Book Image

Magento 1.8 Development Cookbook

By : Bart Delvaux, Nurul Ferdous
Book Image

Magento 1.8 Development Cookbook

By: Bart Delvaux, Nurul Ferdous

Overview of this book

<p>Magento is an open source e-commerce platform which has all the functionality to function from small to large online stores. Its architecture makes it possible to extend the functionalities with plugins where a lot of them are shared by the community. This is the reason why the platform is liked by developers and retailers.</p> <p>A practical developer guide packed with recipes that cover all the parts of Magento development. The recipes will start with the simple development exercises and get the more advanced as the book progresses. A good reference for every Magento developer!</p> <p>This book starts with the basics. The first thing is to create a test environment. Next, the architecture, tools, files and other basics are described to make you ready for the real work.</p> <p>The real work starts with the simple things like theming and catalog configuration. When you are familiar with this, we will move on to more complex features such as module and database development. When you have survived this, we will move on to the last part of making a shop ready for launch: performance optimization and testing. This book will guide you through all the development phases of Magento, covering the most common pitfalls through its recipes.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Magento 1.8 Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Exploring the limits of a website


One of the first things you need to know are the limits of the current website. How much capacity has my website got? What is slowing down my site? We have to get an overview of all these aspects to arrive at a conclusion of which optimizations will have the most effect.

In this recipe, we will see some tools that help to create a view of the performance. Some of the tools are listed as follows:

  • ApacheBench

  • Siege

  • Magento Profiler

  • YSlow

  • PageSpeed

  • GTmetrix

  • WebPagetest

We will do some tests with all these tools to work out the pitfalls of a Magento store. With these results, we can find out what kind of optimizations have the most effect.

Some optimizations are very easy and can have a large effect. Other optimizations are difficult and can have less effect. It is on you to decide what you want.

Getting ready

To start, it is recommended to install the following tools to do some performance tests on a Magento installation:

  • ApacheBench (ab): This tool is automatically installed...