Building Magento-powered stores can be a challenging task. It requires a great range of technical skills that are related to the PHP/JavaScript programing language, development and production environments, and numerous Magento-specific features. This book will provide necessary insights into the building blocks of Magento.
By the end of this book, you should be familiar with configuration files, the dependency injection, models, collections, blocks, controllers, events, observers, plugins, cron jobs, shipping methods, payment methods, and a few other things. All of these should form a solid foundation for your development journey later on.
Chapter 1, Understanding the Platform Architecture, gives a high-level overview of the technology stack, architectural layers, top-level system structure, and individual module structure.
Chapter 2, Managing the Environment, gives an introduction to VirtualBox, Vagrant, and Amazon AWS as platforms to set up development and production environments. It further provides hands-on examples to set up/script Vagrant and Amazon EC2 boxes.
Chapter 3, Programing Concepts and Conventions, introduces readers to a few seemingly unrelated but important parts of Magento, such as composer, service contracts, code generation, the var directory, and finally, coding standards.
Chapter 4, Models and Collections, takes a look into models, resources, collections, schemas, and data scripts. It also shows the practical CRUD actions that are applied to an entity alongside filtering collections.
Chapter 5, Using the Dependency Injection, guides readers through the dependency injection mechanism. It explains the role of an object manager, how to configure class preferences, and how to use virtual types.
Chapter 6, Plugins, gives a detailed insight into the powerful new concept called plugins. It shows how easy it is to extend, or add to, an existing functionality using the before/after/around listeners.
Chapter 7, Backend Development, takes readers through a hands-on approach to what is mostly considered backend-related development bits. These involve cron jobs, notification messages, sessions, cookies, logging, profiler, events, cache, widgets, and so on.
Chapter 8, Frontend Development, uses a higher-level approach to guide the reader through what is mostly considered frontend-related development. It touches on rendering the flow, view elements, blocks, templates, layouts, themes, CSS, and JavaScript in Magento.
Chapter 9, The Web API, takes up a detailed approach to the powerful Web API provided by Magento. It gives hands-on practical examples to create and use both REST and SOAP, either through the PHP cURL library, or from the console.
Chapter 10, The Major Functional Areas, adopts a high-level approach towards introducing readers with some of the most common sections of Magento. These include CMS, catalog and customer management, and products and customer import. It even shows how to create a custom product type and a shipping and payment method.
Chapter 11, Testing, gives an overview of the types of test that are available in Magento. It further shows how to write and execute a custom test.
Chapter 12, Building a Module from Scratch, shows the entire process of developing a module, which uses most of the features introduced in the previous chapters. The final result is a module that has admin and storefront interface, an admin configuration area, e-mail templates, installed schema scripts, tests, and so on.
In order to successfully run all the examples provided in this book, you will need either your own web server or a third-party web hosting solution. The high-level technology stack includes PHP, Apache/Nginx, and MySQL. The Magento 2 Community Edition platform itself comes with a detailed list of system requirements that can be found at http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/install-gde/system-requirements.html. The actual environment setup is explained in Chapter 2, Managing the Environment.
This book is intended primarily for intermediate to professional PHP developers who are interested in Magento 2 development. For backend developers, several topics are covered that will enable you to modify and extend your Magento store. Frontend developers will also find some coverage on how to customize the look of a site in the frontend.
Given the massive code and structure changes, Magento version 2.x can be described as a platform that is significantly different from its predecessor. Keeping this in mind, this book will neither assume nor require previous knowledge of Magento 1.x.
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: "The AbstractProductPlugin1 class does not have to be extended from another class for the plugin to work."
A block of code is set as follows:
<config xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="urn:magento:framework: ObjectManager/etc/config.xsd">
<type name="Magento\Catalog\Block\Product\AbstractProduct">
<plugin name="foggyPlugin1" type="Foggyline\Plugged\Block\Catalog\Product\ AbstractProductPlugin1" disabled="false" sortOrder="100"/>
<plugin name="foggyPlugin2" type="Foggyline\Plugged\Block\Catalog\Product\ AbstractProductPlugin2" disabled="false" sortOrder="200"/>
<plugin name="foggyPlugin3" type="Foggyline\Plugged\Block\Catalog\Product\ AbstractProductPlugin3" disabled="false" sortOrder="300"/>
</type>
</config>Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
php bin/magento setup:upgrade
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: "In the Store View drop-down field, we select the store view where we want to apply the theme."
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