magento
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The Magento 2 Learning Curve
5 minutes - Feb 3, 2017
The learning curve for various products and platforms tends to vary greatly depending on the complexity of the system you are learning. For example, people that understand how to use the internet and communicate online via email or Facebook are generally able to figure out how to work with Twitter without much of an issue. On the other hand, when you are looking at the learning curve for designing airplanes that are able to carry people, it should be much more difficult to understand how to start as compared to starting to use Twitter. -
The Best Way to Learn Magento 2
4 minutes - Jan 25, 2017
The very best way that I have found to figure out how to develop with Magento 2 is to write unit tests for a module. It not only requires you to figure out how to work with phpunit, but to also look at the existing codebase for examples of how the Magento 2 team works with the same objects and handles the same kinds of tasks. Once I wrote a full set of unit tests for my first Magento 2 module, I felt that I had a much better grasp of the workings of Magento 2 than I did before I started writing the unit tests. -
Magento 2, Docker, and macOS don't mix
5 minutes - Jan 11, 2017
I was excited when the Docker team launched their better-integrated solution for running Docker containers on OS X this past summer. It allowed our team to switch from using full Vagrant/Virtual Box based virtual machines for local development to a much lighter-weight solution. Compared to the Vagrant setup, Magento 1 seemed to run a bit faster and require fewer resources when running in Docker. However, when trying to setup a similar environment with Magento 2, the performance numbers didn’t quite line up when using a macOS host. -
Verify Magento User Access to Admin Functionality
2 minutes - Mar 25, 2015
When working with Magento, there will inevitably come a time where you need to manually check to see if the currently logged-in user has access to a specific piece of functionality as defined in the ACL settings. Personally, I have come across this situation more often when creating my own custom modules and their custom permissions, but they can be used to check the permissions of any module. As is so often the case, Alan Storm has documented the exact solution for this scenario. -
Laravel Removed The QuickStart For Version 5
2 minutes - Mar 24, 2015
To start out, I want to be clear that what follows should not be interpreted to be a criticism of the software framework that those that work on Laravel publish, nor an indictment of open-source software as a whole. Rather, it is a look at how some projects, open or closed source make it harder than it should be for new users/developers to utilize their terrific products. It seems experts conveniently “forget” the tips and tricks and tribulations it takes to learn a new technology, covering it all with, “It’s just so easy”. -
Never Explicitly Trust Software Because It Is Open-Source
3 minutes - Mar 13, 2015
One of the major ideas behind open source projects is that allowing anyone that wants to view the source code of a project to be able to do so should make bugs and security weaknesses easy to find. While this did not work so well with OpenSSL and its various bugs that have been exposed recently, I do have an example where it worked extremely well. Magento is an eCommerce platform that has two separate editions. -
The Number 1 Cause of the Not Invented Here Syndrome
3 minutes - Mar 12, 2015
One of the quickest ways to get a new internal tool bootstrapped is to utilize an existing design, making slight adjustments to ensure the design matches the requirements of the current project. Instead of using another internal tool as the basis for the new design, I used a design that was purchased specifically for this project. This particular design was unique in that there were multiple working examples using AJAX, pure HTML, and AngularJS. -
The Amazing Magento Configuration
One minute - Mar 6, 2015
At the heart of every piece of PHP in Magento is the XML configuration files that tell core Magento code where to find functions and what to do with them. It seems to be the biggest hurdle that most developers face when they begin developing with Magento. When going through a bit of code recently, I discovered something in the configuration that looks like it should have never worked, but amazingly enough, has worked without issue the entire time it has been in place. -
Don't Be a Dunce, Save Your Orders
2 minutes - Mar 5, 2015
There are some gotchas that you think that you will always see coming. One such gotcha is the need to save an object to the datastore to persist any changes you may have made to that object. While it seems like a reasonable concept at the base level, there are times that the need to save an object completely escapes your mind. It seems that for many non-developers, this occurs when they have been working a long time on a file, typically a Microsoft Word document, shortly before their computer blue screens, losing all of their work. -
Magento's preDispatch Observer
2 minutes - Mar 4, 2015
One of the decisions that always seems to arise when adding functionality to a Magento website is what the best strategy is for doing so. Should you override the controller or function, edit it in place, or use an observer to listen for a particular event to occur. It just so happens that if you want to make sure that you have some sort of validation logic that runs before a particular controller action is executed, the easiest way to implement it is via a preDispatch observer.