Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook

Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook

By : Nurul Ferdous

Buy this Book

Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook

By: Nurul Ferdous

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

Magento is the fastest growing PHP-based e-commerce solution based on the Zend Framework. It is a robust CMS that provides developers the ability to enrich their store with extra functionalities using custom modules. Developing a Magento store to get the desired look and feel is not as easy as you might believe and may take hours due to the wealth of features available for you to use. Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook provides unparalleled guidelines to develop a much faster and more captivating Magento store by writing powerful custom modules. The book covers everything from common development tasks to integrating social networking plugins into Magento. If you choose to work through all the recipes from the beginning, you will have a development platform ready to work with Magento. You will also explore different ways to customize the look and feel of a Magento store to offer your customers a better user experience. Integration of Magento with WordPress to add striking functionality to your store will be accomplished in just a few steps. Some cool recipes take care of the Magento security measures by editing the parameters in the admin panel. Setting up a master-slave setup for Magento database is discussed along with other database optimizations in the database chapter. Developing new modules and widgets for Magento is thoroughly described. Optimizing Magento's performance is the most important part of this book, which is armed with some easy and incredible recipes dealing with YSlow, Page Speed, Siege, Apache bench, Apache configuration, php.ini optimization, and caching with APC or Memcached. The work procedure behind the wall is explained in an easy manner so that both novice and experienced developers can benefit from it. This book also has some recipes that are not only useful for Magento but also for any other LAMP-based project.

Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Getting Started with Magento Development

Introduction

Preparing the platform with a virtual host

Setting up a Subversion/SVN

Getting the latest copy of Magento with the SVN checkout

Setting up MySQL tools

Setting up a Magento project with NetBeans

Working with Magento code

CMS and Design

Introduction

Adding a home link to the menu bar

Changing any page title in Magento

Customizing a Magento error page

Adding AdWords tracking code to order confirmation page in Magento

Adding a custom CMS layout template

Adding an RSS feed (last five tweets!)

Placing the trusty old contact form in CMS

Integrating JW Image Rotator 3.17 in Magento

Adding Extra Functionalities

Introduction

Integrating WordPress in Magento

Creating a new page

Adding jQuery support

Adding Lightbox2 in Magento

Adding an accepted payment banner at the footer

Customizing a Store

Introduction

Creating a custom "Twitter handle" field in a registration form

Deleting orders in Magento

Using Google Website Optimizer

Creating a custom variable and using its own e-mail templates

Using Google analytics for Magento

Creating Catalog and Shopping Cart Price Rules

Creating a featured product and showing it in the home page

Creating a custom admin theme

Playing with Products

Introduction

Setting up the Catalog defaults

Adding a Facebook 'Like' button in product page

Setting up Table Rates shipping

Adding a product to the cart through Querystring

Creating a configurable product

Embedding a YouTube video in product details

Adding a Professional Touch to Your Site

Introduction

Installing Magento 1.4 in PHP 5.3.2 (without mcrypt)

Optimizing Magento store for search engines

Implementing PayPal Website Payments Pro and Express Checkout into Magento

Preventing a CSRF attack in Magento

Database Design

Introduction

Resources and database connections

Magento database replication using Master Slave setup

Using the Magento’s Singleton method

Repairing the Magento database

Working with Magento’s EAV design

Creating a Module

Introduction

Creating an empty module with a Module Creator

Creating the required directories

Activating a module

Creating a controller for the module

Creating a configuration XML file for the module

Creating a helper for the News module

Creating models for the module

Setting up SQL for the News module

Designing a template for the News module

Adding required blocks for the News module

Creating a Shipping Module

Introduction

Initializing module configuration

Writing an adapter model

Adding a module in backend

Adding a module in frontend

Writing a Social Widget

Introduction

Creating an empty module and an enabler file

Creating a config file and declaring the widgets

Writing the default module helper Data.php

Creating a source model for services multi select in widget configuration

Creating frontend block for our widget

Creating templates

Performance Optimization

Introduction

Measuring/benchmarking your Magento with Siege, ab, Magento profiler, YSlow, Page Speed, GTmetrix, and WebPagetest

Optimizing Magento database and MySQL configuration

Optimizing Apache web server configuration

Tuning Magento configurations

Using APC/Memcached as the cache backend

Accelerating PHP: php.ini configuration

Applying YSlow and Page Speed rules

Debugging and Unit Testing

Introduction

Installing and configuring Xdebug

Using FirePHP with Zend Wildfire plugin

Installing PHPUnit and necessary PHP CLI binaries

Writing your first Magento test case

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Adding an RSS feed (last five tweets!)

You might have heard about the much hyped Twitter and might have an account with it. You will be glad if we could add it to your eCommerce store powered by Magento, probably in the sidebar.

We will add the last five tweets from a given Twitter account's username and Twitter feed. It's not a tough dance to dance! We can add it within a couple of minutes!

Getting ready

We will use Zend_Feed_Rss library to parse the RSS feed, which came with Magento and Zend Framework. Open your favorite PHP IDE and fire up the Magento project.

How to do it...

Create a new file named tweets.phtml in the app/design/frontend/YOUR_PACKAGE/YOUR_THEME/template/callouts directory. In my case, it's app/design/frontend/base/default/template/callouts.

Now paste the following code inside it and change the Twitter username and feed URL with your desired one:

<?php
/**
 * @var String $twitterUsername
 * change $twitterUsername with your desired username
 */
$twitterUsername = 'packtpub...

Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook

By : Nurul Ferdous

Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook

By: Nurul Ferdous

Overview of this book

Related Content you might be interested in

Current Title:

Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook

Adding an RSS feed (last five tweets!)

Getting ready

How to do it...