Project Portfolio
Case Studies
15 anonymized project cases drawn from real client work. Each showcases a distinct domain of OpenMage / Magento 1 expertise - from custom feature development to infrastructure debugging and security hardening.
Image Import Performance: From 52 Minutes to 22 Seconds
A product image import timed out after 10 minutes on every run, processing only ~100 of 580 images. The client had worked around this for months by importing 7-8 products at a time, an extremely slow and manual process.
Custom Category Sorting Engine with Cluster Logic
Category pages were broken in Bestseller sort mode: spare parts and accessories appeared before flagship products because the default bestseller ranking treated all products equally. Multiple previous fix attempts had left the issue partially resolved at best, for nearly two years.
GLS Return Label Integration from Scratch
The client wanted to offer GLS alongside DHL for return shipments. No existing community module covered the GLS ShopReturn API, requiring a full integration built from scratch within the existing Magento order and shipment workflow.
DHL Packstation Checkout Integration
DHL Packstations are one of the most-used delivery options in Germany, but the existing checkout had no mechanism to collect a Packstation address: no Postnummer field, no address type distinction, and no compatibility with the SAP order export that downstream fulfillment depended on.
B2C Store Transformation: Custom Products Only
The client wanted to stop selling standard-size products on their B2C channel entirely, offering only custom-made variants. The B2B channel and the dedicated configurator shop had to remain completely unchanged. The scope touched product pages, category listings, search results, landing pages, and the Google Shopping feed simultaneously.
Checkout Address Validation Overhaul
Orders were arriving in SAP with invalid addresses: some had only a house number, others contained post office box entries in the street field. Fulfillment was failing or requiring manual correction. The checkout used a single free-text address line with no enforcement of the street/house number split and no country-specific validation rules.
GDPR-Compliant Video Consent Integration
A cookie audit revealed YouTube cookies being set on page load before any user consent, a clear GDPR violation. The root cause was a jQuery Backstretch vendor library that initialised video embeds unconditionally. Vimeo and Video.js embeds had the same problem. A simple overlay was not enough; the entire video loading pipeline needed to be consent-aware from the first JavaScript execution.
Intermittent Homepage Outage: Root Cause Analysis
The German-language homepage had been randomly going blank 2-3 times per week for several months. Cache clearing always restored it within minutes, so the team had been living with the problem rather than escalating it. The ask: find and permanently fix the root cause, not paper over it.
Security Rate Limiter: Custom OpenMage Module
A live log review uncovered repeated automated SQL injection attempts against the shop's API endpoints, multiple requests per minute from the same source IPs. The existing JSON validator was blocking the injections, but every request still reached the application server and consumed PHP-FPM workers, degrading response times for real users during attack windows.
OpenMage LTS Version Upgrade - Zero Regressions
A multi-store production shop with Varnish and Redis was running an outdated OpenMage LTS release with known security vulnerabilities and several backend bugs affecting customer account management, newsletter templates, and price rule processing. The multi-store, Varnish-cached setup made a zero-downtime upgrade non-trivial.
Redis Outage & Security Observer Race Condition
Redis became unresponsive during a working day and could not be restarted through the hosting backend. With Redis down, session handling failed, and customers could not add items to cart, effectively taking the shop's checkout offline.
Varnish 503: Workspace Overflow Diagnosis
The employee/B2E store was consistently returning 503 errors on requests that bypassed the Varnish cache, while cached pages served correctly. The pattern pointed at the Varnish-to-backend communication rather than the application itself.
Dynamic Category Indexer: Cron Stability & Error Reporting
A nightly cron job responsible for re-indexing rule-based dynamic categories was crashing with a PHP fatal error. The crash left the indexer half-run, silently showing incorrect product assignments in affected categories. Root cause: a corrupted attribute condition on one dynamic category rule caused getAllAttributeValues() to return false, which the indexer had no guard for, aborting the entire run rather than skipping the broken category.
Configurator Price Bug + Performance: B2B Tax Logic
B2B customers in EU customer groups were seeing gross prices (including 19% VAT) in the product configurator instead of correct net prices. The same customer groups displayed correct net prices on standard product pages, making this a configurator-specific bug in the price mapping layer.
Elasticsearch Search Quality & Module Consolidation
A flagship product was appearing at position 3 in search results when customers searched for its exact product name, with two less relevant products ranked above it. The e-commerce team had escalated the issue as it was directly affecting conversion on one of their top-selling SKUs.
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All projects above were delivered on OpenMage LTS / Magento 1, PHP 8.2, MySQL 8, Redis, Elasticsearch, Varnish, and Nginx. If your stack looks similar, get in touch.
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