As with many other open source technologies, Magento comes with its own terminology, which can be baffling to unfamiliar developers. This section identifies and defines some of the commonly used terms in the Magento theme development.
Magento has the following four levels of scope that help define the level in your Magento store(s) at which settings are applied:
Global: This refers to settings that affect the entire Magento installation.
Website: This acts as the parent entity for one or more stores in the Magento terminology. Websites can be configured to share the customer data or not share any data at all.
Store (or store view group): These are the hierarchical children of Magento websites. Products and categories are managed at Magento's store level. A root category is configured for each Magento store, allowing multiple stores under the same website to have totally different catalog structures.
Store view: A store needs one or more store views to appear in the frontend to customers so they are able to browse your store. The store view inherits the store's category and product information, and so the changes at the store view level are typically only cosmetic, changing the way the data is presented. The most common and likely implementation of multiple store views is to allow customers to navigate between two or more languages.