Ecommerce developers with Magento

I was playing with some of the Magento controller functions today, when I saw my coworker Vedran Subotic struggling with turning the Path hints in On and Off every few minutes. Idea cross my mind, and here is the result Inchoo’s Magento Developer Toolbar prototype.

Simple : ) -Ok, lets get down to business. This one is really, really simple, but powerful. In all it greatness Magento lacks the good content management solution (CMS features). Lot of people are heading down the road of integrating the WordPress and Magento. Probably everyone in web development has heard about WordPress. Personaly I like them, from Joomla, Drupal, WordPress…

Imagine a scenario where you wish to simply create a view file like custom-note.phtml and show this view file on some new url inside the Magento store. One way to do this is to create a CMS page and call that block from within CMS page. But what if you wish to create and append this block to other areas of Magento layout that are inaccessible from CMS page interface form admin? What if I want to add new div element under the breadcrumbs and append new block under it?

One of the differences between Magento eCommerce platform and lets say WordPress, when looked from developer point of view, is “avoid raw queries” approach. For a web application, Magento is massive system. His database, although not so massive but surely breathtaking with around 220 tables forces you to use “eye candy” EAV model to do even simple things.

Ever wanted to “just send the email” using the built in email features in Magento? Ever hit the wall trying to do something with Magento? OK, I know the answer to the other one, just had to ask . Anyhow, sending the emails with Magento turned out to be a process of “just” a few hours of tracing Magento code.

Due to the “complexity” of Magento’s xml files, developers can waste great amount of time on “unnecessary” things.
When I say “complexity” I say it with purpose. XML files are not so complex by them selves, but due to extreme lack of documentation and changes Magento pumps in every new “major” release, people are lost among things that should really be sideways. Anyway, in this little article I will show you how to create basic, startup structure for your module to get it shown under Magento Admin main top menu.

I have been working on a project, in my own time, that involves Flex – Magento communication. I decided to test Adobe’s AMF format. In this article I will show you how easy is to create AMF server as an extension in Magento.

If you ask me, there are two important things that make Magento so attractive. First, its free and open source. Until month ago Magento was fully free, now they have Community and Enterprise editions. But make no mistake, when it comes to out of the box feature list, Community edition will most likely beat any open source cart out there. Rich “out of the box” features are the second thing that make it so attractive.

I have been involved in Magento development for almost a year now. God knows I had (and still have) my moments of pain with it . If you are in professional, everyday, PHP development that focuses mainly on Magento then your life probably isn’t all flowers and bees. Magento is extremely rich eCommerce platform, but its main downside IMHO is its size and code complexity. If you download Magento via SVN, you will sound find out it has around 11 600 and more files. This is no small figure. Transferring that much of files over the FTP can be a real night mare. Luckily we have SSH and tar command to handle this really neat.

Yesterday I came across an article that somewhere between the lines mentions the topic of subscribing to “professional” articles in certain field of interest. Reading it, got me thinking why and when would I pay for article subscription. Here are my thoughts and views. First lets define “professional”. At certain level articles can be of two types: “HowTo” and “My thoughts or overviews” type. To be honest, the more I am into the development, the more I like the second ones. Then there is the “credibility” of the author. Is he a PhD “talk only” person or practitioner without any significant official education but with extreme knowledge in his field. Personally I like the other one more. Not to say that “talk only” people are not important as well.