Packt Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook 268pages software manual

- Develop Modules and Extensions for Magento 1.4 using PHP with ease
- Socialize your store by writing custom modules and widgets to drive in more customers
- Achieve a tremendous performance boost by applying powerful techniques such as YSlow, PageSpeed, and Siege
- Part of Packt's Cookbook series: Each recipe is a carefully organized sequence of instructions to complete the task as efficiently as possible

Magento is the fastest growing PHP-based e-commerce solution based on the Zend Framework. It is a robust CMS that provides developers the ability to enrich their store with extra functionalities using custom modules. Developing a Magento store to get the desired look and feel is not as easy as you might believe and may take hours due to the wealth of features available for you to use.

Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook provides unparalleled guidelines to develop a much faster and more captivating Magento store by writing powerful custom modules. The book covers everything from common development tasks to integrating social networking plugins into Magento.

If you choose to work through all the recipes from the beginning, you will have a development platform ready to work with Magento. You will also explore different ways to customize the look and feel of a Magento store to offer your customers a better user experience. Integration of Magento with WordPress to add striking functionality to your store will be accomplished in just a few steps. Some cool recipes take care of the Magento security measures by editing the parameters in the admin panel. Setting up a master-slave setup for Magento database is discussed along with other database optimizations in the database chapter. Developing new modules and widgets for Magento is thoroughly described. Optimizing Magento's performance is the most important part of this book, which is armed with some easy and incredible recipes dealing with YSlow, Page Speed, Siege, Apache bench, Apache configuration, php.ini optimization, and caching with APC or Memcached. The work procedure behind the wall is explained in an easy manner so that both novice and experienced developers can benefit from it. This book also has some recipes that are not only useful for Magento but also for any other LAMP-based project.

A practical guide to take your Magento store to the next level by developing powerful modules and extensions

<b>What you will learn from this book :</b>
- Write custom modules and widgets for Magento to make your site look and behave just like you want it to
- Build a new Base 64.php plugin that handles the cryptography for Magento while you install Magento in PHP 5.3.X without the mcrypt module
- Add a LIghtbox 2 tool on your store and tweak its libraries to display images as per your requirements
- Integrate the Facebook Like plugin in Magento to enable users to making connections to your pages and share content back to friends on Facebook with just one click
- Create a new database connection that would work on any database and write an SQL query against the Magento database using a singleton method
- Prevent CSRF, XSS, DDoS attacks in Magento by customizing Magento code
- Write Unit Tests with PHPUnit for Magento
- Optimize database, php.ini, caching, and web server configuration
- Replicate the Magento database with a master-slave setup by tweaking the database configuration file and configuring the MySQL servers accordingly

<b>Who this book is written for</b>
If you are a PHP developer or a software engineer, novice or experienced, interested in achieving high impact in a fast-paced development environment and want to boost your PHP/Magento development skills to the next level then this book is for you.

No prior experience with Magento is required but basic knowledge of PHP is needed.