Magento web development is now becoming an essential part of online businesses who are selling their products on the online platform. Designers and developers use Magento for meeting their development needs. However, Magento developers need to strive to avoid blunders that usually occur during the Magento development process. They should utilize Magento customization to come up with innovative eCommerce solutions for retailers who wish to achieve tremendous online growth.
The fiercely competitive online environment urges businesses to create unique and user friendly eCommerce website. If you are a developer looking forward to a career in Magento customization or Magento web design then it is imperative for you to learn some simple yet effective design and development tricks. Following are some of the tricks for front-end developers as well as so that they can come up with an effective eCommerce website using Magento.
For Front-End Developers and Designers:
- It is better to create a custom theme rather than going for modification of core Magento theme files.
- Understanding the package or theme relationship can give you a clear idea on how to effectively utilize it for the website you are building. Smart use of the packages or themes can give rise to innovative ways to manage the small differences required among different templates or pages.
- Always use the correct starting theme, especially in a community. While dealing with a community project, blank theme saves a great deal of time as it eliminates a lot of unrequited CSS styling. This helps front-end developers to expedite the overall development process.
- It is important for developers to bear in mind that Magento makes use of tables in some places. It is always advantageous to go through the sample or demo site to view source and cloning said source as the HTML you utilize while creating your own CSS.
For Magento Programmers:
- While extending the functionality of a core class, it is important that you don’t end up overwriting the core class by entering the same file path on the local code pool, app/code/local/Path to core class/… Instead, it is better to use class rewriting than to overwrite. The new class must inherit from the class you wish to prolong. This makes room for greater compatibility and brings down the chances of breaking things when upgrading to a newer version of Magento. It is beneficial to tackle the module conflicts.
- Never ignore nested collections. Every collection is a query which implies that if you have a collection within a look, then there surely exists a query within a look. This will bring down the overall speed of your website.
- Writing a module is good, but to test it with full page caching it’s better. A number of times module works impeccably over the local server but fails to give the best performance on a live site. Hence, it is imperative to test it with full page caching to avoid problems.
- Not being attentive to the namespaces utilized for custom modules, which may clash with the namespaces of core Magento modules.
It is important for you to keep these tips and tricks in mind when you are taking up any design and development project using Magento. This will ensure the success of your Magento web development project.
