Magento – magento currency selection

We've got something like this running in production (we're enabling or disabling add to cart and pricing depending on the customer's location).

We built and installed the "Varnish GeoIP module" from https://github.com/leed25d/geoip-vmod ... This sets a "X-GeoIP" header in each request that reaches Magento indicating the user's country. Within Magento you need to detect this header and customise the content as required.

The final problem to overcome is that Varnish will cache the generated page and serve it to all customers regardless of their country. You could "turn off" caching for that page, but performance suffers, so that's not ideal either. Our solution was to send a "Vary" header in our HTTP response, which tells Varnish to cache different objects for different values of the X-GeoIP header, so we have a different page cached for each visitor's country.

One of my colleagues at Aligent has created a Magento module which contains a helper to fetch the country code from the X-GeoIP header (with fallback to IP if it's not present, which is useful for development), and an observer to send the "Vary" header. We've open sourced the module, check out https://github.com/aligent/Aligent_GeoIP if you want the implementation detail.

Ok so I am not sure if this is the bug but if you compare the Magento 1.8 and Magento 1.7 versions of the function currency in Mage_Core_Model_Local you will notice a reference to a bug with Zend_Currency

Magento 1.7: Mage_Core_Model_Local->currency

/**
 * Create Zend_Currency object for current locale
 *
 * @param   string $currency
 * @return  Zend_Currency
 */
public function currency($currency)
{
    Varien_Profiler::start('locale/currency');
    if (!isset(self::$_currencyCache[$this->getLocaleCode()][$currency])) {
        try {
            $currencyObject = new Zend_Currency($currency, $this->getLocale());
        } catch (Exception $e) {
            $currencyObject = new Zend_Currency($this->getCurrency(), $this->getLocale());
            $options = array(
                    'name'      => $currency,
                    'currency'  => $currency,
                    'symbol'    => $currency
            );
            $currencyObject->setFormat($options);
        }

        self::$_currencyCache[$this->getLocaleCode()][$currency] = $currencyObject;
    }
    Varien_Profiler::stop('locale/currency');
    return self::$_currencyCache[$this->getLocaleCode()][$currency];
}

Magento 1.8: Mage_Core_Model_Local->currency

/**
 * Create Zend_Currency object for current locale
 *
 * @param   string $currency
 * @return  Zend_Currency
 */
public function currency($currency)
{
    Varien_Profiler::start('locale/currency');
    if (!isset(self::$_currencyCache[$this->getLocaleCode()][$currency])) {
        $options = array();
        try {
            $currencyObject = new Zend_Currency($currency, $this->getLocale());
        } catch (Exception $e) {
            /**
             * catch specific exceptions like "Currency 'USD' not found"
             * - back end falls with specific locals as Malaysia and etc.
             *
             * as we can see from Zend framework ticket
             * http://framework.zend.com/issues/browse/ZF-10038
             * zend team is not going to change it behaviour in the near time
             */
            $currencyObject = new Zend_Currency($currency);
            $options['name'] = $currency;
            $options['currency'] = $currency;
            $options['symbol'] = $currency;
        }

        $options = new Varien_Object($options);
        Mage::dispatchEvent('currency_display_options_forming', array(
            'currency_options' => $options,
            'base_code' => $currency
        ));

        $currencyObject->setFormat($options->toArray());
        self::$_currencyCache[$this->getLocaleCode()][$currency] = $currencyObject;
    }
    Varien_Profiler::stop('locale/currency');
    return self::$_currencyCache[$this->getLocaleCode()][$currency];
}

My suggestion would be to try updating the try catch to match that of Magento 1.8 (I know this is not the best solution and obviously I would not suggest editing the core files but adding a rewrite)