A Peek into Magento for the Uninitiated

Magento has remained the No.1 ecommerce platform ever since its inception in March 2008. Robust, flexible and Open Source, it is built on the Zend framework and delivers just what the customer wanted. The leader though it is, it’s not difficult to learn for all you need is sound knowledge of HTML and CSS and you will learn the rest with the Magento environment itself. 

 

The Building Blocks of Magento 

 

Now, to build an ecommerce website with Magento, you need to be familiar with the MVC pattern. The MVC (Model-View-Controller) design pattern is used to separate an application’s concerns with the model representing an object, the view representing the visualisation of data and the controller acting as both, essentially controlling the data flow.

But there are many other components apart from the models and the views in Magento. When you look at the code of Magento, you will find many modules without views. On the other hand, you will find additional modules such as ‘sql’, ‘helper’ etc. What you need to understand here is that Magento has its own set of modules each having their own M’s and V’s and C’s. These modules create the separate portions inside a typical Magento page replete with the headers, links, footers, mini-carts, and so on. 

 

The Magento code structure is extremely well-designed in the sense that there exists a clear distinction between the ‘core’ code and community ‘third-party’ code. What does that mean for you? This means that you can install third party extension and modules without any fear of it impacting your site’s essential look and feel.

Now, with this Magento is able to achieve some great features such as product comparison, CMS system for static pages, layered navigation, multistore feature and much more. It is able to achieve all this with its superior API integration that other ecommerce platforms still have a lot to learn from. As to how Magento does this, wait till the next article!