Five Things I Learned on the Path to Magento Certification

February 4, 2013 By mattolsen,

As a developer at DO I was challenged this quarter to obtain my Magento Certification. For those that don't know, Magento Certified Developer Exams are "created by an Advisory Board of Magento's own developer gurus" and is a credential that helps to differentiate yourself from the pack. With that said here are some things I learned while studying for my certification:

The answer is always C
Umm...

One Thing I Didn't Learn on the Path to Magento Certification

How to write blog entries

OK... seriously though... Five Things I Learned on the Path to Magento Certification

When Magento core checks routers for a matching route, it always starts with Admin routes, then Standard routes, followed by CMS routes and finally Default routes. Most importantly, this means that Standard items like product and category pages will override CMS pages if they share the same name.
All that's required to register and configure a new entity capable of being saved and loaded from the database, are a few configuration settings in your module's config.xml, a model, a resource model, and, of course, a table to store the entity's data.
You can implement custom forms and data grids in Magento's admin interface by overriding the appropriate class(es). Define or modify a data grid by extending Mage_Adminhtml_Block_Widget_Grid and implementing the _prepareCollection() and _prepareColumns() functions. Create a standard Adminhtml form for a custom data model by implementing a sub-class of Mage_Adminhtml_Block_Widget_Form and declaring your module's block class prefix in your config.xml file.
You can change a configuration variable's scope by setting it's show_in_default, show_in_website and show_in_store properties in your module's system.xml.
Catalog target rules are used to render lists of additional products, such as related products, upsells and cross-sells, on the product page.

Matt Olsen is a Senior Web Developer at Digital Operative, he looks like Jesus and gets injured...a lot