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

Analyzing the page speed


YSlow is a tool that analyzes the speed for a web page. It is a plugin that you can install in Firebug. While running a report, the site will be tested on some parameters. A report will be shown with an overall score of your website.

The test is based on a ruleset. You have the YSlow (V2) and YSlow (V1) ruleset. We will use the YSlow(V2) ruleset for this recipe, which has 22 rules. The complete page load (including images and static content) can be increased by 25 to 50 percent if you adhere to the following 22 rules:

  • Minimize HTTP requests

  • Use a Content Delivery Network

  • Avoid empty src or href

  • Add an expires header or a cache-control header

  • Use Gzip for components

  • Put stylesheets at the top

  • Put scripts at the bottom

  • Avoid CSS expressions

  • Make JavaScript and CSS external

  • Reduce DNS lookups

  • Minify JavaScript and CSS

  • Avoid redirects

  • Remove duplicate scripts

  • Configure ETags

  • Make AJAX cacheable

  • Use GET for AJAX requests

  • Reduce the number of DOM elements

  • No 404 errors

  • Reduce the cookie...