Magento 1.8 development cookbook

• Customize the look and feel of your Magento shop
• Work on theming, catalog configuration, module, and database development
• Create modules to modify or extend Magento's standard behaviour

If you are a developer with minor PHP knowledge and you want to start with Magento development, this book is for you. With its specially tailored recipes, we will guide you from simple development in Magento to the more advanced stuff. Even if you are an experienced Magento developer, some recipes in this book will interest you. The other recipes will serve as a good reference to look at.

• Install Magento on a custom webserver
• Add your own touch to a Magento store with a custom theme
• Speed up your store with some performance tools
• Customize and extend backend functionality with forms, grids, and more
• Build your own shipping module
• Manage the display of your products
• Understand database design patterns

Magento is an open source e-commerce platform which has all the functionality to function from small to large online stores. Its architecture makes it possible to extend the functionalities with plugins where a lot of them are shared by the community. This is the reason why the platform is liked by developers and retailers.

A practical developer guide packed with recipes that cover all the parts of Magento development. The recipes will start with the simple development exercises and get the more advanced as the book progresses. A good reference for every Magento developer!

This book starts with the basics. The first thing is to create a test environment. Next, the architecture, tools, files and other basics are described to make you ready for the real work.

The real work starts with the simple things like theming and catalog configuration. When you are familiar with this, we will move on to more complex features such as module and database development. When you have survived this, we will move on to the last part of making a shop ready for launch: performance optimization and testing. This book will guide you through all the development phases of Magento, covering the most common pitfalls through its recipes.