Magento For Developers
1. Introduction to Magento
What is Magento? It's the most powerful online eCommerce platform in the universe and is changing the face of eCommerce forever.
Of course, you already know that. What you may not realize is Magento's also an object-oriented PHP Framework that can be used to develop modern, dynamic web applications that tap into Magento's powerful eCommerce features.
This is the first in a series of articles in which we're going to go on a whirlwind tour of Magento's programming framework features. Don't worry if you don't follow everything immediately. As you study the system more everything in this article will start to make sense, and you'll soon be the envy of your colleagues stuck working with more primitive PHP systems.
In this article...
- Code Organized in Modules
- Configuration-Based MVC
- Controllers
- Context-Based URI Model Loading
- Models
- Helpers
- Layouts
- Observers
- Class Overrides
- Wrap Up
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2. The Magento Config
The config is the beating heart of the Magento System. It describes, in whole, almost any module, model, class, template, etc. than you'll need to access. It's a level of abstraction that most PHP developers aren't used to working with, and while it adds development time in the form of confusion and head scratching, it also allows you an unprecedented amount of flexibility as far as overriding default system behaviors go.
To start with, we're going to create a Magento module that will let us view the system config in our web browser. Follow along by copying and pasting the code below, it's worth going through on your own as a way to start getting comfortable with things you'll be doing while working with Magento, as well as learning key terminology.
In this article...
- Setting up a Module Directory Structure
- Creating a Module Config
- What Am I Looking at?
- Why Do I Care?
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3. Magento Layouts, Blocks and Templatese
Developers new to Magento are often confused by the Layout and View system. This article will take a look at Magento's Layout/Block approach, and show you how it fits into Magento MVC worldview.
Unlike many popular MVC systems, Magento's Action Controller does not pass a data object to the view or set properties on the view object. Instead, the View component directly references system models to get the information it needs for display.
One consequence of this design decision is that the View has been separated into Blocks and Templates. Blocks are PHP objects, Templates are "raw" PHP files (with a .phtml extension) that contain a mix of HTML and PHP (where PHP is used as a templating language). Each Block is tied to a single Template file. Inside a phtml file, PHP's $this keyword will contain a reference to the Template's Block object.
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4. Magento Models and ORM Basics
The implementation of a "Models Tier" is a huge part of any MVC framework. It represents the data of your application, and most applications are useless without data. Magento Models play an even bigger role, as they typically contain the "Business Logic" that's often relegated to the Controller or Helper methods in other PHP MVC frameworks.
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5. Magento Setup Resources
On any fast paced software development project, the task of keeping the development and production databases in sync become a sticky wicket. Magento offers a system to create versioned resource migration scripts that can help your team deal with this often contentious part of the development process.
In the ORM article we created a model for a weblog post. At the time, we ran our CREATE TABLE statements directly against the database. This time, we'll create a Setup Resource for our module that will create the table for us. We'll also create an upgrade script for our module that will update an already installed module. The steps we'll need to take are:
- Add the Setup Resource to our config
- Create our resource class file
- Create our installer script
- Create our upgrade script
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5. Advanced ORM - Entity Attribute Value
In the first ORM article we told you there were two kinds of Models in Magento. Regular, or "simple" Models, and Entity Attribute Value (or EAV) Models. We also told you this was a bit of a fib. Here's where we come clean.
ALL Magento Models inherit from the Mage_Core_Model_Abstract /Varien_Object chain. What makes something either a simple Model or an EAV Model is its Model Resource. While all resources extend the base Mage_Core_Model_Resource_Abstract class, simple Models have a resource that inherits from Mage_Core_Model_Mysql4_Abstract, and EAV Models have a resource that inherits from Mage_Eav_Model_Entity_Abstract
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6. Magento 1.6 Upgrade
Learn how to upgrade to Magento 1.6 via SSH. Magento 1.6 version has been released. Lots of fixes has been done in this major release. So, if you want to upgrade from Magento 1.5.1 to Magento 1.6.0, this tutorial is for. This blog helps you to upgrade your Magento website to the latest version.
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7. How to Speed Up Magento?
Learn how to optimize Magento Store. Get free tips on Magento Installation and Magento Speed Up.
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8. How to Fix Magento Issues?
Learn how to fix few basic and very common Magento issues like- Google Analytics configuration, Access Denied, Magento SSL Setup, 301 redirect and enabling SEO friendly URLs.
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Learn how to solve IE7, IE9 and Prototype Validation Bug in Magento. Here are the soltuions for Prototype validation bug in Magento:
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