Since this blog mainly focuses on Magento. Lets get you familiar with magento introduction in this tutorial. i.e introduction to magento.Lets discuss What is Magento? Magento is the most powerful online e-commerce platform and is changing the face of e-commerce forever. 🙂
Introduction:
Magento is a feature-rich, professional open source e-commerce web application that was launched on March 31, 2008. Magento offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content and functionality of their online store. Magento’s intuitive administration interface contains content management, powerful marketing and merchandising tools to give merchants the ability to create sites that are fully fit their unique business needs, putting no constraints on business processes and flow.
Of course, you already know that. What you may not realize is Magento’s also an object-oriented PHP Framework that can be used to develop modern, dynamic web applications that tap into Magento’s powerful e-commerce features.
This is more of an introductory tutorial however I will try to briefly explain all the important features and aspects of magento.
Why to Use Magento?
- Magento is an open source E-commerce software.
- Magento is scalable and offers small organizations to build business.
- Magento enables searching and sorting of products in several ways.
- Magento easily integrates with many of the third-party sites which are needed to run effective E-commerce website.
Features
- Magento provides different payment methods such as credit cards, PayPal, cheques, money order, Google checkouts, etc.
- Magento enables shipping of products in one order to multiple addresses.
- Magento helps to manage the orders easily by using the admin panel.
- Magento provides order of product status and history of product. It also supports e-mail and RSS feeds.
- Magento supports multiple languages, different currencies and tax rates.
- Magento filters the products and displays in grid or list format.
- Magento makes it easy to browse the products. It has features such as image zoom-in and checking of stock availability.
- Magento has built-in SEO (Search Engine Optimization.
Advantages
- Magento is user friendly E-commerce software.
- Magento is compatible with smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.
- Magento provides multiple payment options, so every visitor can make payment based on their preferred payment gateway.
- Magento has many extensions which support the development of an online store.
Disadvantages
- Magento uses larger disk space and memory.
- Magento takes longer time to build the customized functionality.
- Magento is very slow compared to other E-commerce sites.
- Magento needs proper hosting environment. If the hosting environment is improper, the user can face many problems.
Furthermore lets discuss step-by-step procedure for Magento installation. Before installing Magento, you require the following system requirements.
system requirements
Database − MySQL 5.1 +
Web Server −
Apache 2.x
Nginx 1.7.x
Operating System − Cross-platform
Browser Support − IE (Internet Explorer 7), Firefox, Google chrome
SSL (Secure Socket Layer) − A valid security certificate is required for HTTPS
PHP Compatibility − PHP 5.4+
Architecture
Likewise we are going to discuss the architectural style of Magento, for implementing user interfaces.
The Magento architecture comes with Models, Views and Controllers.
User Request − The user sends a request to a server in the form of request message where web browsers, search engines, etc. act like clients.
View − View represents the data in particular format. It is the user interface which is responsible for displaying the response for user request. It specifies an idea behind the presentation of the model’s data to the user. Views are used to reflect “how your data should look like”.
Controller − The controller is responsible for responding to user input and perform interactions on the data model objects. It uses models to process the data and send responses back to the view.
Model − The model is responsible for managing the data of the application. It contains logic of the data and represents basic data object in the framework. It responds to request from the view and to the instructions from the controller to update itself.
Database − Database contains the information which is requested from the user. When the user requests data, view sends requests to the controller, the controller requests from the model and the model fetches the required information from the database and responds to the user.
WSDL − WSDL stands for Web Services Description Language. It is used for describing web services and how to access them.
Now magento 2 is the core e-commercep latofrm for development. So, i am not discussing here the versions of magento(magento 1). Futhermore, in other tutorials i will discuss the latest versions.
That’s it from this tutorial. I hope it serves the purpose.Furthermore please feel free to drop any suggestions or queries in comments section. That will definitely be highly appreciated.