„The search doesn’t find our article numbers.“ If you build shops for B2B or tech-adjacent merchants, you’ve had this ticket. The customer types AB-123.4 or K+S 40 or an email address into the search box, and the results are garbage. The usual reaction is „we need Elasticsearch“ or „we need a search plugin“. Sometimes true. […]
„I need this variable in every storefront template.“ Every Shopware project arrives at this sentence eventually — a trust badge config, a feature toggle for the frontend, an A/B test bucket, some ERP status. And the solutions I’ve seen in the wild are consistently worse than they need to be: Twig extensions with service lookups, […]
This gem is a two-for-one: a neat optimization you didn’t know you were using, and the explanation for a bug you have probably chased — icons that render fine on the page but show up empty when the same template fragment is loaded via AJAX. The optimization you’re already running A product listing renders the […]
During a code review I once flagged a colleague’s template: „{% break %}? That’s not Twig, this can’t work.“ It worked. I lost a small bet and gained a grep target. The answer lives in Framework/Adapter/Twig/Extension/PhpSyntaxExtension.php. Shopware quietly extends Twig with a whole layer of PHP-isms — control structures, operators, type tests, cast filters. It […]
Two classics of the „shop got big, code got slow“ genre: Both have quiet solutions in the DAL. One is a Criteria mode with a misleading docblock, the other is an optimization you get for free — but only if you use the right method. Part 1: Three ways to count (and one to avoid) […]
„Can you check why customer X doesn’t see their special prices?“ — every agency developer knows this ticket. And the workflow it triggers: ask the customer for… no wait, you can’t ask for their password. Create a test account? It won’t have their customer group, their rules, their cart. Stare at the rule builder and […]
This one is less „cool trick“ and more „you want to know this before it bites you“. Imagine a grown B2B shop: customer groups, country-specific prices, campaign rules, partner conditions. Over the years the Rule Builder collects rules like my desk collects mate bottles. And one day a customer calls: „I sorted by price, but […]
Order states, delivery states, payment states — Shopware models all of them as state machines with defined transitions. Which is great, until a) a new colleague asks „so which states can an order actually be in?“ and you start drawing boxes on a whiteboard, or b) an order gets stuck in a state it can’t […]
Open the error log of any grown Shopware shop and you’ll find the same suspects, hundreds of times a day: CHECKOUT__CUSTOMER_AUTH_BAD_CREDENTIALS because someone mistyped their password. CHECKOUT__CART_HASH_MISMATCH because a tab was open too long. 404s from bots probing for WordPress. None of these are your bugs — but they bury the one log line that […]
Most Shopware developers know exactly two things about feature flags: there is a feature.yaml, and you can put FEATURE_ALL=1 in your .env to see what breaks. That was my level of knowledge too, until I read Feature.php and FeatureFlagRegistry.php top to bottom for this series. Turns out there is a whole feature management system in […]
Here is a support ticket I have seen in about five different costumes: a middleware pushes orders into Shopware via the Admin API. One day the payloads start failing — or worse, they don’t fail, they just silently write incomplete data. After an hour of digging it turns out someone deactivated a plugin on the […]
Every Shopware developer has been here: you push 50,000 products through the Sync API and the import crawls. The writes themselves are fast. What kills you is everything that happens after each write — inheritance updates, cheapest price calculation, search keyword generation, category denormalization. Shopware calls all of this „indexing“, and by default it runs […]
