2 years later I got speaking with somebody who worked at Space 48, after visiting the office and meeting some other members of the team I was sure it’s the place for me. So with the help of Tony Brown I spent a few difficult months learning Magento and eventually got offered a job with Space 48. After spending some time with Magento I grew to be a big fan, and still am to this day!

TL:DR; I’ve been working with Magento for around 2.5 years, and I learned it so I could work at Space 48!

Arpatech: Ben, you are associated with Space 48. Please share your work experience as a front-end developer. Please shed some light on Best development practices as a Front-end developer.

Ben: I now enjoy working with the front-end of Magento, at first it was a huge pain and even simple tasks seemed overly complex but after gaining some experience across different projects it got much easier. It’s almost like you have to tame Magento, you have to show it some love, spend some time with it and after a while it starts to listen to you.

If I could go back to when I first started working with Magento I would tell myself to break it down into smaller chunks, so instead of diving in head first and being overwhelmed I could have concentrated on one area at a time such as layout XML, templates, the fallback mechanism etc.

My main tips:

• Think before you code! For example – Plan out what layout blocks you need to edit/create, do you have all the assets/info you need, plan your file structure, could your changes affect other sections of the site?

• Maintenance – One thing I have noticed with many Magento stores is they are not maintained, and I don’t just mean patches. The code you wrote 4 years ago is probably not so great now. Maybe you’ve dropped IE support, so remove the related code! (See Rebecca Troth’s talk about this)

• Consistency – Be consistent across all your projects, if every project uses a different library or naming convention it makes life very difficult when you regularly jump between them.

• CSS Specificity – My most hated thing as a front-end dev is overly specific CSS (nesting SCSS is a big cause of this), it can be very difficult to work with Magento’s themes because of this. But there’s no excuse when you’re building a new piece of functionality or building a theme from scratch! I’m a huge fan of the BEM naming syntax as it helps combat CSS specificity.

• Don’t blindly follow Stack Overflow! I have seem some answers that overwrite core code get accepted, always think before you copy and paste.

• Search for a class/ID instead of forever turning the template hints on.

• Test, test, test, then test again. Never presume every browser and OS will handle your code the same.

• Try PHP Storm + the Magicento plugin, this increased my productivity a large amount.

Arpatech: What is the best project you are engaged with or have done in your entire career? What are the challenges you faced and how did you tackle them?

Ben: The project I’m proudest to work on is CharlotteTilbury.com, mainly due to the rapid international expansion and the many awards the website has won. But on the flip side it’s also one of the most difficult projects I’ve worked on due to the extra stores and customizations, if you don’t plan new stores correctly it can get messy fast.

To tackle this it’s all about planning in advance, make sure your file structure and fallback mechanisms is working for you and not against you – duplicate code is the enemy of maintenance.

Arpatech: You are engaged with Magento conferences and meet-ups. What do you gain from these conferences?

Ben: I enjoy conferences because I usually leave them feeling extra motivated and ambitious, and as Jon Woodall would say the Magento community thrives on sharing knowledge.

I actually haven’t attended any Magento meetups yet, but I will likely start attending the Manchester one next year.

Arpatech: Do you recommend to attend such conferences? Will you be willing to attend more conferences in future?

Ben: I recommend everyone attends at least one conference, whether that be one related to work or a hobby. It’s great to speak to people with similar interests, the knowledge you can take from certain conferences can be so useful.

I will definitely be attending more, my favourite conference at the moment is Mage Titans, I’ve never seen a conference with such a great community feel.

Arpatech: What do clients have in mind when they hear you suggesting Magento to them? Being a Magento specialist/Developer what do you suggest to them? What myths do the clients usually come up with?

Ben: I don’t usually get involved with clients up until the website is being planned/built so luckily I can avoid having to convince people. If I was in that situation I would start by mentioning the large brands that use Magento, such as SEAT, Kurt Geiger, or Burger King.

Arpatech: Ben, being a Magento front-end developer, who are your inspirations in the Magento community? Please share some names to the readers who they can follow to learn more about Magento front and back end development.

Ben: I don’t  have many inspirations when it comes to the front-end of Magento as it’s pretty hard to find front-end developers who openly focus and share knowledge on Magento (if you know of any please do share!), I get the impression most are front-end developers who just happen to work with Magento.

In general, the Magento developers I follow the most are:

• Vinai Kopp
• Alan Kent
• Tom Robertshaw
• Alan Storm

Outside of development (but still within Magento) I suggest:

• Ben Marks
• Rebecca Troth

Arpatech: Apart from work, I follow you on twitter and I found that you are an avid gamer. What games do you play? Do you like first person shooting games? What else do you do in your free time?

