Book Image

Magento 1.8 Development Cookbook

By : Bart Delvaux, Nurul Ferdous
Book Image

Magento 1.8 Development Cookbook

By: Bart Delvaux, Nurul Ferdous

Overview of this book

<p>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.</p> <p>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!</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p>

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Magento 1.8 Development Cookbook
Bart Delvaux | Nurul Ferdous
Feb, 2014 | 274 pages
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Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Magento 1.8 Development Cookbook
Magento 1.8 Development Cookbook
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started with Magento
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
2
Theming
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
3
Working with Products
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
4
Creating a Module
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
5
Database Concepts
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
6
Databases and Modules
Databases and Modules
Introduction
Registering the resource models
Registering connections
Installing and upgrading scripts
Creating a flat table with models
Working with Magento collections
7
Magento Backend
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
8
Event Handlers and Cronjobs
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
9
Creating a Shipping Module
Creating a Shipping Module
Introduction
Initializing module configurations
Writing an adapter model
Extending the shipping method features
Adding the module in the frontend
10
Creating a Product Slider Widget
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
11
Performance Optimization
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
12
Debugging and Unit Testing
Debugging and Unit Testing
Introduction
Getting started with Xdebug
Debugging with FirePHP
Installing PHPUnit
Creating a Magento test case
Index
Index

Working with source models

Magento works with a lot of drop-down fields that you can select in the forms of the application. Also, we can make use of drop-down fields in our custom fields.

A drop-down or multiselect field always has options that you can choose in this field. To render these options, Magento uses a class that returns the options. Such a class is called a source model.

In this recipe, we will see which source models Magento uses and how we can create a custom source model for a custom configuration field.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will create a source model that is linked to a custom configuration field. This is done in the Packt_Helloworld module, which we will extend in this recipe.

How to do it...

The following steps describe how you can create your own source models for your form fields.

  1. The first thing that we have to create is a configuration field of the type drop-down. This has the same syntax as a normal configuration. In the system.xml file of the Packt_Helloworld...

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