF-16BE' to `UTF-8' is not allowed"

We have noticed this issue cropping up with Magento. Whilst we originally assumed it was a system level fault, further testing has revealed there is an issue with the implementation of iconv() in Magento. There was a problem with Magento converting strings between character sets, specifically when creating a PDF invoice. Initial testing with a … Continue reading

8 Jun

Magento: mini_sendmail and Zend_Mail incompatibility

This article is now deprecated and the issue has been resolved without changes to core code after our service change. We have recently spotted an issue after traversing our Apache sendmail application to mini_sendmail (read more about the change). In Magento's mail headers, the recipient and sender details have both the email address and respective … Continue reading

4 Jun

PHP: Combine and compile CSS and JS into Gzipped files

This has actually been the secret behind a lot of our great system performance, but as it was open source originally, it's going back to the people. Its a relatively straightforward script and speeds up JS and CSS performance by a huge amount, especially if you are using multiple files (like we do!). It should … Continue reading

20 May

So what makes us the fastest Magento host then ...

As we've been developing Magento sites for almost a year now, I think we can start to say we're getting proficient at the inner workings. So much so, that with our expanding hosting range - we've been tweaking our server to squeeze the best possible performance out of Magento. What looks to have been an … Continue reading