Ben: I go through stages with gaming, I usually alternate between competitive games such as Counter Strike/Dota/Battlefield and more casual games like Skyrim/Fallout/Overwatch/Civ 6. I’m really enjoying virtual reality at the moment, every time I go on the HTC Vive I’m left amazed. For the social gamers out there I recommend Insomnia Gaming Festival.

If I’m not tinkering with Magento or gaming I’m likely to be either relaxing or out with my girlfriend. I also follow British Touring Car Championship on and off and watch a few TV series (Breaking Bad, Power, Game of Thrones).

Arpatech: Rebecca, you are serving as a Project Manager at iWeb. I have been engaged with some courses of Project Management and I love this field. Please share your experience as a project Manager and delivering Magento solutions to clients. What are the most frequent concerns of client?

Rebecca: Many moons ago I was a developer at a smaller agency which didn’t have any Project Managers and so I had a very mixed role of managing the clients and projects as well as developing and building the sites. I attended a conference in 2014 called DPM:UK, recently rebranded to DeliverConf, and was truly inspired by the speakers and attendees there that were immersed in digital project management! So much so that I decided to focus and take on my current role as PM with the awesome team at iWeb. In terms of concerns I have, generally, I try to keep them to a minimum. The projects we take on are high pressure and mean so much to the clients involved that when things go wrong it can be hard not to take it personally, but you just have to pick yourself up and keep working hard!

Arpatech:  As you say in your blog that you never heard of Magento before 2013. What took you to this platform? What was the motivation for choosing Magento as your career?

Rebecca: I have always had an interest in eCommerce but as a 20-year-old junior developer, I was just excited to be working on any web project and so being given the opportunity to work on large online shops using Magento was thrilling! I picked it up quickly and it wasn’t long before I was no longer considered junior. I have been just as passionate about the platform ever since and will continue to push its and my own development!

Arpatech: Rebecca, you are active Magento community member and run Magento YouTube Channel. Can you suggest newbie some tips to stay connected in this community? Is it really difficult to be part of the community?

Rebecca: My biggest tip would be to put yourself out there! I know it’s scary and difficult to do but the Magento community is a friendly one who are always looking for new talent! I recently wrote an article about my feelings when I was first joining the community and where I am now: Being a Magento extrovert is challenging. Just remember you are not alone and we all started as a stranger to each other. I still get nervous when interacting with the community, but my passion outweighs my fear (just about) so I will never let that stop me.

Arpatech: You are working as a project Manager and you are very close to Magento products. Many developers are still working on Magento 1 and most of them have not even thought of switching it. Why Magento 2 is still not famous among developers?

Rebecca: It is just not as well-polished as Magento 1 yet. Developers are having to learn on the job, are facing barriers and big changes with every new release, but officials at Magento are listening to the feedback from everyone using the platform and are pushing to improve the experience for developers. Unfortunately, it is just a waiting game at the moment and we are a little bit in limbo.

Arpatech: Being a Magento specialist, you love to write. Please guide our readers about the best practices of writing a blog.

Rebecca: Oh gosh! I do love to write but I am far from an expert and so all I can tell you is the approach I take and that is to be myself. I write my posts how I would say them, I use the same tone of voice and vocabulary as I do in my day to day life which I hope helps my writing come across more genuine. It seems to be working!

Arpatech: Let’s talk something about ecommerce store. We see a lot of competition in this sector. Please give some suggestion to our merchants on how to sell their first product online. What can they do to stand out of the cluttered online market?

Rebecca: It is such a competitive sector. Especially with the ease of getting set up online now, it is hard for even those in the business like myself to keep up! I would have to recommend not trying to go alone. The world wide web is a big place with experts on every niche you can think of! Rely on these experts to help you and learn from, be it for development, marketing, or customer service etc.

Social media is also a huge thing for businesses that I truly believe should not be ignored or taken for granted. No matter who your target market is, I can almost guarantee you they will be using social media in some way or another.

Arpatech: I searched for your interest in photography and found some amazing clicks. Your passion seems quite interesting.  How did you start as a photographer? If you get a chance to choose photography as your career, what will you do? What else do you prefer in your spare time?

Rebecca: I have always loved being behind the camera rather than in front of it. I appreciate everything on this planet and believe everything and everyone is beautiful and that’s what I love to capture. I did do a college course on Film and Television production too, so when I think of the ways my career could have gone, I like to think I could have been a director on a big fancy movie set! Haha.

