Book Image

Magento 1.3: PHP Developer's Guide

By : Jamie Huskisson
Book Image

Magento 1.3: PHP Developer's Guide

By: Jamie Huskisson

Overview of this book

<p>Magento is the most powerful e-commerce solution around and has gained popularity in a short period of time. You can create and manage online stores using the extensive suite of powerful tools it offers. However, because of its powerful features, developing with Magento can be easier said than done.<br /><br />This book will show you how to develop better and do more with the Magento. You will be able to extend and customize modules for the Magento system without editing the core system code. It will show you how to create both basic and advanced functionality modules for your store and help you turn your ideas for extending Magento into reality by building modules from scratch.<br /><br />This book starts by walking you through the server requirements for installing Magento making sure Magneto's installation and upgrade process can fit into your workflow and suit your hosting environment setup. Then it runs through the architecture behind Magento's system, covering the core file structure and how the template system works. You'll also learn how to build a basic shipping module, payment module, and a brand management module for Magento. As you delve deeper into the book you will learn how to integrate your favorite CMS into Magento for data portability. <br /><br />By the end of the book you will be able to take your basic knowledge of Magento and turn it into something advanced that will help you develop turn your ideas for extending Magento into reality.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Magento 1.3: PHP Developer's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
2
Installing/Upgrading Magento and Preparing for Development
6
Building a Basic Featured Products Module
Index

Using the Module Creator script to get Hello World


We'll now go through an automated method of creating a module with backend administration. This will show us how to quickly deploy a base of a fully featured module in the future. After doing that, we'll go through this code to understand how it all works individually.

Note

We can find the Module Creator available as an extension on Magento Connect at the following link: http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/1108/modulecreator. Credit for the Module Creator script goes to Daniel Nitz, with the example templates being created by Alistek.

This script allows us to put together a solid base of required files for our modules, without having to manually create each file. It saves some time when creating all the individual files and all developers should know about this when getting into regular module development for Magento. While it's not a substitute for knowing how to put together the modules ourselves, it does help when we need to get a module...