Magento 1.8 Development Cookbook

Magento 1.8 Development Cookbook

By : Bart Delvaux, Nurul Ferdous

Buy this Book

Magento 1.8 Development Cookbook

By: Bart Delvaux, Nurul Ferdous

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

Magento is an open source e-commerce platform which has all the functionality to function from small to large online stores. Its architecture makes it possible to extend the functionalities with plugins where a lot of them are shared by the community. This is the reason why the platform is liked by developers and retailers. A practical developer guide packed with recipes that cover all the parts of Magento development. The recipes will start with the simple development exercises and get the more advanced as the book progresses. A good reference for every Magento developer! This book starts with the basics. The first thing is to create a test environment. Next, the architecture, tools, files and other basics are described to make you ready for the real work. The real work starts with the simple things like theming and catalog configuration. When you are familiar with this, we will move on to more complex features such as module and database development. When you have survived this, we will move on to the last part of making a shop ready for launch: performance optimization and testing. This book will guide you through all the development phases of Magento, covering the most common pitfalls through its recipes.

Magento 1.8 Development Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Getting Started with Magento

Introduction

Preparing the development environment

Installing Magento with sample data

Adding version control to the source code

Configuring the development tools

Theming

Introduction

Configuring Magento themes and packages

Creating your first theme

Adding extra files to your theme

Adding jQuery support

Changing a page title

Working with translations

Understanding the theming block system

Adding widgets to the layout

Working with Products

Introduction

Setting up the catalog defaults

Working with attribute sets

Working with product types

Adding a Facebook like button

Adding a product to the cart through querystring

Embedding a YouTube video

Changing the URL of a product page

Creating a Module

Introduction

Creating files

Registering blocks, helpers, and models

Adding a new page

Adding a layout file

Adding a translation file

Adding a block of new products

Rewriting a core class

Database Concepts

Introduction

Finding your way in the tables

Creating a database connection in Magento

Working with flat tables

Working with EAV tables

Configuring a Master/Slave setup

Repairing the database

Databases and Modules

Introduction

Registering the resource models

Registering connections

Installing and upgrading scripts

Creating a flat table with models

Working with Magento collections

Magento Backend

Introduction

Registering a backend controller

Extending the menu

Adding an ACL

Extending the system configuration

Creating a grid from a database table

Adding customer attributes

Working with source models

Event Handlers and Cronjobs

Introduction

Understanding Magento event types

Creating your own event

Adding an event observer

Introducing cronjobs

Creating a new cronjob

Testing your new cronjob

Creating a Shipping Module

Introduction

Initializing module configurations

Writing an adapter model

Extending the shipping method features

Adding the module in the frontend

Creating a Product Slider Widget

Introduction

Creating an empty module

Registering helpers and blocks

Creating a widget configuration file

Creating a block and the template files

Creating a custom configuration parameter

Finalizing the theming

Performance Optimization

Introduction

Exploring the limits of a website

Optimizing the database and MySQL configuration

Optimizing the Apache web server

Tuning the Magento configurations

Configuring APC and Memcached

Optimizing the PHP configurations

Analyzing the page speed

Debugging and Unit Testing

Introduction

Getting started with Xdebug

Debugging with FirePHP

Installing PHPUnit

Creating a Magento test case

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Adding customer attributes

Sometimes, it is easy if we can add an attribute to a customer as we can do with products. This is possible, but there is no interface for adding attributes in the backend. We have to create it using a module that adds the attributes to the customer object. In this recipe, we will add a loyaltynumber field to the customer.

Getting ready

For adding a customer attribute, the only task is to create an upgrade script which adds the attribute. Then, we have to link the attribute in the form table.

How to do it...

Perform the following steps to add the loyaltynumber attribute to your customer objects:

The first step is to create the upgrade script. In the previous chapters, we have created an install and upgrade script in the app/code/local/Packt/Helloworld/sql/helloworld_setup folder. Create an extra install script with the name upgrade-002-003.php.
To install the customer attribute, add the following code in that install script:
```
<?php

$installer = $this;

$installer-...
```

Magento 1.8 Development Cookbook

By : Bart Delvaux, Nurul Ferdous

Magento 1.8 Development Cookbook

By: Bart Delvaux, Nurul Ferdous

Overview of this book

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Current Title:

Magento 1.8 Development Cookbook

Adding customer attributes

Getting ready

How to do it...