This error is the most frustrating of all. Initially, it cranked me up, but patience  is the key. Whenever you come across this error, just stay calm and move to the solution. The simplest way to avoid this error is to use 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost in Web configuration. OR Go to your Magento Database and find the table core_config Find web/unsecure/base_url and web/secure/base_url in the path column Change all the values from http://localhost/”MagentoFolderName”/ to http:// 127.0.0.1/”MagentoFolderName”/ Now remove the cache by removing all the files and folders in the cache folder of Magento. Navigate to Root/var/cache and delete all the files and folder Now go back to your site. Everything should be perfect now. These are some common errors that might become a bottleneck when installing Magento. Let me know if you are facing some other error or issues while installing Magento 2. Feel free to comment in the comment section below: Learn how to configure Multiple Stores in Magento

Just when the world was realizing the true potential of this powerful ecommerce platform, in the end of 2015, Magento released it’s new version “Magento 2” which turns out to be a phenomenal update and in some ways a more advanced version than its predecessor. Magento 2 is powered by PHP framework that really puts a developer’s life to ease.

Listed below are some of the New Features of Magento 2:

1. New structure
2. Full NGINX support
3. Redis
4. Full page cache
5. Varnish cache
6. CSS preprocessing
7. CSS and JS Minification
8. Catalog images caching
9. Code generation
10.  Requirejs for improved JS performance
11. Session storage management
12. XML validation

Best Development Practices in Magento 2

Now, beside the other ecommerce development platforms, Magento 2 specifically is a bit technical and requires advanced development skills. So, a lot of the developers get stuck while in the development process and then they seek expert’s advice from the Magento Community.

So, we thought, why not directly ask from the experts that in their opinion what are some of the best development practices in Magento 2 and which approach is the best. So, mentioned below are the responses that we got from Magento Developers which can really help anyone who’s just getting started in Magento 2 or even an advanced developer can learn a trick or two. So, here it goes:

Marius Strajeru
Magento Master 2016

The official docs and reverse engineering. That’s all I’ve used so far, and magento stackexchange of course.

Tobias Hartmann
Lead Frontend Developer at Sitewards

About Magento 2, as I said in the interview, we don’t know about a best practice. We tried to get information about it from conferences and by asking people but there are a lot different opinions about it and I personally think that this is a problem. Such a big framework should give solutions to that and to the modern workflows and should not raise such big questions. So far what we did in a magento 2 project we applied overrides on the frontend styles and switched classes within the templates but did not use the ui lib, how it should be used, because it appears to be too complex. And for sure, as Magento says by its own, don’t base on the Luma theme because it might change completely. The base should be the blank theme. Since the snowdog scss theme is on a good way I would prefer this for upcoming magento 2 projects.

Bartek Igielski
Front End Developer at Snowdog

– Write everything as a module and keep semantic versioning

– Magento (front-end) codebase isn’t great, remember to follow best practices, not their code standards (i.e. use BEM or other naming methodology, use SASS, ES6…)

– Do code review for every chunk of code and run automated tests – even simples checks using linters (ESLint, SASS-Lint, Stylelint, PHP_CS)

– Report bugs and contribute to Magento project – it’s open source, so if nobody reports a bug or propose some solution, probably it will not be fixed or changed.

Vinai Kopp
Trainer, Developer, Consultant

I’d say, “Decouple your code as much as possible from Magento 2 implementation details, or, if that isn’t possible, be conscious about the coupling. Wrappers for core classes are a good thing.

Also develop with Varnish as the FPC in mind, so don’t think every request will reach Magento. The built in FPC behavior is different and code that works with it can’t be assumed to work with Varnish.”

Sean Breeden
Magento Developer at Jamersan

Not sure if anyone else covered this or not but here’s my 2 cents on a good place to start with best practices:

A simple recommendation that I can make for working with Magento 2 is to adopt the same coding standards that Magento is using if you aren’t following them already.

For years, I worked on projects that required fast turnaround times so it caused me to lose focus on the importance of adhering to standards. Quality suffered and my progress seemed to stall out. It wasn’t until I started strictly following coding standards again that I saw significant improvements in my ability to write good code.

Magento recommends following the Basic Coding Standard and Coding Style Guide when creating extensions. There’s a lot of common sense things in there that any developer can use to improve. Not only will your code become easily readable, it may have a possibly surprising side-effect of increasing your skills!

Basic Coding Standard – http://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-1/

Coding Style Guide – http://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-2/

Daniele Rutigliano
CEO Ecommerce manager at Aproweb web agency

First of all it is necessary to analyze the needs of commitment and the features of the project. In some cases Magento 2 could be not right version and there are not knowledge and plugins to fast use.

At the second you have to install your ecommerce on test server. As with Magento 1.x you have not edit the core software but to use the override way. At the end check the log files and resolve ALL bugs and errors: your Magento will be faster.

Riccardo Tempesta
Co-Foundeer, CTO at IDEALIAGROUP srl

Fighting against Magento 2 coding can be an hard work and it requires good programming skills and framework knowledge.

