TechDivision_SystemConfigDiff

Module to diff a remote Magento system configuration and CMS blocks/pages and sync values. Please feel free to participate in further development of this module. It is easily extendable as you can read under developer documentation. Any feedback is welcome!

Features

• System configuration diff
• CMS pages diff
• CMS blocks diff
• Table overview for diffs
• Easy and intuitive diff displaying in the system configuration
• Differentiates between all scopes
• Synchronisation between both systems
• Cron job functionality to update diffs automatically

See our video illustrating the features: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDh75aaE01c

Purpose

The purpose of the module is to create and display a diff of the system configuration, cms blocks and cms pages of two different system instances. The module requests via a Magento API extension the system data of the configured reference system the data gets compared with. It saves all diffs and can display them in the system configuration. There you can replace the config value with the value from the other system with just one click. It can differentiate between all scopes (default, websites, stores) as well as between all scope instances (the different websites, stores).

Developer documentation

All templates, css and js will be injected via an observer before the layout gets rendered. Unfortunately the HTML code for the config fields is hard coded in PHP so Mage_Adminhtml_Block_System_Config_Form_Field had to be rewritten as well as a child class called Mage_Adminhtml_Block_System_Config_Form_Field_Regexceptions because rewrites don't support class inheritance. The module comes with two differs: One is for the system configuration, the other is for cms blocks and cms pages. The module can easily be extended with more differs. Therefore you need to define a new differ in the config.xml under <differs>. The differ class should derive from TechDivision_SystemConfigDiff_Model_Differ and has to implement the following two functions:

• function diff($thisConfig, $otherConfig) calculates the diff of two arrays of system data
• function getSystemData() returns the system data for one system (i.e. at the webservice call)

System Configuration

On the reference system you have to configure a webservice user which has sufficient rights for System Config/Getting Config. On the other system you have to configure the api settings. As the module uses version 2 of the API you have to use the following URL: http://magentohost/api/v2_soap/?wsdl=1. You can define aliases for both systems for displaying the diffs. Also you can turn on/off the diff display in the system configuration. Optionally you can declare ignore paths which will not be shown as diff in system configuration. This could be helpful for paths where you are sure they will never be the same like the base url.

Compatibility

The extension is compatible without problems for the following versions:

• Community >= 1.7.0.0
• Enterprise >= 1.12.0.0

Unfortunately lower versions are not compatible because of a Magento core bug. If you have set your webservice configuration to WSI-compliance mode, this bug will occur. The error message is It looks like we got no XML document. There is a fix for this: Copy Mage_Api_Model_Server_WSI_Adapter_Soap from the core codepool to the local codepool and remove the lines in the else branch marked in the picture:

We have to add that the use of this fix is totally at your own responsibility, we are not responsible for any damage caused by this fix.