Magento is one of the most successful open source e-commerce platforms out there today. It is powerful enough to build small or enterprise businesses.
The first stable version of Magento was released in 2008. Since the beginning, lots of merchants have chosen Magento to be their platform with great success.
The current global ecosystem of Magento includes 240+ merchants, 300+ partners, and 4500+ certified developers, and this number is growing on a daily basis.
Over the last few years, e-commerce has changed a lot, so Magento announced a new platform that will support this. This new era of commerce is called Magento 2.
Magento 2 offers enhanced performance and scalability. The new platform is built from scratch to enable lots of new features. It supports both B2C and B2B businesses, and will serve the best omnichannel shopping experiences to their shoppers.
This book will provide you with the necessary insights to get a better understanding on what is needed to build such a powerful commerce platform.
The book is divided into several recipes, which show you which steps to take to complete a specific action. In each recipe, we have a section that explains how everything works.
It will cover installing a Magento 2 website, configuring your categories and products, performance tuning, creating a theme, developing a module, and much more.
At the end of this book, you will gain the knowledge to start building a success website.
Chapter 1, Installing Magento 2 on Apache and NGINX, is a totally different ballgame compared to Magento 1. Where Magento 1 could be installed through FTP or SSH, Magento 2 is installable only via the command-line interface for an experienced webmaster.
Chapter 2, Magento 2 System Tools, explains how to install Magento 2 via the command shell. Magento released a new powerful tool to manage and install sample data, reindex your database, back up your site, or flush your caches, which are just a few of the options.
Chapter 3, Enabling Performance in Magento 2, explains how to configure different types of caching options. In Magento 2, the Full Page Cache (FPC) can be handled by Varnish to give your store a performance boost. There are also external services that you can use as a cache.
Chapter 4, Creating Catalogs and Categories, shows you one of the major elements of a Magento store before creating products. Creating the correct product type including attributes is an important step in setting up a Magento store.
Chapter 5, Managing Your Store, covers setting up the correct tax rules, configuring an inventory, and creating customer groups.
Chapter 6, Creating a Magento 2 Theme, discusses the Magento 2 blank theme and how to use the fallback to create seasonal variations. It also explains how the new theme is set up and where files are stored.
Chapter 7, Creating Magento 2 Extensions – the Basics, contains the basic functions required to use extensions in a Magento 2 installation. It contains a brief introduction to new methods introduced in the Magento 2 framework and examples on how to create basic functions.
Chapter 8, Creating Magento 2 Extensions – Advanced, explains how to use advanced features in extensions for Magento 2. It also includes how to add unit/functional tests as this is a new requirement for extensions listed on the new Magento Connect.