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As you probably know by now, Google is Using site speed in web search ranking. And I couldn’t agree more: speed is important for your site, and not only for Google but mainly for the User Experience (UX) on your site. Research from Google and Microsoft shows that slower websites convert less and that the [...]

The Magento Profiler is used to identify performance problems on the server side.  The Profiler can help you find PHP functions which use up too much CPU or functions with slow database queries.
These problems will first be noticed if you have high load on your server. Apache processes can be seen using “top”, where you [...]

Some time, you meet this 404 error after upgrade you magento website, or even fresh installation. Your frontend running smooth but you can not access your backend. Do the following ways to bring your backend accessible. One at a time, if problem fixed, it's not necessary to do anothers.

Still searching a best way to intergrate your magento with wordpress, you can have it done in a few small steps, no more headache. Try Fishpig’s Magento/WordPresss Integration Extension, and you can make your blog run with magento.
In this tutorial, we have:
- Magento installed in root folder (e.g., /public_html/)
- Wordpress installed in a subfolder (e.g [...]

Originally, as a PHP programmer, if you wanted to collect together a group of related variables you had one choice, the venerable Array. While it shares a name with C's array of memory addresses, a PHP array is a general purpose dictionary like object combined with the behaviors of a numerically indexed mutable array.

In other languages the choice isn't so simple. You have multiple data structures to chose from, each offering particular advantages in storage, speed and semantics. The PHP philosophy was to remove this choice from the client programmer and give them one useful data structure that was "good enough".

All of this is galling to a certain type of software developer, and PHP 5 set out to change the status quo by offering built-in classes and interfaces that allow you to create your own data structures.

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In the first ORM article we told you there were two kinds of Models in Magento. Regular, or "simple" Models, and Entity Attribute Value (or EAV) Models. We also told you this was a bit of a fib. Here's where we come clean.

ALL Magento Models inherit from the Mage_Core_Model_Abstract / Varien_Object chain. What makes something either a simple Model or an EAV Model is its Model Resource. While all resources extend the base Mage_Core_Model_Resource_Abstract class, simple Models have a resource that inherits from Mage_Core_Model_Mysql4_Abstract, and EAV Models have a resource that inherits from Mage_Eav_Model_Entity_Abstract

If you think about it, this makes sense. As the end-programmer-user of the system you want a set of methods you can use to talk to and manipulate your Models. You don't care what the back-end storage looks like, you just want to get properties and invoke methods that trigger business rules.

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Great news for customers and developers, full page cache is now come natively with magento community version 1.5.0.1, check it out yourself.

Magento Enterprise Edition already come with full page cache, and this time Magento Community Edition have it.

On any fast paced software development project, the task of keeping the development and production databases in sync become a sticky wicket. Magento offers a system to create versioned resource migration scripts that can help your team deal with this often contentious part of the development process.

In the ORM article we created a model for a weblog post. At the time, we ran our CREATE TABLE statements directly against the database. This time, we'll create a Setup Resource for our module that will create the table for us. We'll also create an upgrade script for our module that will update an already installed module. The steps we'll need to take are

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The implementation of a "Models Tier" is a huge part of any MVC framework. It represents the data of your application, and most applications are useless without data. Magento Models play an even bigger role, as they typically contain the "Business Logic" that's often relegated to the Controller or Helper methods in other PHP MVC frameworks.

Traditional PHP MVC Models

If the definition of MVC is somewhat fuzzy, the definition of a Model is even fuzzier. Prior to the wide adoption of the MVC pattern by PHP developers, data access was usually raw SQL statements and/or a SQL abstraction layer. Developers would write queries and not think too much about what objects they were modeling.

In this day and age, raw SQL is mostly frowned upon, but many PHP frameworks are still SQL centric. Models will be objects that provide some layer of abstraction, but behind the scenes developers are still writing SQL and/or calling SQL like abstraction methods to read and write-down their data.

Other frameworks eschew SQL and take the Object Relational Mapping (ORM) approach. Here, a developer is dealing strictly with Objects. Properties are set, and when a save method is called on the Object, the data is automatically written to the database. Some ORMs will attempt to divine object properties from the database, others require the user to specify them in some way, (usually in an abstract data language such as YAML). One of the most famous and popular implementations of this approach is ActiveRecord.

This definition of ORM should suffice for now, but like everything Computer Science these days, the strict definition of ORM has blurred over the years. It's beyond the scope of this article to settle that dispute, but suffice it say we're generalizing a bit.

Magento Models

It should be no surprise that Magento takes the ORM approach. While the Zend Framework SQL abstractions are available, most of your data access will be via the built in Magento Models, and Models you build yourself. It should also come as no surprise that Magento has a highly flexible, highly abstract, concept of what a Model is.

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Developers new to Magento are often confused by the Layout and View system. This article will take a look at Magento's Layout/Block approach, and show you how it fits into Magento MVC worldview.

Unlike many popular MVC systems, Magento's Action Controller does not pass a data object to the view or set properties on the view object. Instead, the View component directly references system models to get the information it needs for display.

One consequence of this design decision is that the View has been separated into Blocks and Templates. Blocks are PHP objects, Templates are "raw" PHP files (with a .phtml extension) that contain a mix of HTML and PHP (where PHP is used as a templating language). Each Block is tied to a single Template file. Inside a phtml file, PHP's $this keyword will contain a reference to the Template's Block object.

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