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Magento 2 Development Essentials

Chapter 1. Magento Fundamentals

Magento is a highly customizable e-commerce platform and content management system. Magento is one of the most used e-commerce systems to create online stores around the world by providing management of inventory, orders, customers, payments, and much more. It has a powerful scalable architecture.

Are you ready to start on the world of Magento development?

First of all, we will need to set up our environment. In this book, we will cover how to set up a local environment. It is very important to have this local ecosystem development to work smoothly and in an agile way.

In every chapter of this book, we will work with a mini project. It's kind of a sprint to learn the path. In this chapter, our mission is to create a work environment and understand the basic concepts of Magento (http://magento.com/).

After setting up the environment, you'll study the Magento folder structure and work on a basic Model View Controller (MVC) software architecture pattern and Magento basic setup.

Basically, we will work on this chapter with the following topics:

XAMPP PHP development environment
Magento e-commerce system
Magento system structure
Magento basic setup

Are you ready for fun some? Let's go!

XAMPP installation

First of all, let's access the XAMPP website on https://www.apachefriends.org/.

XAMPP has three distinct versions for different operating systems (OS): Windows, Linux, and OS X. Choose your preferred version to download, and start the installation process.

XAMPP for Windows installation

XAMPP for Windows has three different kinds of installation files:

Installer: This is a classic Windows installation method
Zip: This method uses compressed files to install manually
7zip: This method uses compressed files to install manually

The (.exe) installer is the most popular process to install. Download it and execute to start the installation process, shown as follows:

You can skip FileZilla FTP Server, Mercury Mail Server, and Tomcat for our installation purposes but feel free to consult Apache Friends Support Forum for further information at https://community.apachefriends.org.
On XAMPP, we have the option to use Bitnami (https://bitnami.com/xampp), but for learning purposes, we will install Magento in a classic way.
Complete the installation by pressing the Finish button.
In order to start XAMPP for Windows, you can execute xampp-control.exe and start the Apache web server.
To test if everything is working, type http://localhosturl in your favorite web browser. You will see the XAMPP start page:

XAMPP for Linux installation

XAMPP for Linux has two main versions of installation files:

32-bit version
64-bit version

Choose the file according to your architecture and follow these steps:

Change the permissions to the installer:
```
chmod 755 xampp-linux-*-installer.run
```
Run the installer:
```
sudo ./xampp-linux-*-installer.run
```
XAMPP is now installed below the /opt/lampp directory.
To start XAMPP, execute this command on terminal:
```
sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start
```
To test if everything is working, type the http://localhost URL in your favorite web browser. You will see the XAMPP start page:

XAMPP for OS X installation

To install XAMPP for OS X, you simply need to follow these steps:

Download the DMG image file.
Open the image file to start the installation process.
The steps are pretty much the same as Windows installation.
To test if everything is working, type the http://localhost URL in your favorite web browser. You will see the XAMPP start page:

The XAMPP htdocs folder is the docroot folder of your server. Everything that you save on htdocs can be accessed via any browser. For example, if you save index.php inside the htdocs root, you can access this script by entering http://localhost/index.php. If you save your file in the packt folder, you can access it by http://localhost/packt/index.php. Piece of cake!

Magento

Magento is an open source content management system for e-commerce websites. It's one of the most important e-commerce systems, which has grown fast since its launch in 2008.

Basically, Magento works with two different types of Magento: Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE). In this book, we will cover CE.

On a study provided by aheadWorks (https://aheadworks.com/) in October 2014, Magento CE has taken the leading position among examined e-commerce platforms.

Now, we have solid concepts about "where we are going". It's very important to have solids concepts about every aspect that you are working on in this moment. Globally, e-commerce shows a remarkable potential market and Magento professionals are welcome.

Magento installation

First of all, we need to create a user account on the Magento website (http://www.magento.com) to download Magento CE. Click on the top-menu link My Account and after clicking the button labeled Register, fill out the form and confirm your registration.

