Many developers think of making their lives easier by relying on tools to extend their competency. Magento is a complex system and especially for beginners development for the system can get complex without proper tools. It can be beneficial for a beginning magento developer to dig through the thousands of lines of code that exists inside of the Magento core, but it is definitely not the most productive use of any developer’s time. Here we will examine some of most useful Magento development tools. So read through to find out what are the various Magento development tools.
Mgt Developer Toolbar Module
This is a free Magento tool which helps developers to understand what is going on in each request. It allows you to quickly clear toggle displaying block hints cache, and so on.
It is also capable of showing the blocks and layouts involved in building content of loaded models and collections, pages as well as controller action and params. It has also the ability to show profiler output. It is very useful for average level developers and beginner.
Magento Debug
This is another Magento debugging toolbar which has similar features to the Developer Toolbar, but has a different look and feel to it. It is up to the developers to decide which suits them better.
Magento PHPUnit Testing
This test allows you to find errors in rewrites, configuration problems and check if a module behaves properly with a set of incoming data. Scenarios and Code quality are easy to test with this extension.
Mage Tool
This tool allows you to automate common operations, such as creating a module, model, controller etc. It also allows for operations, such as re-indexing data and clearing cache. All of this is available from the command line
Easy Template Path Hints
This simple extension is useful to quickly turn on block hints by passing an additional parameter to the controller. You can avoid going to the backend and enabling the option explicitly by using it.
Firebug
Firebug extension is a must have for any web developer. Firebug is one of the most popular Firefox extensions which combine an html display with java console and css class selectors logging among other things. There are numerous plugins that extend the capability of firebug and you are losing out hugely if you are not using it.
Commerce Bug
Commerce Bug is placed on top of your local development magento installation and offers a plenty of information to you in menu.
- Controller locations and classes in the file system
- Module name
- Action Name and Id Parameters
- Models in use and their call order
- Collections which are in use and their call order
- Block classes, locations and templates
- Layout handles , translations , templates, layouts and skins in use
- Event hierarchy
- Observers , Observer classes and called methods
- Clear cache , Turn on Template Hints, Add Block Hints, Turn on Magento Logging and Custom Commerce bug logging.
CssUpdater
If you do a lot of modifications to css files for magento templateing and themeing cssUpdater is a very important. But if you are not familiar with css then don’t bother with this firebug extension.
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