There are good practices you can follow to achieve a good result. With “good result” we mean a better stability, a shorter coding time and less headaches.

We wrote down 10 of the most important rules in the Magento programmers life:

 

Rule 1.
Never start coding Magento 2 without knowing at least a bit of Magento 2 framework theory. Magento 2 is one of the most complex framework in the world and exploring its code without knowing where to search can be really frustrating.

Rule 2.
Always follow Magento 2 coding guidelines, because you will not probably be the only one working on your code. Remember: “Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.”

Rule 3.
Magento 2 requires a lot of additional coding but it is based on simple and clear concepts, so if it is too complicated then probably it is not the right way to do it.

Rule 4.
Do not waste your time and use tools like “MSP_CodeMonkey” or “MSP_DevTools” to automatically write boilerplate code and debug your application. They are free while your time is not. They do not make mistake while you can.

Rule 5.
Use the right IDE, we use PhpStorm with Magicento2 and xdebug integration. They save you a lot of time. We know it is not cool as programming with “vi”, but we are in 2016.

Rule 6.
If you do not know how to do it, then look at Magento source code. Magento code is often a source of inspiration when you are approaching something new.

Rule 7.
Write integration tests and test units. Upgrading a Magento version can break some of you custom modules or third party modules and integration tests can save your week-end.

Rule 8.
Always use git to version your code, use an automated deployment tool like capistrano and use a local virtual machine for development (vagrant or docker can be good tools).

Rule 9.
Be careful when using third party modules, someone did not correctly understand rule number 2. Before using them in production take some time to explore their code and make sure they are ok.

Rule 10.
You do not talk about Fight Club.

So, there you go! Magento Developers and experts have shared their experiences regarding the Best Development Practices in Magento 2. Now, you might agree or disagree with the methods stated in it, and that’s perfectly fine. As I said before, Magento is a community-driven platform, so everyone is welcome to share their experiences.

If there’s anything you’d like to share regarding development practices in Magento 2, feel free to share with us in the comments section below.

The First Ever @magento Meetup Dubai. Thank you @benmarks @ Ali and @mhgontijo for the wonderful session.#realmagento pic.twitter.com/rr1WmvYrka

— Adnan Fasih (@adnanfasih) October 30, 2016

.@mhgontijo talking to us live over Skype about the #MagentoEcosystem at #MagentoMeetUpDubai pic.twitter.com/P7K3KHXrcF

— Redbox Digital (@redboxdigital) October 29, 2016

Thanks to @benmarks for join us remotely in #magentomeetupdubai#realmagento pic.twitter.com/sbvmSK2EzA

— Wajid Hussain (@wajidstack) October 29, 2016

Glad I remembered about my presentation to the Dubai Magento Meetup tonight.

Heading for dinner at 6:30. #mm16ro — Ben Marks (@benmarks) October 29, 2016

Let the fun begin! #magento #dubai #realmagento @arpatech pic.twitter.com/L6Z8uJd8iu

— OneStepCheckout (@onestepcheckout) October 29, 2016

What’s More in Store?

Well, Magento Meetup Dubai will go down in the history books as the first Magento Meetup in Dubai and we would once again like to congratulate the participants as together “WE HAVE MADE HISTORY!”

But we are just getting started and are already working on some REALLY BIG PLANS right now. On that note, we would request you all to stay tuned, follow us on facebook, twitter and LinkedIn so that you can get to know about the details related to our next event.

*Note: You can become a part of our next event:

<p style=”color: red;”>I am a red Block <a href =http://www.arpatech.com target= ”_blank”> Go </a> </p>

Click to Save Block

Now from your server navigate to

\app\design\frontend\ theme\template\page

Note: Instead of theme, the name of folder will be related to your theme.

In the following folder, find 2cloumns-left.phtml file and use any of your preferred editor to edit it. For this tutorial we are using 2cloumns-left design. If you are using some other design then edit the related file.

Open the file and find the required div class in which you have to attach the block. The best way to check the class name is:

Go to you page.

Right click on anywhere you want to show the static block.

Select Inspect Element.

A code window will open. See the desired div in which you want to attach the block.

Now go back to the file and find the required div. In  my case its <div class=”main”>

In  my case its <div class=”main”>

Add the following line right under the div:

<?php echo $this->getLayout()->createBlock(‘cms/block’)->setBlockId(‘myblock’)->toHtml() ?>

I have included the block under <div class=”main”>. You can place it anywhere according to your need.

Open your page. You can see the new block listed. Now you can create your customize blocks with images, texts and much more. I hope you enjoyed the block.

Feel free to ask us anything regarding the tutorial in the comments section below.

Learn how to display products from a specific category in Magento.