Mastering Magento 2 - Second Edition

Book description

Maximize the power of Magento 2 to create productive online stores

About This Book

  • Updated for Magento 2, this book offers a comprehensive coverage of all the new features of Magento to build modern online stores
  • Exploit little-known techniques to extend, tune, and manage your Magento installation
  • Detailed coverage to make your store run faster, better, and more productively

Who This Book Is For

This book is for web designers, developers, or e-commerce store-owners who design or manage Magento stores for their clients and want to gain an in-depth understanding of the various features of Magento 2.

What You Will Learn

  • Discover what makes Magento 2 different - and even more powerful
  • Develop strategies to create multi-store environments
  • Find out how to create themes and extend the functionality of Magento 2
  • Create sound development practices to insure code integrity and security
  • Know the why, as well as the how, behind using Magento 2

In Detail

The long-awaited release of the world's most popular online solution, Magento 2, is now out with an all new interface and several enhancements. This book offers you advanced guidance on managing, optimizing, and extending your store while taking advantage of the new features of Magento 2.

This is a comprehensive guide to using the all new features and interface of Magento 2 to build, extend, and design online stores. From planning your Magento installation through to advanced techniques designed to make your store as successful as possible, this book is your roadmap to managing your Magento store. Focusing on Magento's Community version, the book covers everything from creating and managing multiple stores to fine-tuning Magento for speed and performance. You'll learn how to manage categories, products, design themes, extensions, and more.

Style and Approach

This book will be a straightforward guide that will dive deep into both aspects of developing and administering beautiful and secure stores.

Get a firm idea of the different tools that the latest version has to offer to ensure the best customer experience.