Once registered, you gain access to download Magento CE. You can access the Products | Open Source/CE and VIEW AVAILABLE DOWNLOADS menus.

On this page, we have three important options:

Full Release (ZIP with no sample data): This is a complete download of the last and stable Magento version
Full Release with Sample Data (ZIP with sample data): This is important to create example products to our store for testing.
Download with Composer: This is the dependency management installation tool

Choose the Full Release with Sample Data (ZIP with sample data) option for downloading Magento. Extract the compressed files in the XAMPP htdocsfolder and rename the folder to packt.

Note

Remember to start Apache and MySQL services on the XAMPP panel before the installation.

Before starting the Magento installation, we'll need to create a new MySQL database instance to store the Magento data. phpMyAdmin is a MySQL web app to manage your database and can be accessed at http://localhost/phpmyadmin/.

Click on the Databases menu and the Create database option to create the packt database.

Now, let's start our Magento installation. On your browser, access http://localhost/packt/setup.

By now, you will see this installation page on your browser:

Let's start the Magento installation by following these steps:

Readiness Check: Check the environment for the correct PHP version, PHP extensions, file permissions, and compatibility.
Add a Database: Fill the database form with your connection information. By default, you can follow the suggestions given here:
Web Configuration: Enter you store address and admin address here:
Customize Your Store: In this step you provide the time zone, currency, and language information:
Create an Admin Account: Enter with personal login information and set the admin address to packt-admin.

After all these steps, we are done! Congratulations! We have our first Magento installation!

You can access your new site by accessing the URL at http://localhost/packt:

And you can access the admin area by accessing the URL at http://localhost/packt/admin-packt:

For more information about Magento installation, access http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/install-gde/bk-install-guide.html.

Magento MVC architecture

MVC is an architectural software pattern that works with three different but interconnected parts. Its principal mission is to abstract the development work into interdependent layers providing the best practices to documentation and organization of software projects.

The Magento e-commerce solution is written with the PHP Zend framework, which is one of the most powerful PHP frameworks. For more information, access http://framework.zend.com/.

Magento is a configuration-based MVC System. For example, when you develop a module (we will check this in the next chapters), besides creating new files and classes to your module, you need to also create a config.xml file. This file contains all the configuration data for Magento module. These practices abstract some important information that you can easily edit to set the module as you need.

In this book, we will cover only the very basic Magento software architecture concepts, but it's highly recommended that you to study more software design patterns, especially in our case MVC software architecture needs to be understood well to best experience the field of software development.

Key benefits

Create unique solutions for Magento 2 by developing and implementing solutions, themes, and extensions

Be proficient in the main functionalities, resources, and system structure of Magento 2

Get to grips with this practical and hands-on guide to raise your web development skills to the next level

Description

Magento is the e-commerce software and platform trusted by the world's leading brands. Used by thousands of merchants for their transactions worth billions, it provides the flexibility to customize the content and functionality of your website. By strengthening your fundamentals in Magento development, you can develop the best solutions and take advantage of the growing market. This fast-paced tutorial will provide you with skills you need to successfully create themes, extensions, and solutions to Magento 2 projects. This book begins by setting up Magento 2 before gradually moving onto setting the basic options of the Sell System. You will take advantage of Search Engine Optimization aspects, create design and customize theme layout, develop new extensions, and adjust the Magento System to achieve great performance. By sequentially working through the steps in each chapter, you will quickly explore all the features of Magento 2 to create a great solution. With ample examples and a practical approach, this book will ensure your success with this astonishing e-commerce management system.

What you will learn

[*] Install and set up the Magento Ecosystem [*] Choose the best options for Magento’s Sell System features [*] Work with Search Engine Optimization in Magento [*] Create and customize themes for Magento [*] Develop extensions for new Magento functionalities [*] Package extensions to publish in the Magento Connect network [*] Create Magento solutions for mobile devices [*] Carry out performance adjustments to speed up your Magento system

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