The Magento PHP Developer's Guide will help new and not so new developers to understand and work with Magento's fundamental concepts and standard practices for developing and testing code in Magento.
This book is my attempt to write a guide that answers questions that many developers, including myself, had when we started to develop for Magento: What is EAV? How does the ORM in Magento work? What are observers and events? Which design patterns were used to create Magento?
Most importantly, this book also answers questions that many developer still have to this day: What is the standard for developing modules and extending the frontend and backend? How can I properly test my code? What is the best method to deploy and distribute custom modules?
Chapter 1, Understanding and Setting Up Our Development Environment, will help you set up a complete environment for Magento development with MySQL and Apache. Additionally, we will go over the tools available to facilitate the development, several IDEs, and version control systems.
Chapter 2, Magento Fundamentals for Developers, will be about the fundamental concepts of Magento, such as the system architecture, MVC implementation, and its relation with Zend Framework. All the concepts in this chapter will set the foundation for developers starting with Magento.
Chapter 3, ORM and Data Collections, covers collections and models in Magento that are the bread and butter of everyday Magento development. In this chapter, we will introduce the reader to the Magento ORM system, and we will learn how to properly work with data collections and the EAV system.
Chapter 4, Frontend Development, will explain the practical use of the skills and knowledge we have acquired so far, and we'll be building a fully functional Magento Module step by step. The custom module will allow readers to apply a variety of important concepts, such as working with collections, routing, sessions, and caching.
Chapter 5, Backend Development, will extend what we built in the previous chapter and create an interface in the Magento backend for interacting with our application data. We will learn about extending the backend, the admin HTML theme, setting data sources, and controlling our extension behavior through configuration.
Chapter 6, The Magento API, will explain the Magento API and how we can extend it for providing access to the custom data that we captured using our extension.
Chapter 7, Testing and Quality Assurance, will help the reader learn critical skills for testing our Magento modules and custom, which form an integral part of development. We will learn about the different types of tests and the tools available for each particular type of test.
Chapter 8, Deployment and Distribution, will help the reader learn about the multiple tools available for deploying our code to a production environment and how to properly pack our extensions for distribution through channels such as Magento Connect.
Appendix, Hello Magento, will give new developers a quick and easy to follow introduction for creating our first Magento Extension.
You will need an installation of Magento 1.7, either on a local machine or on a remote server, your favorite code editor, and permissions to install and modify files.
If you are a PHP developer getting started with Magento or if you already have some experience with Magento and want to understand the Magento architecture and how to extend the frontend and backend of Magento, this is the book for you!
You are expected to be confident with PHP5. No experience with Magento Development is expected, although you should be familiar with basic Magento operations and concepts.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "GitHub now includes a .gitignore file specifically for Magento, which will ignore all the files in the Magento core and only keep track of our own code."
A block of code is set as follows:
{
"id": "default",
"host": "magento.localhost.com",
"repo": [
"url": "svn.magentocommerce.com/source/branches/1.7",Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ vagrant box add lucid32 http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box $ vagrant init lucid32 $ vagrant up
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "You should now see Apache's default web page with the message It Works!".
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