Magento 1.3: PHP Developer's Guide
- Media: Book (Paperback, 260 pages)
- ISBN: 1847197426
- Publisher: Packt Publishing
- Release Date: Jan 27, 2010
Product Description
Design, develop, and deploy feature-rich Magento online stores with PHP coding
- Extend and customize the Magento e-commerce system using PHP code
- Set up your own data profile to import or export data in Magento
- Build applications that interface with the customer, product, and order data using Magento's Core API
- Packed with examples for effective Magento Development
In Detail
Magento is the most powerful e-commerce solution around and has gained popularity in a short period of time. You can create and manage online stores using the extensive suite of powerful tools it offers. However, because of its powerful features, developing with Magento can be easier said than done.
This book will show you how to develop better and do more with the Magento. You will be able to extend and customize modules for the Magento system without editing the core system code. It will show you how to create both basic and advanced functionality modules for your store and help you turn your ideas for extending Magento into reality by building modules from scratch.
This book starts by walking you through the server requirements for installing Magento making sure Magneto's installation and upgrade process can fit into your workflow and suit your hosting environment setup. Then it runs through the architecture behind Magento's system, covering the core file structure and how the template system works. You'll also learn how to build a basic shipping module, payment module, and a brand management module for Magento. As you delve deeper into the book you will learn how to integrate your favorite CMS into Magento for data portability.
By the end of the book you will be able to take your basic knowledge of Magento and turn it into something advanced that will help you develop turn your ideas for extending Magento into reality.
What you will learn from this book
- Install and upgrade Magento to get ready for development
- Get familiar with the architecture and internal structure of Magento
- Learn about the best modules available and what they can do for you out of the box
- Build a Shipping module for your Magento store to give users options for receiving their items once they have paid for them
- Create a payment method for Magento and the various aspects that go together to complete the payment process
- Speed up your module creation process using the Module Creator script
- Build a basic brand-management module for Magento to manage brands and display their details
- Integrate your favorite CMS into Magento including a walkthrough of integrating Wordpress into Magento
- Create, update, delete, and retrieve customer data from within Magento by implementing the customer API
- Integrate Magento data into an existing external web application or script using the Magento Core API
- Import/export files to retrieve and store information from and to external sources using Excel Spreadsheet or CSV data
Chapter 1: Magento: Developer's Guide
Chapter 2: Installing/Upgrading Magento and Preparing for Development
Chapter 3: Magento's Architecture
Chapter 4: Building a Shipping Module for Magento
Chapter 5: Building a Payment Method for Magento
Chapter 6: Basic Modules to Extend Magento's Functionality
Chapter 7: Fully Featured Module with Administration Panel
Chapter 8: Integration of a Third-Party CMS
Chapter 9: Magento's Core API
Chapter 10: Importing and Exporting Data
Chapter 11: Appendix A - Resources for Further Learning
Approach
This book is a practical tutorial, filled with examples, aimed at people with no experience of programming web sites using the Magento system.
Who this book is written for
If you are a PHP developer who wants to understand the architecture of Magento, learn how to extend the system with PHP code, add new features, and integrate Magento with a third-party CMS, this book is for you.
You are expected to be a confident PHP 5 developer. No experience of Magento development is expected, although you should be familiar with the operation of Magento. No experience of the Zend framework is expected.
Not a book for advanced development
I used this book as a reference manual several times in the few months that I have owned it. I had never used the Core API before and did not know the benefits of using it, but it was super simple and the book does a great job explaining it. Learning the Core API saved me from having to preform 5 hours of manual product updates! Also, I also like how it quickly details how to put together shipping and payment modules with explanations of what everything in the code does. Overall each chapter does an excellent job of explaining a core Magento feature that Magento developers should be familiar with.
In just a few places I think the book is teaching you improperly or lacking something important. For instance: it missed setting up the cron job for Magento. Then at another point it tells you to edit the default themes files, which I hate doing because when you upgrade Magento these files can get overwritten and you lose your work. In some places I felt the book was repetitive, however, in the first chapter it did warn of that it would repeat itself to help some people learn the important concepts. There were not many more things that bothered me about the book.
I read the entire book even though I could already do things like install and upgrade Magento with SSH and FTP. And I am glad I did because it occasionally surprised me with something I did not know. I was hopeful for a deeper explanation of modules and the framework but I realized that subjects like these were better left being explained in a more advanced book. I am not aware of a book yet that goes this far into magento. If James Huskisson would write that book it would be awesome stepping stone from intermediate to advanced Magento development.
Finally, this book was written for Magento 1.3 not 1.4. Theming has changed slightly in 1.4, and they have added widgets. I would not hesitate in buying this Magento book just because a new version of Magento is out because there are very few references to anything with themes in this book. Plus- 1.3 at the time of this writing is still more stable than 1.4.
Horrible book. Don't waste your money.
Good stuff surrounded by lots of fluff.
The book walks you through installing Magento. This info is already online, why spend a whole chapter on that? There are several places that either code was left out of the book or something, but some very important lines of code that just seem to be inserted are not explained at all.
Would I buy the book again, yes. It has some good stuff in there and there are some good examples. Is it worth >$30. I don't think so. Like I said, you could easily cut about 1/3 of this book out as it's too basic and explains obvious things.
Decent info, but very disappointing overall
Overall Im frustrated and bummed that this book wasn't what I was hoping that it would be. The reason I gave it two stars instead of one was because I did actually learn something and it was helpful and the author was friendly. Otherwise Im tempted to try to get my money back due to all the mistakes and frustration it provides me with on a consistent basis.
It Is What It Claims To Be