Stephan Miller
Building Websites, Traffic, and Income
The Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook
Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook
Development in Magento
I would have to say that I chose Magento in the first place because it would have a lot of the features we would need available without writing or editing code.
It turns out, that wasn’t so. There will never be a platform you don’t want to tweak, and Magento code may be some of the most complicated PHP code you have seen. It was when I first dug into it.
There were no books at that time and I depended on forum posts to get my answers and I made many mistakes long the way.
I love cookbooks. Telling me how to write the code, documentation or giving me a toy example may help a bit. But a cookbook with real code is something that gives me ideas. And that’s just what the Magento Development Cookbook is.
Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook Review
This is the third Magento book I have reviewed at this blog. The first book took a beginner through the basics of adding products to and running a Magento store and not much more. The second book was for Magento Developers interested in extending Magento’s functionality. So both of those books covered the “build it” part of running an online store with Magento. And this book covered the “and they will come” part of running your store.
A Review of Magento 1.3: PHP Developer’s Guide
- Image via Wikipedia
Let me guess. You’re an in-house ecommerce developer. About a year or so ago you heard about this slick ecommerce software called Magento. You’re skeptical but you see a large community and free extensions. So you think you can make it work.
Yeah, you can start with that default Magento theme. It’s better than that crappy table driven one you are currently using with osCommerce anyway. So you start with the default theme. And all is well until you try to get that stupid dog picture off of the sidebar. Some of you might have just stopped there and I can’t say that wasn’t a wise choice. But for those of you who stuck with it, this is probably only the first WTF moments in a long line with Magento.
What’s New with Magento
First, let me tell you that I will soon be receiving the Magento 1.3 PHP Developer’s Guide to review. Magento has an architecture link no other software. Hopefully this book sheds some light on developing with Magento and beats hunting a pecking through the forums. The last book I bought for a CMS was one for Drupal. With WordPress, I picked up everything I know online.
Friday Links
- Image via CrunchBase
Magento block caching | Inchoo
If you have a Magento site and slow loading configurable products pages, download and use the extension listed here. The same concept of caching applies to any html block in Magento. Setting this up reloads a copy of the block the second time and does not call the database. Blocks can be cached until edited.
This change actually sped up the configurable products page almost 1000%. Our configurable products were based off of over 1000 underlying skus so needless to say, the page loaded slow before this and now loads at a decent speed. But Magento is never really “fast”. It’s just such a change, that comparing it to the one minute load times it was having, it seems fast, below 3 seconds.
But I do plan on going on with it, finding the bottlenecks in the code and applying block caching. The next target is the category products lists. The worst I think is the layered navigation but a default installation of Magento already has caching built in for the layered navigation.
Magento Beginner’s Guide
Image by Guido Jansen via Flickr
Building an online store is not a walk in the park and I have developed a lot of them with osCommerce, ZenCart and even X-cart. Then I ran into Magento which has more potential than all three.
But that doesn’t mean it is necessarily the easiest software to use. Anything that runs smooth and looks good on the frontend does have a lot going on in the backend. And Magento does take some getting used to. And Magento’s Beginner’s Guide is a great place to start. While it won’t take you through all the complex procedures of building multiple store or using Magento’s API, it will show you how to get a store up and running. And it truly is a beginner’s guide, walking you through each step with annotated screenshots.
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