Tuesday 20 March 2012

Magento Introduction: Magento For Developers

Magento, a powerful and successful ecommerce platform widely used by global developers has changed the era of ecommerce world. It allows developers to create magic by developing next-generation, dynamic and highly attractive web applications with the use of its rich features. Magento development is based on PHP framework and is an affordable solution for ecommerce sites. Most of the people around the world opt to get involved with ecommerce business and thus Magento development is the best option for them. It offers Magento developers with flexible and attractive design options so that their stores attract more visitors.


Being an open source it is more advantageous for Magento developers to use it for development of online stores/websites. However if you want to use this program then it is advisable to learn some basic knowledge of how it works, how to run it, how to get the most out of it and how to get it developed by skilled designers/developers.

The first step towards learning Magento is its code which is organized into individual modules. A PHP application which has MVs framework controllers are in a single folders while rest all modules are in another. Magento customization needs extending the blocks, modules, features, helpers or just editing the core files. It allows managing multiple websites or stores with just one backend. While creating a new module for Magento customization you need to add an XML file to a folder. Being a convention based MVC based system whenever any new controller is added it needs creation of file/class so that the system can automatically pick it up.

In Magento Development identification of your business or company is referred as Package or a Namespace. Different community members will use their individual package name for creating modules so re-use of other's code is avoided. Each portion of URL specifies different things like the first one tells the front name while the second one tells Magento to use the controller and third one is the action name which is "view".

For using the controllers it is necessary to configure them so that it is linked with Module with a URL. By not finding a valid controller for a URL Magento tries again with second set of routing rules. Magento uses static factory methods on the global mage class which is called Grouped class known as URI. Similar to other frameworks also Magento offers ORM system which helps you out to avoid writing of SQL and results into pure clean PHP code. It also allows multiple objects via an interface.

Magento has two types of model objects, one is the traditional one and the other one is Entity Attribute Value Model. While instantiating these models all attributes are selected automatically. EAV offers flexibility in Magento customization. After dealing with models, helpers and controllers now it is the turn of:
  • Setting variables for view
  • Loading of default "outer" HTML layout by the system
  • Loading of view inside the outer layout by the system
A tree or nested collection of "Block objects is called as Magento Layout. Each block renders a specific bit of HTML and performs with the help of PHP code. These blocks are specifically meant for retrieving data. These mini controllers (Blocks) can be defined well as head and body for HTML. Also there are additional blocks for various purposes like navigation, welcome message etc.

Magento also implements event/observer pattern like other system so that end users hook into it easily. It allows you to save and even issue any event signal if desired. Last but not the least Magento is a great system that allows to replace model, helper and block classes from the core modules with your own. Anyone out of you is likely to have a single store, website or store view but be sure and aware enough that you can expand the product for any changes in future.

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