Since its launch in late 2007, Magento has become the most widely used open source e-commerce platform. The growth of the system was fueled by its ability to be extended and customized to meet almost any online retailing need. Thousands of developers and store owners have built profitable B2C and B2B implementations.
However, it's no secret that the learning curve to master Magento can be intense. With power comes a degree of complexity. To meet this need for Magento 1.x, one of the authors, Bret Williams, wrote the very successful Mastering Magento for Packt Publishing in 2012. The book helps thousands of readers navigate Magento.
Magento has released the long-awaited version 2. This version introduces a completely revamped code architecture, admin user interface, and better workflows. Version 2 is truly a completely new version.
Therefore, it stands to reason that Magento users will need to learn how to maximize this improved platform. Mastering Magento 2 satisfies this need while following much of the same easy-to-learn, information-rich format of the first book.
With Mastering Magento 2, author Bret Williams has teamed with eminent Magento developer and technical architect, Jonathan Bownds. The combination of these long-time Magento experts brings a full-circle approach to truly mastering the world's most powerful open source platform for online sales.
Chapter 1, Planning for Magento, introduces you to Magento 2 with a discussion of its technical considerations, its multistore methodology, and how to apply this key feature to your plans for multiple stores.
Chapter 2, Installing Magento 2, provides keys to ensure that you have a successful Magento 2 installation as well as guidance to plan your categories, backups, and security.
Chapter 3, Managing Products, teaches you about how Magento manages products and categories.
Chapter 4, Designs and Themes, explores the new Magento 2 theming structure and shows you how to customize your store for your brand.
Chapter 5, Configuring to Sell, covers the entire sales process, including payment systems, shipping methods, taxes, and transactional e-mails.
Chapter 6, Managing Non-Product Content, discusses the Magento content management system that helps you create pages and layouts to communicate your brand.
Chapter 7, Marketing Tools, covers the various Magento features that work to drive more business—and repeat business—to your store.
Chapter 8, Extending Magento, dives into the powerful extendibility of the platform, including how to build your own Magento 2 extensions.
Chapter 9, Optimizing Magento, takes an in-depth look at the core Magento 2 data architecture and how you can tune your Magento store for maximum speed.
Chapter 10, Advanced Techniques, guides more technical readers through processes that improve Magento reliability and stability.
Chapter 11, A Pre-Launch Checklist, provides an easy-to-follow checklist to use when taking a new Magento 2 store online.
Store owners using this book to learn Magento 2 should have an installed version of Magento 2 to work with. Developers should have a development environment capable of supporting a Magento 2 installation:
A Unix operating system (Linux, MacOS X)
Composer
Apache 2.2 or 2.4, or Nginx 1.8.x web server
PHP 5.5, 5.6 or 7.0.2
MySQL 5.6.x
Developers are also required to have a good working knowledge of PHP, object-oriented programming, and MVC architecture.
Mastering Magento 2 was crafted for anyone who will use Magento 2, whether it's as a store owner or developer. The book was designed specifically for those with little or no prior experience with Magento. Packt Publishing provides additional books by experienced authors to cover more specific Magento topics in even greater detail. This book provides the reader with a solid, functioning foundation to successfully use Magento 2.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles 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, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Open the .htaccess file in a text editor."
A block of code is set as follows:
SetEnvIf Host www\.[domain] MAGE_RUN_CODE=[code] SetEnvIf Host www\.[domain] MAGE_RUN_TYPE=[type] SetEnvIf Host ^[domain] MAGE_RUN_CODE=[code] SetEnvIf Host ^[domain] MAGE_RUN_CODE=[type]
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
[default]
exten => s,1,Dial(Zap/1|30)
exten => s,2,Voicemail(u100)
exten => s,102,Voicemail(b100)
exten => i,1,Voicemail(s0)Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
cd <your Magento install dir>/bin ./magento setup:rollback (full path to backup filename from var/backups directory)
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Click on Default Category shown on the left side of the edit area."
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