Book Image

Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook

By : Nurul Ferdous
Book Image

Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook

By: Nurul Ferdous

Overview of this book

<p>Magento is the fastest growing PHP-based e-commerce solution based on the Zend Framework. It is a robust CMS that provides developers the ability to enrich their store with extra functionalities using custom modules. Developing a Magento store to get the desired look and feel is not as easy as you might believe and may take hours due to the wealth of features available for you to use.<br /><br />Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook provides unparalleled guidelines to develop a much faster and more captivating Magento store by writing powerful custom modules. The book covers everything from common development tasks to integrating social networking plugins into Magento.<br /><br />If you choose to work through all the recipes from the beginning, you will have a development platform ready to work with Magento. You will also explore different ways to customize the look and feel of a Magento store to offer your customers a better user experience. Integration of Magento with WordPress to add striking functionality to your store will be accomplished in just a few steps. Some cool recipes take care of the Magento security measures by editing the parameters in the admin panel. Setting up a master-slave setup for Magento database is discussed along with other database optimizations in the database chapter. Developing new modules and widgets for Magento is thoroughly described. Optimizing Magento's performance is the most important part of this book, which is armed with some easy and incredible recipes dealing with YSlow, Page Speed, Siege, Apache bench, Apache configuration, php.ini optimization, and caching with APC or Memcached. The work procedure behind the wall is explained in an easy manner so that both novice and experienced developers can benefit from it. This book also has some recipes that are not only useful for Magento but also for any other LAMP-based project.</p>

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Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook
Nurul Ferdous
Dec, 2010 | 268 pages
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Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook
Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started with Magento Development
Getting Started with Magento Development
Introduction
Preparing the platform with a virtual host
Setting up a Subversion/SVN
Getting the latest copy of Magento with the SVN checkout
Setting up MySQL tools
Setting up a Magento project with NetBeans
Working with Magento code
2
CMS and Design
CMS and Design
Introduction
Adding a home link to the menu bar
Changing any page title in Magento
Customizing a Magento error page
Adding AdWords tracking code to order confirmation page in Magento
Adding a custom CMS layout template
Adding an RSS feed (last five tweets!)
Placing the trusty old contact form in CMS
Integrating JW Image Rotator 3.17 in Magento
3
Adding Extra Functionalities
Adding Extra Functionalities
Introduction
Integrating WordPress in Magento
Creating a new page
Adding jQuery support
Adding Lightbox2 in Magento
Adding an accepted payment banner at the footer
4
Customizing a Store
Customizing a Store
Introduction
Creating a custom "Twitter handle" field in a registration form
Deleting orders in Magento
Using Google Website Optimizer
Creating a custom variable and using its own e-mail templates
Using Google analytics for Magento
Creating Catalog and Shopping Cart Price Rules
Creating a featured product and showing it in the home page
Creating a custom admin theme
5
Playing with Products
Playing with Products
Introduction
Setting up the Catalog defaults
Adding a Facebook 'Like' button in product page
Setting up Table Rates shipping
Adding a product to the cart through Querystring
Creating a configurable product
Embedding a YouTube video in product details
6
Adding a Professional Touch to Your Site
Adding a Professional Touch to Your Site
Introduction
Installing Magento 1.4 in PHP 5.3.2 (without mcrypt)
Optimizing Magento store for search engines
Implementing PayPal Website Payments Pro and Express Checkout into Magento
Preventing a CSRF attack in Magento
7
Database Design
Database Design
Introduction
Resources and database connections
Magento database replication using Master Slave setup
Using the Magento’s Singleton method
Repairing the Magento database
Working with Magento’s EAV design
8
Creating a Module
Creating a Module
Introduction
Creating an empty module with a Module Creator
Creating the required directories
Activating a module
Creating a controller for the module
Creating a configuration XML file for the module
Creating a helper for the News module
Creating models for the module
Setting up SQL for the News module
Designing a template for the News module
Adding required blocks for the News module
9
Creating a Shipping Module
Creating a Shipping Module
Introduction
Initializing module configuration
Writing an adapter model
Adding a module in backend
Adding a module in frontend
10
Writing a Social Widget
Writing a Social Widget
Introduction
Creating an empty module and an enabler file
Creating a config file and declaring the widgets
Writing the default module helper Data.php
Creating a source model for services multi select in widget configuration
Creating frontend block for our widget
Creating templates
11
Performance Optimization
Performance Optimization
Introduction
Measuring/benchmarking your Magento with Siege, ab, Magento profiler, YSlow, Page Speed, GTmetrix, and WebPagetest
Optimizing Magento database and MySQL configuration
Optimizing Apache web server configuration
Tuning Magento configurations
Using APC/Memcached as the cache backend
Accelerating PHP: php.ini configuration
Applying YSlow and Page Speed rules
12
Debugging and Unit Testing
Debugging and Unit Testing
Introduction
Installing and configuring Xdebug
Using FirePHP with Zend Wildfire plugin
Installing PHPUnit and necessary PHP CLI binaries
Writing your first Magento test case
Index
Index

Activating a module

Activating or deactivating a module in Magento is handled by an XML file. In this recipe, we will activate our News module by specifying it in an XML file named Packt_News.xml.

How to do it...

  1. Create a new XML file named INTERFACE_MODULE in the app/etc/modules directory. In my case, this is Packt_News.xml.

  2. If you already have this file, there is no need to create a new one. Just replace the existing code with the following code snippet:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
  <modules>
    <Packt_News>
      <active>true</active>
      <codePool>local</codePool>
    </Packt_News>
  </modules>
</config>

  3. Save this file and exit.

How it works...

Magento depends heavily on XML file configurations. For our new module, we had to tell Magento to activate News module from the package Packt. And the codepool for our News module resides in the app/code/local directory. We wrote it in an XML file as Magento can interpret it.

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