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

Understanding the theming block system


The Magento frontend is not a single file. It is a combination of blocks nested in each other. Each block is an object you can play with.

Getting ready

Open a category page in your shop and you see a lot of frames which all represent a block. Some blocks are structural (left column, right column, content, and footer) and others contain content (product list, cart, navigation, and so on).

How to do it...

In the next two steps, we will enable the frontend hints to get an idea of the used blocks on a page.

  1. Enable your frontend Template Path Hints. Go to System | Configuration | Developer and enable the template and block names.

  2. Reload the frontend. When the frontend hints are enabled, a frontend page will have red frames around each block.

Each block with a template is in a red frame. The title in white is the template file and the blue title is the classname of the block object.

When you want to edit the content of a block, you will have to look at the files...