Table of contents

  1. Mastering Magento 2 Second Edition
    1. Table of Contents
    2. Mastering Magento 2 Second Edition
    3. Credits
    4. About the Authors
    5. About the Reviewer
    6. www.PacktPub.com
      1. eBooks, discount offers, and more
        1. Why subscribe?
    7. Preface
      1. What this book covers
      2. What you need for this book
      3. Who this book is for
      4. Conventions
      5. Reader feedback
      6. Customer support
        1. Errata
        2. Piracy
        3. Questions
    8. 1. Planning for Magento
      1. Defining your scope
        1. Project requirements
          1. Requirements checklist
        2. Planning for users
          1. Staff
          2. Customers
        3. Assessing technical resources
      2. Technical considerations
        1. Hosting provider
        2. In-house hosting
          1. Servers
        3. The best of both worlds
          1. Setting up a local test installation
      3. Global-Website-Store methodology
        1. Global
        2. Website
        3. Store
      4. Planning for multiple stores
        1. Using multiple domains for effective market segmentation
        2. Using multiple businesses to keep finances separate
        3. Using multiple languages to sell globally
      5. Summary
    9. 2. Installing Magento 2
      1. How hosting effects installation
        1. Understanding types of hosting
        2. Successful hosting guidelines
        3. Avoiding the PCI headache
      2. Keys to a successful installation
        1. Avoid the bleeding edge
        2. Take your time
        3. Install the sample data
      3. Setting up Magento stores
        1. Planning your categories
        2. Disabling the cache
        3. Set up websites, stores, and store views
        4. Nginx versus Apache
          1. Configuring Apache
            1. Modifying the .htaccess file
            2. Temporary URLs
            3. Modifying the virtual host declaration
          2. Configuring Nginx
            1. Modifying the nginx.config file
            2. Modifying the index.php file
        5. Configuring Magento
          1. Configuring base URLs
        6. Using localization to sell globally
          1. Language files
          2. Manually translating labels
        7. Converting currencies
          1. It begins with the base currency
          2. Let Magento automatically convert currencies
      4. Strategies for backups and security
        1. Backend backups
        2. File structure backups
        3. Keep it secure
      5. Summary
    10. 3. Managing Products
      1. Catalogs and categories
        1. Creating categories
          1. General information tab
          2. Display Settings tab
          3. Custom Design tab
          4. Category Products tab
        2. Re-ordering categories
        3. Special categories
      2. Managing products the customer focused way
        1. The simple product type
        2. The complex product types
          1. Configurable product type
          2. Grouped product type
          3. Bundle product type
          4. Virtual product type
          5. Downloadable product type
        3. Attributes and attribute sets
          1. Attribute types
            1. Selecting an attribute type
            2. Creating an attribute
              1. Attribute properties
              2. Manage options
              3. Manage Swatch
              4. Advanced attribute properties
              5. Managing labels
              6. Storefront properties
          2. Creating attribute sets
      3. Creating products
        1. The new product screen
          1. Creating a simple product
          2. Creating a configurable product
          3. Creating a grouped product
          4. Creating bundled products
          5. Creating a downloadable product
          6. Creating a virtual product
      4. Managing inventory
        1. Low stock notifications
        2. Product reports
      5. Pricing tools
        1. Pricing by customer group
        2. Quantity-based pricing
      6. Autosettings
      7. Related products, up-sells, and cross-sells
        1. Related products
        2. Upsell products
        3. Cross-sell products
      8. Importing products
        1. The shortcut to importing products
      9. Summary
    11. 4. Designs and Themes
      1. The Magento theme structure
        1. Theme files and directories
      2. The concept of theme inheritance
        1. Configuring a parent theme in theme.xml
        2. Overriding static files
        3. Overriding theme files
      3. Default installation of design packages and themes
      4. Installing third-party themes
      5. Inline translations
      6. Working with theme variants
        1. Assigning themes
        2. Applying theme variants
        3. Scheduling a theme variant
      7. Customizing themes
      8. Customizing layouts
        1. Expertly controlling layouts
          1. Using the reference tag to relocate blocks
        2. Customizing the default layout file
      9. Summary
    12. 5. Configuring to Sell
      1. The sales process
        1. The Magento sales process
        2. Managing backend orders
          1. Convert orders to invoices
          2. Creating shipments
      2. Payment methods
        1. PCI compliance
        2. Classes of payment systems
          1. Off-site payment systems
            1. Pros
            2. Cons
          2. On-site payment systems
            1. Pros
            2. Cons
        3. PayPal
          1. PayPal all-in-one payment solutions
          2. PayPal payment gateways
          3. PayPal Express
        4. Braintree
        5. Check/money order
        6. Bank transfer payment
        7. Cash on delivery payment
        8. Zero subtotal checkout
        9. Purchase order
        10. Authorize.net direct post
      3. Shipping methods
        1. Origin
        2. Handling fee
        3. Allowed countries
        4. Method not available
        5. Free shipping
        6. Flat rate
        7. Table rates
          1. Quantity- and price-based rates
          2. Save your rate table
          3. Table rate settings
          4. Upload rate table
        8. Carrier methods
      4. Managing taxes
        1. How Magento manages taxes
        2. Creating tax rules
        3. Importing tax rates
        4. Value added tax configurations
        5. Setup VAT taxes
      5. Transactional e-mails
        1. Create a new header template
        2. Assign e-mail header and footer
        3. Create new e-mail template
      6. Summary
    13. 6. Managing Non-Product Content
      1. The Magento content management system
        1. Pages
          1. Customizing a CMS page
            1. Modifying the Home Page layout
            2. The Content screen
          2. Creating a CMS page
        2. Using blocks and widgets
          1. Adding a page link
            1. Using WYSIWYG
            2. Using HTML
            3. Using a widget
          2. Using variables
            1. Creating your own variables
          3. Using widgets to insert content onto site pages
      2. Summary
    14. 7. Marketing Tools
      1. Customer groups
        1. Creating a customer group
      2. Promotions
        1. Creating a catalog price rule
        2. Creating cart price rules
          1. Adding the new rule
          2. Defining the rule's conditions
          3. Defining the rule's actions
          4. Modifying the rule's labels
          5. Generating coupon codes
          6. Testing the rule
      3. Newsletters
        1. Subscribing customers
        2. Creating newsletter templates
        3. Scheduling your newsletter
        4. Checking for problems
        5. Managing your subscribers
      4. Using sitemaps
        1. Adding a sitemap
      5. Optimizing for search engines
        1. Using meta fields for search engine visibility
        2. Meta fields in Magento
        3. SEO checklist
      6. Summary
    15. 8. Extending Magento
      1. Magento Connect
        1. Searching Magento Connect
        2. Why developers create free extensions
      2. The new Magento module architecture
      3. Extending Magento functionality with Magento plugins
      4. Building your own extensions
        1. Whether others have gone before
        2. Your extension files
          1. Step one
          2. Step two
          3. Step three
          4. Step four
          5. Step five
          6. Step six
      5. Summary
    16. 9. Optimizing Magento
      1. Exploring the EAV
        1. Entity
        2. Attribute
        3. Value
        4. Putting it all together
        5. The good and bad of EAV
        6. Making it flat
      2. Indexing and caching
        1. Indexing
          1. Flat or no flat
          2. Reindexing
        2. Caching
          1. Core caching
          2. Full page cache
          3. The impact of caching
          4. Managing caching
      3. Caching in Magento 2 – not just FPC
      4. Tuning your server for speed
        1. Deflation
        2. Enabling expires
        3. Increasing PHP memory
        4. Increasing the MySQL cache
        5. Using the Nginx server
        6. Using Varnish cache
        7. Using a CDN
      5. Summary
    17. 10. Advanced Techniques
      1. Setting up a staging environment
        1. A simple approach
        2. The basic staging setup
        3. Don't be tempted to skip
      2. Version control
      3. Magento cron
        1. Magento cron jobs
        2. Triggering cron jobs
        3. Tuning Magento's schedules
          1. Setting your frequency
          2. Creating compatible settings
      4. Backing up your database
        1. The built-in back-up
        2. Using MySQLDump
        3. Setting a cron for back-up
      5. Upgrading Magento
        1. Obtaining Magento Marketplace keys
        2. Upgrading your Magento installation
      6. Summary
    18. 11. Pre-Launch Checklist
      1. A word about scope
      2. System configurations
        1. SSL
        2. Base URLs
        3. Administrative base URL
        4. Reducing file download time
          1. Merging JavaScript files
          2. Merging CSS files
        5. Caching
        6. Cron jobs
        7. Users and roles
      3. Design configurations
        1. Transactional emails
        2. Invoices and packing slips
        3. Favicon
        4. Placeholder images
        5. 404 and error pages
      4. Search engine optimization
        1. Meta tags
        2. Analytics
        3. Sitemap
      5. Sales configurations
        1. Company information
        2. Store e-mail addresses
        3. Contacts
        4. Currency
        5. General sales settings
        6. Customers
        7. Sales emails
        8. Tax rates and rules
        9. Shipping
        10. Payment methods
        11. Newsletters
        12. Terms and conditions
        13. Checkout
      6. Product configurations
        1. Catalog
          1. Storefront panel
          2. Product reviews
          3. Product alerts
          4. Product alerts run settings
          5. Product image placeholders
          6. Recently viewed/compared products
          7. Price
          8. Layered navigation
          9. Category top navigation
          10. Search engine optimizations
          11. Catalog search
        2. RSS feeds
      7. Maintenance configurations
        1. Backups
      8. Summary
    19. Index

Product information

  • Title: Mastering Magento 2 - Second Edition
  • Author(s): