The Sysgen Media Blog

We’re in the finishing phases of our first e-commerce site using Magento. In the beginning, the project was daunting. If anyone has tried using Magento, you might already know that the learning curve is incredibly steep. Trying to navigate the file structure and learning where everything is coming from is an uphill battle. The fact that documentation is sparse and hard to locate doesn’t help. Luckily there is a small but dedicated group of message board users and forum posts to sift through which can help find answers to many of your problems. I strongly recommend to anyone starting their first Magento project to join the forums, the users there have helped me numerous times in the beginning of this project.

Having an understanding of the MVC (Model-View-Controler) design pattern is a good idea before diving into Magento, the core code is heavily based on this design. Id also recommend taking a look at the Zend Framework.

If you are using a custom template, make sure that the template is built for the same version of Magento that you are using. An older template will have compatibility issues with a different version of Magento. This will cause all kinds of php errors on your page. If you have to use a template made for an older version, look through the Magento site for Diff files or the Wiki for notes on updating templates. This will speed up the process and help you find where your template might be using outdated code. Looking at the default template is another good place to check for differences between an older and current template.

One of the great features about Magento is its path and block hints. These feature can be enabled from the developer tab in the admin panel and willl add add highlighting to sections of the code, showing you what files they are being generated from. This is a great way to learn the file structure as well as get a feel for how the url paths correlate to the folder structure.

These are just a few of the tips and precautions I’d like to touch on now, I’ll be posting more about Magento in the following week, with more tips, things we’ve learned and some of the functionality we managed to get out of the system.