Magento Supercharged Development Tools and Links

Posted in Development, Magento by B00MER

So I’ve been doing some reading up and researching on Magento lately, and found some links to articles and tools I think may be useful, so I’m sharing them with everyone. Enjoy!

Credits: A lot of these projects and articles are courtesy of these well known names in the Magento Community: Colin Mollenhour, Ashley Schroder, Alan Storm and Unirgy (Boris Gurvich).

Module Manager:
Creates symlinks between a mapped out file similar to a Makefile in Linux compiling that will create links where they need to be installed from the CLI via symlink making it easy to deploy and uninstall modules in Magento without touching the Core. It’s also Git friendly.
http://code.google.com/p/module-manager/

Module Manager for when svn:externals just doesn’t cut it:
How Module Manager can be used instead of svn:externals.
http://colin.mollenhour.com/2009/10/17/module-manager-for-when-svnexternals-just-doesnt-cut-it/

Magento Debug tool similar to Alan Storms ecommerce Bug:
Debug Tool with some nifty features – requires modman to install at the moment.
Now Available on Magento Connect.
https://github.com/madalinoprea/magneto-debug

MongoDB abstraction layer for Magento:
MongoDB is an open source Database that’s high performance, schema-free, document-oriented, with JSON encoded outputs. This is an abstraction layer for using MongoDB with Magento instead of MySQL.
http://github.com/colinmollenhour/magento-mongo

Wiz Magento CLI for developers:
Wiz is a CLI interface for Magento. It aims to provide useful functionality for developers and administrators in a powerful and scriptable CLI format.
https://github.com/molotovbliss/Wiz

uScaffold rapid prototyping modules:
Scaffolding is pretty common amongst Rails developers it’s a means of building a skeleton shell of a module based on some parameters.
http://unirgy.com/wiki/uscaffold?#uscaffold

Magento Design Patterns:
A list of design patterns that Magento currently utilizes:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5041473/magento-design-patterns

The EAV Data Model:
A good detailed article on how EAV works (…and yet I still hate it!)
http://techportal.ibuildings.com/2010/10/21/the-eav-data-model/

Alan storms Configuration Lint:
XML Configuration verification script, does a “light” job and isn’t extensive.
http://alanstorm.com/magento_config_lint

Magentos API with SOAP:
Quick read article to get you using Magentos API via SOAP, with some details on WHERE clauses, setup, etc.
http://www.yireo.com/tutorials/magento/magento-programming/629-connecting-to-magento-with-soap-part-1

CSS3 + HTML5 Boiler Plate for Magento:
HTML5 Boiler Plate on CSS3 For Magento, starting point for Magento Themes.
http://zeljkoprsa.com/magento-boilerplate-with-css3pie/

Speed testing for Magento with Seige:
Uses Seige to test a sites Magento speed (requires sitemap.xml)
http://www.magespeedtest.com/

Magento Development environments & deployment Ideas/tips:
The comments Kristof Fooman and Colin make are also good to read.
http://www.aschroder.com/2010/07/structuring-your-magento-project-for-engineering-not-hacking/

Possibly Related Posts:

• Getting Started with Magento
• Magento vs X-Cart
• Magento version 2.0 (X.Commerce) and eBay
• Book Review: Magento 1.4 Themes Design by PacktLib
• Magento modules post deployment uninstall & downgrading

05May2011