Finally - Magento Made Easy
If you aren't a licensed partner to get access to official Magento training, learning Magento is like feeling your way around the dark. You have to Google all day long and more often than not there are two or three ways to do something - which one is best?!
What if you could get a module that:
- Has beautiful and easy-to-access documentation showing you exactly how to do what you need.
- Cut your development for new modules in half because you don't have to figure out which classes to inject, objects to instantiate or repos to access?
- Was built to use the latest Magento standards, future-proofing your own work? No going back and fixing stuff after a new version release!
- Helps you to quickly on-board new Magento developers to your team because all the answers they have is answered in the module's documentation (how do I get a product by SKU, how do I get the current store ID, how do I custom attributes etc.)
I've started the basic outline for such a module and would love to hear if you would be as interested in this as I am? Let me know in the comments below.
TLDR; would you be interested in a Magento module that answers all the "how do I..." questions you have about Magento? It does all the heavy lifting in the backend and you only have to call one-liners to do everything you now manually have to figure out on a day-by-day basis.
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Yes, in general, Magento can be mastered in not a very long period of time. According to this manual (https://whidegroup.com/blog/how-to-speed-up-magento-2/) I managed to speed up my site by an order of magnitude
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That's great news and I like your initiative. I would need some help in working with Magento. I am new in this field and it is pretty hard to understand all the Magento features. Moreover, there is no one who can help me and I am studying by myself. When I have some misunderstandings I just try to find the answer on the Internet. For example, recently, I was looking for information about how to get and disable product reviews in Magento 2, and I found a good answer on a site. So, I would be interested in a Magento module where I could find answers and explanations for all the questions I have.
I used Magento before trying to setup an online shop and I only had bad experiences with it. The platforms seems a bit outdated and while trying to update to the newer Magento 2 the installation failed entirely. I created an issue on GitHub but it was closed even though other people had the same issues.
After that I switched to WooCommerce and the installation, interface and ease of use were orders of magnitude better.
I don't remember actually feeling the need of modules in Magento as the interface feels already so cluttered I had a hard time knowing what comes with it by default and what else should I get on top.
So, I only used Magento as a client before, but based on that I assume the creation of modules is even harder/more complex and that good tutorials and scaffolding for that would be useful.
That being said I do think Magento is an old platform that lost its way and I would personally not spend time ior money nvesting in tools for it.
Well I can give you some very recent updates. Magento woke up about 12 months ago and finally started a massive marketing campaign to build relationships with their development and client community. This includes all the amazing things that trendy systems like Salesforce have, like client profile targeting, AI etc.
As much grey hair as Magento has given me (especially starting out all alone a few years ago, having to learn everything myself) it is in no way outdated. Maybe the admin panel look and feel isn't very sexy, but it's powerful as hell .... IF... IF you know how to use it properly.
And that is the biggest problem I'm trying to solve for developers. It's a f@#%@ nightmare to just tell a dev 'build a new module for Magento'.
Looking at the trends graph I am a bit surprised that Magento is still doing as good as WooCommerce, but I assume they have a lot of big clients because of their more complex platform and longer market presence.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=Magento,WooCommerce,Shopify
Do you really want to make it a Magento module? Magento in development mode is quite slow, you know and if you mess up the config or DI you can’t even load it ;)
Unfortunately, onboarding Magento developers is not an easy process and requires big investment from both developer and employer. The best way to learn Magento is to dig through its code. No documentation can replace it. Surely your module can help newcomers cut some corners.. but that’s it. Once he will face a non-documented/ungoogleable issue/bug - he will spend days on it.. and at this point understanding of how to debug Magento will be much more helpful.
That being said I think you can’t really cut dev time “in half” by just looking up the answers :)
Wish you a good luck anyways. There’s never enough documentation for Magento :)
Hi and thanks for the reply!
Well if the aim is to make development faster I think it can still be valuable.
I mean, none of Magento's classes are actually documented. You don't know what methods you already have access to until you go and dig inside the core modules!
So imagine if I create documentation for my module with a Catalog section. You click on it and immediately you see all the functions you have access to. These are all the functions I call in my module to the various repos and classes of Magento's core modules. That way you don't have to go and scour the web and the core files, everything is centralized and immediately accessible.
What do you think?
Well, methods which are available through public interfaces should be enough in most cases. And IDE autocompletion is good enough to get a list of them. If you want to use some methods which are not exposed through interfaces, you better go check if there is a better way of architecting this.. meaning going and looking through the core files..
Also, how are you planning to keep it up to date and provide valid information for different versions of Magento? If you want an adequate coverage that looks like quite a lot of a manual work.
Oh and regarding the different versions - this is a legitimate question. I will probably have no choice but to release a version per Magento release because things tend to change. So I'll provide a version-specific module. Not ideal but trying to squeeze everything into one module will make it too messy.
I can also do a version check and then have subfolders for each version with the module files in there, so only the correct version will always be accessed.
Thanks for the feedback so far!
I agree that IDE's can help a lot, but I find many juniors on my team stuck at knowing what repo to import in the first place. And sure you only need to remember it once, maybe twice and then you know it the next time but the fact remains:
So imagine if there was nice documentation with a Catalog section. You click on it, it immediately shows you all the methods you can access, neatly organized in one class in my module that accesses all the various related places in Magento in the RIGHT WAY.
What do you think?