You may already know that velite.de is based on Zend Framework, just like Magento. For obvious reasons like SEO and style we wanted to redirect www.velite.de/foo to velite.de/foo. Even more because of the style fact than because of SEO. However, first I thought about implementing this by the standard mod_rewrite function in a .htaccess file. But I got the idea, it would be nicer realizing it within the Zend Framework itself. So I created a little Frontend Plugin I want to share with you, take a look:

class My_Controller_Plugin_Wwwredir extends Zend_Controller_Plugin_Abstract
{
public function preDispatch(Zend_Controller_Request_Abstract $request)
{
     $piece = strtolower(substr($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'],0,4));
     if (strcmp($piece, 'www.')==0)
     {
          $url = 'http://' . substr($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'],
               4).$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
          $response = $this->getResponse();
          $response->setRedirect( $url, 301 );
          $response->sendResponse();
          exit;
     }
}

You want to start coding your own Magento extension and you are frustrated because Varien doesn’t provide a documentation? I also don’t have any documentation for you :-). But what helped me getting started are these Code-Snippets on snippi.net. The Website is run by Branko Ajzele. His blog is also a good ressource to get information about extension programming for Magento.