Murphy says: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. When it happens to your store it’s best to get the information about it ASAP and present the error in the most humane possible way. Let’s do it!

Since ever Magento presented it’s errors on the front-end for everyone to see and it was good for the developers but once the site has gone live that couldn’t be an option anymore. In Magento 1.4 those errors are now hidden and all your customer could get about the actual error was the “error number”.

Are you sick and tired of scrolling you browser when you get Magento error, trying to read and trace it?

Here is a post of my colleague Ivan Weiler which describes how to enable error information in latest Magento.

This is a screenshot of my browser when I get Magento error:

New Magento 1.4 brings changes in how errors are displayed along with an easy way to put your favorite store into maintenance mode.

If you check index.php file of new Magento 1.4, you’ll notice one interesting thingy, it checks for existence of “maintenance.flag” file in store root, if it’s found your store is put into maintenance mode. Service Temporarily Unavailable page is displayed with Please try again later message. Remember that administration can’t be accessed in maintenance mode along with the store.

Developers probably noticed that errors also are no longer displayed like before, as mentioned on Magento blog:
Since version 1.4.0.0 for security reasons the trace in the Magento error report page is disabled by default. The “Error log number” does not give any information about the error. To enable the trace copy the errors/local.xml.sample to errors/local.xml and follow the instructions described in that file.

Many of us who started experimenting with this interface and tried to place various values for Base URL, came to a dead end where Magento breaks.  Usually, we get Internal Server Error 500 with each page load. The problem lies in the fact that we can no longer open the Magento administration to correct the error. What needs to be done in such a scenario?

One of our clients wrote me a message today:

I have put www.mydomain.com in a bad spot. I changed the base URL to {{base_URL}} and now im getting a 500 server error on both the front end and the admin panel. I have looked through the database and cannot find the right field to change this value back. Can you point me in the right direction?

I am installing a fresh magento 1.3.2.1 in my Windows XP computer. I have Xampp installed. While installing magento, I had a problem at the configuration step where I had to fill database host, username, password etc. When I click continue after filling the required fields, the installation process doesn’t move forward. I am redirected to the same page.