Some must-know basics for newbie Magento developers

Magento is believed to be the most robust and user-friendly open source shopping cart, available till date. Its Enterprise Edition is specially developed for offering utmost e-commerce convenience to enterprises dealing with different kinds of products and services. Some of the biggies including 3M, Lenovo and The North Face have already used Magento Enterprise Edition to grow their online business by huge bounds and leaps. The open source nature of Magento makes it a best fit even for the start-ups as well as the small-scale business organizations. In this article, I’ll be highlighting all the custom Magento development basics that you need to be aware of, if you’re about to start with building a career in Magento development.

Here’s the list of Magento basics that are a must-know for newbies in Magento e-store development:

• Magento has a steep learning curve

With Magento, you need not worry about learning a lot of coding. The powerful and flexible nature of Magento makes it a best fit for individuals who are more comfortable with HTML and CSS and know a little bit about programming languages such as PHP and MySQL. You can easily use Magento’s Enterprise Edition even with very little knowledge about PHP coding techniques.

• Magento supports installation of modules via web-based interface

With Magento, you can install a wide range of modules through a web-based interface that’s accessible through the administrative area of the Magento installation. These modules can further be hosted on the Magento e-commerce website as a PEAR server. Any of the Magento community members can upload a module through the website and make the same available once it’s been confirmed by a member of the Magento community. In Magento, module installation is quite convenient. All you need to do is enter the module key into the web-based interface and you’re done.

• Besides M’s, V’s and C’s, Magento has many other components- Although Magento works on the basis of the MVC(Model View Controller) model, there are many other components which are in-built and used for performing a variety of tasks. Each of these components has the Controller and Model except Views. You can even find additional features such as "helper" "etc" and "sql".

• By default, Magento’s caches are enabled- Whether it’s about developing a Magento e-store from scratch or custom Magento development, you must know that all Magento’s caches are enabled by default. If you want to disable the caches, all you need to do is go to Admin dashboard-> System-> Cache Management, Select All, actions-> disable and finally click on "Submit" button.

• Magento comes with an invaluable free extension called the Developer Toolbar- This Magento extension allows the Magento developers to add a new toolbar to the bottom of the site. The toolbar has a number of handy links that are utilized for controlling various settings in Magento including enabling "Frontend Hints" etc.

• Everything in Magento inherits- In Magento, everything inherits by default. For example, if Magento looks for a template file within a specific theme and doesn’t find it there, it’ll try to load it from the site’s default theme. And, if the default theme doesn’t exist, it’ll fall back to the base skin. The same phenomenon is applicable to config, layout and locale files as well.

Author Bio

Mr. Jason Roiz is an experienced Magento developer and loves sharing information on custom Magento development. He works for a renowned Open Source Software Development Company named OSS Media. You too can choose the company for hiring proficient Magento developers.

Jason Roiz is a fervent, self driven tech expert working in close tandem with a leading Software development company.