Magento is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms on the market because it is free, stable, and offers a lot of functionalities. A lot of e-commerce websites are built with Magento. Developing in Magento is not as easy as you would expect. When you want to start with Magento, a good guide that shows you the best practices will be very helpful while learning Magento development, and that is what this book has set out to do.
With Magento 1.8 Development Cookbook, we will discover all the topics that will help you become a good Magento developer, and then we start with the basics and end with more advanced topics towards the end of this book. This will be a good guideline that explains every step or action that you have to take to complete the recipes of this book.
We will start this book with the creation of a good development environment using the right tools. We will create a web server where we will put a Magento installation with sample products in it. We will create a custom theme to change the look and feel of the webshop. The focus of this book will be the development part. We will create a custom module that follows the best practices of Magento. We will customize this module with a lot of common features that are used in Magento projects, such as extra controller pages, database integrations, custom shipping methods, and extra backend interfaces. At the end of the book, we will see how we can improve the performance of our Magento installation. Finally, we will see some debugging techniques such as xDebug and create a unit test with PHPUnit.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Magento, gives you an introduction and shows you how to create a development environment using the right tools, how to install Magento, and how to work with the code in a version control system.
Chapter 2, Theming, explains what you can do to customize the look and feel of your shop.
Chapter 3, Working with Products, gives you more information about the possibilities of showing the products in your shop and customizing the product pages with a Facebook like button.
Chapter 4, Creating a Module, describes how to create a basic Magento module, how to extend that module with configurations for a custom page, translations, blocks, and how to rewrite existing classes.
Chapter 5, Database Concepts, shows you how Magento works with database connections, how the tables are linked to Magento entities, and how the EAV system works. It also shows you how to create a Master/Slave setup.
Chapter 6, Databases and Modules, teaches you how to extend a Magento module with a database interaction by creating an install script that installs a database table and entity that will interact with this database table.
Chapter 7, Magento Backend, covers the topics that you should know when integrating your module with the Magento backend, such as adding extra configuration pages, creating overview pages, and extending the admin menu.
Chapter 8, Event Handlers and Cronjobs, describes how the Event-driven Architecture is implemented in Magento and how you can use this in a module. Later in this chapter, you will learn how to create cronjobs in a module and how to test them.
Chapter 9, Creating a Shipping Module, shows you how to create a custom module with the configurations required for a new shipping method.
Chapter 10, Creating a Product Slider Widget, explains how to create a module with a custom widget, how to build the backend interface, and how to provide a good UI in the frontend of that widget.
Chapter 11, Performance Optimization, describes how to benchmark your site to know the limits and improve its performance using different techniques such as web server optimization and caching systems (APC and Memcached).
Chapter 12, Debugging and Unit Testing, shows you how to use the PHP debugger xDebug, how to use FirePHP in Magento, and how to create a simple unit test with PHPUnit.
Magento 1.8 source code
Ubuntu Version 13.10 or higher
Apache2
PHP Version 5.3 or higher
MySQL Server 5
NetBeans IDE
phpMyAdmin
Wiz command-line tool
Firebug (add-on for Firefox)
FirePHP (add-on for Firefox)
xDebug
PHPUnit
A standard web browser
Siege (a benchmarking tool)
ApacheBench (another benchmarking tool)
YSlow (add-on for Firefox)
Git SCM
jQuery
carouFredSel (a jQuery library to create a jQuery carousel)
If you know something about programming in PHP and want to start with Magento development, this book has something for you. Knowledge of Magento is not required to start with the recipes of this book. Basic knowledge of PHP and web development is required. This book starts with the fundamentals of Magento development and ends with more advanced topics. Even if you know something about Magento development yet you need a good guide, this book has something for you.
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, database table names, folder names, filenames, pathnames, dummy URLs and user inputs are shown as follows: "The widget.xml file is used to define widgets in the Magento installation."
A block of code is set as follows:
<category_id>
<label>Category ID</label>
<type>text</type>
<required>1</required>
<sort_order>20</sort_order>
<visible>1</visible>
</category_id>When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<category_id>
<label>Category ID</label>
<type>text</type>
<required>1</required>
<sort_order>20</sort_order>
<visible>1</visible>
</category_id>Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
sudo apt-get install apache2
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: "Click on Finish and your NetBeans project is ready."
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