Best Development Practices In Magento For Building Attractive Store

Magento e-commerce developers who are new might face some common mistakes in Magento development.  E-commerce website development with Magento is much easy if you have an idea about the tips and have some tricks to build an attractive store. This article is about development tips for Magento developers to avoid common mistakes in Magento development and to improvise the Magento development practice.

Before moving on, you have to make sure that you have Magento installed on your system. Let us see some coolest tricks and tips for Magento ecommerce developers so that you can be a Magento geek too.

Setting up Magento (BASIC STEPS)

Ecommerce web design with Magento is very comfortable. For that first of all you have to setup Magento on your system so that you can further develop e-commerce website with Magento. To set up:

1. Go to System > Cache Management > Disable.
2. Next, you have to enable Logging settings. To do that go to System > Configuration > Advanced > Developer > and head over to Log Settings. Now choose the Enabled option, and the logging setting will get enabled allowing you to do Magento custom development.
3. Magento development services provide us the service of SEO. To enable the SEO setting again go to System > Configuration and head over to The Web and Search Engine Optimization. Now check the Yes option for the Use Web Server Rewrites.
   
4. Next action is to configure the reindex management. Navigate to  System > Index Management and choose Reindex all.
   
5. To enable the Developer Mode go to .htaccess and add the following line of code at the end: etEnv MAGE_IS_DEVELOPER_MODE “true.”
   
6. Within <IfModule mod_php5.c> tag add  php_value display_errors On  in .htaccess
   
7. Locate /errors/local.xml.sample and now rename it to /errors/local.xml.

Never Edit Core Files

Some Common mistakes in Magento development that developers make is that they edit the core files while doing custom Magento development. The first rule of Magento development practice is never to alter those core files of the Magento platform if you want to achieve any functionality you can use any Magento extensions.

The only solution that Magento ecommerce development provides is to edit “Shipping.php” file located at “appcodecoreMageShippingModelShipping.php.” You have two options you can alter the same file here, or you can make a new file of the same name and then after editing you can copy and then paste it in the following path.

This trick works if you want to do any Magento custom development without altering the core files. So next time when you will upgrade your Magento platform, those files will get overwrite because Magento always looks for files in a local directory that is (app code local)  before looking for a file in the core directory.

Turn on Template Path Hints

If e-commerce website development with Magento is the new thing to you, then you surely can realize some hassle while understanding the logic behind the file structure and block structure of a Magento layout when you try to customize the storefront. Magento development services provide you the solution so that you can enjoy while developing with Magento. Magento has the best feature that helps you by displaying hints showing where the different files of your layout are. So using this feature it would be easy for you to locate them you can edit them.

But to access this feature, you have to enable it so that Magento ecommerce development will get easy for you. Follow these steps.

1. To access it you have to log in to your administration panel.
2. Now next step is to navigate to System > Configuration.
   
3. Now find “Current Configuration Scope” from the left navigation column on top.
   
4. Select “Main Website” from the drop down menu.
   
5. Now go to Developer > Advance at the left navigation column.
   
6. Here you can see Template Path Hints under  “Debug” just select Yes.
   
7. Hit Save Config button.

After that you have done the above configurations on your Magento system you will see some red boxes on your storefront. These red boxes are underlying structure of the pages regarding templates and blocks.

PS: Only use this trick when you are in a development environment. Otherwise, your storefront would look hideous with big red blocks everywhere.

Best GUI for Magento Development

Ecommerce web design with Magento can be more lovely if you use JetBrainfs PhpStorm. It is a Php editor that ‘understands’ your code and its structure. Thus provides full support for all PHP language features for modern and legacy projects. The other features of PhpStorm are:

• PHP 5.5 support
• Improved PHP syntax coloring
• Vagrant, SSH console & remote tools
• Support for Magento frameworks
• Debugging and testing improvements

Best Magento Plugins for Magento Developers

If Magento programmers want to choose best Magento development practices to make Magento e-commerce development easy and more catchy, than you can use Magicento is a PHPStorm plugin for Magento developers. Some of the features are:

• Goto and autocomplete for factories
• Goto for template paths
• XML files
• Class names
• Documentation for XML nodes
• Inside Magento environment evaluation of PHP code
• And much more to have!

Best Magento Development Environment

Magento e-commerce developers love you to use XAMPP for Magento Development Environment.XAMPP is free and easy to install Apache server. It contains MySQL, PHP, MariaDB, and Perl. XAMPP is an open source package that is very easy to install and to use. You can download it from the official site so you can start Magento custom development.

Remember!! XAMPP setup is necessary to be installed on your system before you start working on e-commerce website development with Magento.