Before I complain, look at the original zoomer.

I'd argue whether the average user needs to zoom into an image using the a slider, because imo, they wither want to see the whole image or as much detail as possible (maximum zoom). Luckily the front end is much easier to change than the back end, so I've made my own zoomer tool which is infinitely easier to use (because you can't actually control anything) you just roll the mouse pointer over the image, a little box will appear that shows a portion of the actual image with maximum zoom. Move the mouse pointer and the zoomed image will be updated accordingly.

Easy, peasy, nifty.

See a demo and download it.

It was written specificly for Magento 1.1 so uses Prototype 1.4 instead of the latest.

To use it, follow similar instructions to installing lightbox:

Put the .js in the main js folder: /js/huy/.
Put the .css in your theme's css folder: /skin/frontend/default/default/css/huy/

In /app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/product/view/ delete the following lines:

You may want to change the styling of zoomer.css to taste.

Remember to minify it!

My love for optimisation knows no boundaries, as such, I've taken it on myself to provide an automated solution - here it is:

minify.zip

It's a simple script that scans through each theme's layout/page.xml and minifies each JS and CSS it finds.

To use the script, you need to have the Java runtime environment installed, php must have shell execution abilities and your webserver must have write permissions in  each theme's page.xml (/app/design/frontend/default/default/layout/page.xml), css folder (/skin/frontend/default/default/css) and the main js folder (/js). You also need to have YUI Compressor's build jar file on your server (download it here).

One last thing is to edit the script with your Magento's root folder and location of YUI Compressor's jar file.

It is recommended that you put the script into a password protected folder!

Oh, one last thing: I haven't tested the script in a Windows environment so it may not work.

Mosso is Rackspace's cloud computing service, it promises to be somewhere between a VPS (Virtual Private Server) and a dedicated server - it's scalable, dependable, and above all, fully managed and supported like Rackspace's excellent support.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that the 2 Ms would be a as sweet as chocolate, but you'd be wrong like I was wrong.

Having tested Magento on WebFusion's VPS, it was unacceptably slow, during peak times it would take 15 seconds to load the page on a fast broadband connection. The problem (probably) is that Magento uses a lot of CPU resources. It does a lot of database queries and reads and writes many files on each request. The caching system helps substantially but on a shared server, it's still too slow for practical use. Imagine if just a handful of people installed a copy of Magento on their VPS - the server would come to a halt pretty quickly.

In theory, using cloud computing with it's unlimited resources should speed Magento up exponentially, in reality however, the reverse is true. During peak time, most requests timed out, and the ones that do make it through takes more time than making tea.

Was the problem to do with Mosso? or can it be said of all cloud computing in general? I wont be answering that any time soon, I'm sticking to the ground for as long as I can.

So the only real solution for Magento is a dedicated server, which considering, is not too expensive if you are prepared to get your hands dirty. For the same price as a Mosso installation, you can get a basic dedicated server at EasySpace, and believe you me, Magento is very usable!

So click my EasySpace banner yo!