subject: Magento Development The Key To Open Source Ecommerce Web Development! [print this page] What is Magento? It's the most eloquent online eCommerce platform in the universe and is altering the face of eCommerce evermore. Of course, you already know that. What you may not fulfill is Magento's also a victim-oriented PHP Framework that can be worn to polish fresh, dynamic web applications that tap into Magento's fierce eCommerce features. Magento supports installation of modules through a web-based line accessible through the administration subject of a Magento installation. Modules are hosted on the Magento eCommerce website as a PEAR attendant. Any commune part may upload a module through the website. The uploaded module is then made vacant to the stuffed Magento identity once standard by a part of the Magento party. Modules are installed by ingoing a module key, offered on the module page, into the web based border.
This is the first in a sequence of articles in which we're leaving to go on a tornado tour of Magento's programming framework features. Don't agonize if you don't trail everything immediately. As you review the scheme more everything in this clause will father to make sagacity, and you'll quickly be the envy of your colleagues puzzled working with more primal PHP systems. Magento organizes its technique into individual Modules. In a typical PHP Model-View-Controller (MVC) application, all the Controllers will be in one folder, all the Models in another, etc. In Magento, documents are grouped together based on functionality, which are called modules in Magento.
Magento is a configuration-based MVC approach. The alternative to this would a convention-based MVC usage. In a convention-based MVC scheme, if you hunted to add, say, a new Controller or perhaps a new Model, you'd just invent the parade/rank, and the order would choose it up automatically. In a configuration-based usage, like Magento, besides adding the new case/session to the rules origin, you often essential explicitly to tell the routine about the new lecture, or new group of lessons. In Magento, each Module has a line named config.xml. This folder contains the whole important configuration for a Magento Module. At runtime, all these store trick into one large configuration tree.
Magento has two broad types of Model substance. One is a traditional "One Object, One Table" Active Record flare Model. When you instantiate these Models, all attributes are automatically preferred. The flash kind of Model is an Entity Attribute Value (EAV) Model. EAV Models mushroom data across several different tables in the folder. The gives the Magento approach the flexibility to suggest its supple creation attribute procedure without having to do a plan change each time you add an attribute. When creating a collection of EAV substance, Magento is conservative in the number of columns it will query for, so you can use addAttributeToSelect to get the columns you want, or addAttributeToSelect to get all columns. Its enjoyable the twister tour of some of the features the Magento eCommerce system offers to developers. It could be a little overwhelming at first, especially if this is your first experience with a fresh, reason-oriented PHP system. If you flinch to get frustrating, take a secret breath, recap manually that this is new, and new effects are hard, but at the end of the day it's just a different way of coding. Once you get over the learning curve you'll find yourself reluctant to profit to other, excluding forcible systems.
