Magento 2 Developers Guide: Harness the power of Magento 2 to extend and customize your online store

Harness the power of Magento 2 - The most recent version of the world's favourite e-Commerce platform for your online store

Key Features

• Set up, configure, and power up your Magento environment from development to production
• Master the use of Web API to communicate with the Magento system and create custom services
• Create custom modules from scratch to extend the core functionality of the Magento system

Book Description

Magento is one of the most exciting, flexible, and customizable e-commerce systems. It offers you an extensive suite of powerful tools for creating and managing an online store. After years of development, Magento 2 introduces itself with a strong emphasis on modularity, Web API's, automated testing and overall new technology stack platform. The long-awaited Magento 2 release introduces a whole new e-commerce platform to develop online stores. The all new Magento 2 architecture, Web APIs, and a host of other features are equally challenging to master as much as they are exciting to use.

This book will ease the learning curve by offering step-by-step guidance on how to extend the core functionality of your Magento 2 store.

This book is your one-stop guide to build and customize a quality e-commerce website from the latest version of one of the largest, fastest growing, and most popular e-commerce platforms-Magento 2.

We start off with an introduction to the fundamental concepts of Magento to give you a foundation to work from. We then move on to configure the development and basic production environment for Magento. After this, you'll get to grips with the major concepts and conventions that are new to the Magento 2 platform. We then delve deeper to get to the core of automated deployments, persisting data, writing data fixture scripts and applying various backend and frontend modifications. As we near the end of the book, you will learn to make API calls and write automated tests. Finally, you will be guided through building a full-blown helpdesk module from scratch.

By the end of this book, you will have learned a wide range of techniques to extend and customize your Magento 2 store to fit the requirements of your business.

What you will learn

• Set up the development and production environment of Magento 2
• Understand the new major concepts and conventions used in Magento 2
• Build a miniature yet fully-functional module from scratch to manage your e-commerce platform efficiently
• Write models and collections to manage and search your entity data
• Dive into backend development such as creating events, observers, cron jobs, logging, profiling, and messaging features
• Get to the core of frontend development such as blocks, templates, layouts, and the themes of Magento 2
• Use token, session, and Oauth token-based authentication via various flavors of API calls, as well as creating your own APIs
• Get to grips with testing Magento modules and custom themes, which forms an integral part of development

Table of Contents

1. Understanding the Platform Architecture
2. Managing the Environment
3. Programming Concepts and Conventions
4. Models and Collections
5. Using the Dependency Injection
6. Plugins
7. Backend Development
8. Frontend Development
9. The Web API
10. The Major Functional Areas
11. Testing
12. Building a Module from Scratch

Branko Ajzele is a husband, father of two, son, brother, author, and a software developer. He has a degree in electrical engineering. A lover of all things digital, he makes a living from software development. He hopes to find enough quality time some day to seriously dive into hobby electronics; he has his eye on Arduino and Raspberry Pi. He has years of hands-on experience with full-time software development and team management, and has specializing in e-commerce platforms. He has been working with Magento since 2008; he has been knee-deep in it since its very first beta version. Branko is regularly in touch with everything related to PHP, databases (MySQL/MongoDB), search/analytics (Solr/Elasticsearch), Node.js, and related technologies. He has a strong technical knowledge with an ability to communicate those technicalities frequently and clearly with a strong direction. He feels comfortable proposing alternatives to demands which he feels can be improved, even when this means pulling a late shift to meet the deadlines. He holds several respected IT certifications, such as Zend Certified Engineer (ZCE PHP), Magento Certified Developer (MCD), Magento Certified Developer Plus (MCD+), Magento Certified Solution Specialist (MCSS), and JavaScript Certified Developer. Instant E-Commerce with Magento: Build a Shop, Packt Publishing, was his first Magento related book that was oriented towards Magento newcomers. After writing this book, he wrote Getting Started with Magento Extension Development for developers. Currently, he works as a full-time contractor for Lab Lateral Ltd, an award-winning team of innovative thinkers, artists, and developers who specialize in customer-centric websites, digital consultancy, and marketing. He is the Lead Magento Developer and Head of Lab's Croatia office. He was awarded the E-Commerce Developer of the Year by Digital Entrepreneur Awards in October 2014 for his excellent knowledge and expertise in e-commerce development. His work is second to none. He is truly dedicated to helping the Lab Lateral Ltd team and his fellow developers across the world.