Magento Woes (Zend Framework)

As Magento software gets more popular, we’re increasingly running into people who are experiencing errors with our setup. A majority of these are addon issues from Magento Connect and have been addressed via their forums / knowledge base - though we’ve had one that took us a moment to figure out.

Fatal error: Function __autoload(b514i6_xp_2pia3m5o191rxqn3) threw an exception of type ‘Exception’ in /home//public_html/magento/lib/Zend/Validate/Hostname.php on line 420

Long story short - this is because we include the Zend Framework on our include path for everyone to utilize freely - the issue is Magento also bundles Zend Framework locally since they rely on it as well. They likely do this to maintain a stable version across all platforms - and possibly slightly modified it (not confirmed). As a result people trying to install Magento on our machines were getting that obscure error.

To fix it it’s quite simple - change the default include path to your home directory (put this in the .htaccess file  in your public_html/ folder):

php_value include_path /home/

Hopefully this solves some issues people have with a similar setup as ours.

-Cody