Think Different

In this article I will try to explain how to build a “Dealer Locator” extension for Magento. This article is all about extension concepts, structure and planing and not the code itself. First we will start with scoping the feature. What functionality should it have? In our example, let’s imagine a client that wants a dealer locator to have “Search by nearest dealer based on ZIP/Postcode”, “Search by State”, “Search by dealer company name”. Search results should be displayed primarily on Google Map, plus it would be nice to have a table listing for those disliking the map visual style. If we extend this a bit further, we soon come to realisation that “dealers” themselves should be a customers in our Magento system. Justification for this lies in a fact that dealers should be able to do a regular purchases on our Magento store like any other customer just with special prices applied to products. Since customer in Magento has to have a customer g...

Q 1. What is Magento? Ans. Magento is a feature-rich eCommerce platform built on open-source technology that provides online merchants with unprecedented flexibility and control over the look, content and functionality of their eCommerce store. Magentos intuitive administration interface features powerful marketing, search engine optimization and catalog-management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Designed to be completely scalable and backed by Variens support network, Magento offers companies the ultimate eCommerce solution. Q 2. What is the difference between Mage::getSingletone() andMage::getModel() in Magento Ans. Mage::getSingletone() always finds for an existing object if not then create that a newobject but Mage::getModel() always creates a new object. Q 3. Why Magento use EAV database model ? Ans. In EAV database model, data are stored in different smaller tables rather than storing in asingle table.product nam...

Here you will find a list with the major commands, their short descriptions and exemplary usage. For a detailed description of all the GIT commands please visit  http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/ Major GIT commands: git config Sets configuration values for your user name, email, gpg key, preferred diff algorithm, file formats and more. Example:  git config --global user.name "My Name"                  git config --global user.email "user@domain.com" cat ~/.gitconfig [user]     name = My Name     email = user@domain.com git init Initializes a git repository – creates the initial ‘.git’ directory in a new or in an existing project. Example:  cd /home/user/my_new_git_folder/ git init git clone Makes a Git repository copy from a remote source. Also adds the original location as a remote so you can fetch from it again and push to it ...

Nginx , a HTTP and reverse proxy server, known for its blazing speed in serving static files, including grand performance in terms of serving up FastCGI pages makes for a great coupling with the upcoming  PHP-FPM  sapi in PHP (It is currently in the 5.3 branch and previously was a patch) offer a great solution for finally getting rid of that old sloppy mod_php in Apache. Do you have the same issue where your apache instances have started to run too large? This might be the time to start to move forward. A little background on why I have endeavored on this path. While running Apache at several jobs and institutions it simply became clear that under heavier traffic loads having all of the ridged custom components of Apache were starting to slow things down. To the point of large instances running sometimes up to 300MB in size. Having this size just to get a simple image or PHP page was just not necessary as well as proved to be a performance bottleneck. While the first po...