Magento critical security patch SUPEE-5994 ftp install without SSH

SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1205 Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction I have been receiving this error for a few days and couldn’t figure out what the problem was.  It wouldn’t let me update products and save to SQL. I found this site which gave the following instructions: Login to cpanel and phpMyAdmin, click on…

To update the customer e-mail templates follow this guide to create new templates from the originals if desired.  Don’t forget to assign the new template to e-mail, in my case Settings>Config>Sales>Sales E-mails click the drop down and select the new template.

I wanted to disallow access to image dir from a browser, rather than put in a black index.html page I found this solution here In the main .htaccess file add the following code, save and upload. Options -Indexes

I had an issue with the main category and sub category not displaying products when the main category is clicked on, I only got a page with 0 products in category. The solution found here was simple but unbeknown to me: Go to Admin -> Catalog -> Manage Categories -> “Select Category” -> Display Settings ->…

Using the Magento backup tool from within magento 1.9 causes my store to show an internal server error. To reset this I had to change the permissions of the index.php file in the root dir to 644 from 666.  It is a known issue. There is an alternative is to upload a php file called…