Tutorials for Magento and Joomla! - Yireo

GoogleGears Installation Guide

Our GoogleGears module for Magento allows you to use the Google Gears plugin for the Magento Admin Panel - it will speed up your backend by caching various static files locally. This guide takes you through the steps of adding this module to your Magento site.

About Google Gears

Gears is an open source project of Google that aims to make websites faster by adding nifty features to the browsers. One of them is local caching. While the browser is also able to cache things, it will still use HTTP-requests to validate whether the cache has expired or not. With Google Gears you can do this manually, and thus save HTTP-bandwidth.

This guide shows you how to setup Google Gears with Magento. Almost 300 files will be cached in your Gears-cache (CSS-files, JS-files and images) which will speed up Magento if it is hosted on a remote server (which counts for almost all production shops).

You will need to check the Google Gears site to install the Google Gears plugin in your browser. The picture above shows you how the Gears-plugin appears in the Firefox listing of add-ons.

Installing the Magento module

Our Magento module integrates GoogleGears in the Magento Admin Panel. Without this module, Gears doesn't know which files can be cached and there for caches nothing. Make sure your Magento shop meets up with the minimum requirements for this extension.

To install this Magento extension, you use your Magento Downloader application and use the following extension key to install the module:

magento-community/Yireo_GoogleGears

Once the module is installed through your MagentoConnect application, make sure your Magento cache is cleaned. The module should be visible through the following menu-path in your Magento backend:

System > Tools > Google Gears

Initializing GoogleGears

Once the module is installed, browse to System > Tools > Google Gears. Click on the link Check Status on the left. A popup will appear with a Gears Security Warning. To use this module you will need to add the Magento site to the list of trusted Gears sites.

Check the box "I trust this site. Allow it to use Gears." and hit the button Allow.

Using GoogleGears

The next step is to build the Gears-cache. Hit the link Build cache. At this point, all the static content from the Magento Admin Panel will be downloaded to your browser. As long as you don't remove this cache (through the link Remove cache), your browser will not need to download remote files anymore - which speeds up your backend.

There's no easy way to see if GoogleGears is working. If you're working on a remote Magento site, you should experience a gain in speed. Also, if you have access to the Apache logs of your Magento Admin Panel, you should be able to see that there are no new HTTP-requests coming in anymore - which is good.

Using Gears on the frontend

This module is at the moment only designed to run at the Magento backend. Using Gears in the frontend might be possible, but your visitors will not benefit from this. There for it makes much more sense to optimize the frontend files through regular methods like compression, aggregation and server caching.