Sergei Guk is Certified Magento Developer in BelVG. He has a strong background in Magento, OXID and Prestashop as well as in PHP, MySQL, MVC, HTML, Ajax, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX, SOAP, OOP, DBD, Zend Framework, Code Igniter and Cake PHP. It allows him to come with brilliant module ideas for our company. His character…
Hire the authorWhat is Magento design fallback?
Fallback mechanism in Magento is the ability of Magento to use the files from multiple themes in one page, i.e. making your own custom themes more upgradable and with fewer files.
Magento has used fallback mechanism since the very beginning, however from Magento CE 1.4 and Magento EE 1.8 they added base/default theme as the final step of the fallback mechanism.
The fallback mechanism looks like this: Read more
As everyone knows Magento is a MVC application and we will be tackling it’s V letter a.k.a View in this series of articles.
We all make mistakes while developing and need to know where is the error occurred, but Prestashop will show the blank/white screen in case of any issues.
To activate a debug mode for Prestashop versions < 1.5.3 you need to open config/config.inc.php and find the following lines: Read more
The State/Province field was something that many developers struggled for years in Magento – there are countries that don’t need this feature but it’s set up in Magento that not only this field was required one, but also there was a drop-down with states/provinces/counties that was not correct/needed/actual. Although the information is very important for some countries and used for both tax and shipping calculation, but there are a lot of countries that don’t need this info at all. Read more
Our another Magento certification-dedicated article describes the steps for application initialization.
Magento initialization process starts in index.php (with the exception of Magento integrated with some other sites or CMS).
Let’s take a look at the code of this file. Magento developers made their comments using multi line comment and PHPDoc style comments, so for my own comments I’ll use one line style (so called c++ style) comments. Read more
We continue posting Magento certification-dedicated articles in our blog. This time we will describe how to internationalize your Magento site.
Magento can manage multiple stores in a single installation. There are three layers in this hierarchy – websites, stores and store views.
The top level is Website. It’s made up of one or multiple stores. They in turn are made up of one or multiple store views. Stores have the same customers, orders and shopping carts. They are set of store views and the main idea of stores is to group store views in a website.
Most of Magento installations have only one website with one store and only one store view. As store Views are the actual store instances, they are typically used for internationalization purposes, i.e. translation of your store into different languages. Therefore, if you need to display your store in multiple languages, for example English, French and German, you should create the store once and then create three different store views for this particular store. Read more
There is no secret that Magento is the most popular eCommerce CMS in the world. But when you decide to work with Magento (taking into account that you are already familiar with PHP, Javasript, MySQL) and download its archive, you could be frustrated when you see all these hundreds of folders and thousands of files.
A few years ago there was a very limited amount of information provided by Magento itself. In my opinion, this fact and complexity of the platform lead to the situation that even if you want to do everything right, it’s hard to say which way is the right one. But time has changed and there are a lot of good sources developed by Magento and its eco-system.
We suppose you continue following our Magento certification-dedicated posts in our blog. This time we will describe how to set up a cron job.
Let’s start with server setup.
We suppose you continue following our Magento certification-dedicated posts in our blog. This time we will describe class group configuration and use in factory methods.
Magento uses factory methods to instantiate Models, Blocks and Helpers classes, applying a necessary method (for example getModel, helper etc.). You should pass an abstract name of a class group, followed by an entity name. Class groups are described in configuration XML files in /etc/config.xml files of appropriate modules. Read more
We suppose you continue following our Magento certification-dedicated posts in our blog. This week we turn to another pack of Basics questions, concerning main Magento design areas; the structure of a complete theme and Magento templates, layout, skin and javascript files location.
In classical MVC architecture view files are html code with output of the logic in templates via php or any template engine, for example, Smarty (in Prestashop, Oxid) or Twig, Dwoo, Calypso, etc. Working with Magento, you may fall into delusion that everything is extremely complicated, but this complexity allows you to maintain flexibility and modularity.
In Magento there are three components of the template system. As we discussed in a previous article, there are php classes that are stored in modules folder called Block. They load the data from database and transfer it to the PHP/HTML templates in your theme (.phtml files). There are also XML layout configuration files that act as application guides on how to build a page, what to build it with and the behavior of each building block.
All frontend files are stored in three main Magento design areas.
Push the boundaries with the BelVG ecommerce blog full of Magento and PrestaShop innovative and comprehensible guides, PrestaShop and Magento news, online marketing solutions. Find out more about web development and web design trends. Ecommerce is booming and emerging - keeping up with the latest strategies and tools is not easy. That’s why the BelVG team has decided to create this CMS blog where our certified professional Magento & PrestaShop developers, creative designers and experienced marketers can share their knowledge, tips, case studies and ready-to-use ecommerce solutions. The members of our team have been working with the most in-demand ecommerce platforms such as Magento and Prestashop for more than 7 years. We have created over 100 websites, took part in more than 600 project and we want to invest our knowledge and experience in making ecommerce better. Become a regular reader of our web design and web development blog and you will improve your skills. Most of the development articles are specifically helpful for those who prepare for Magento certifications. Let’s explore the challenging but exciting ecommerce world together.
