Elias Interactive ask’s: What’s your biggest Magento pet peeve?

Even with the screencasts and guides Magento/Varient Posted I could instantly tell the designer or HTML/CSS monkey’s didn’t have much say in the structure. It was the Programmers who overly structured the templating system. It takes me atleast 5-7 folders to follow through JUST to get to a folder to upload images, edit a CSS file or even modify the templates themselves. I understand the needs for this sort of thing with Magento’s complex backend functionality but there is such a thing as being to Organized it slows down development processes. I believe the saying goes if your desk isn’t messy your not being very productive!

What I did was take a good base template to start with and started deconstructing the internal workings as much as I could grasp at the time to learn more of how Magento is building the pages up. This was before a lot of the community was asking for a very basic stripped down template that we could use as a base for creating new templates. I believe you can find it on MagentoConnect.

There is also a nifty feature that is somewhat hidden in Magento’s Admin that will display the Block controllers and the actual .phtml file that make up any page you are looking at. You can find this under the Admin area -> System -> Configuration. Select the “Current Configuration Scope:” to the left. <- This is an important step to get to this feature. After you have selected the Store of your choice proceed to the “Developer” Subsection to the left you’ll notice a “Template Path Hints” field with a drop down to enable/disable it. Coming from X-Cart and utilizing Smarty’s Debug Console popup to find template files and variables used I found this most useful feature for designers.

Templates are a headache but try extending the code base with notepad.exe You’ll quickly become overwhelmed with Magento/Varien OOP Voodoo, and PHP docs as nice is it is still doesn’t cut the mustard of someone really documenting methods, attributes, classes, etc. like most other great API’s especially from Google or PHP themselves.

Eventually I found it was time to get a more up-to-date IDE and decided to go with ZendStudio, and I haven’t looked back, the code completion was Exactly what I was missing coming from Micro$ofts Visual Studio. I believe others are also using Eclipse as an IDE to extend Magento more easily.

The other gripe I have with Magento is its speed, its defiantly a luxury car and not some sports car! I know Magento has mentioned improving the speed in future versions as one of their main focuses but for now we are left with server tweaks and hardware upgrades to make things run smoother. I believe I read somewhere that some pages can take as much as 20mb of the servers memory to generate if its not cached.

Besides all of these items I am all for Magento and think its simply the best E-Commerce package to date. I’ve used quite a few in the past and all lacked in features or were a PITA to upgrade!

Here’s is the original blog posting to Elias Interactive’s post:
What’s your biggest Magento pet peeve? | Elias Interactive.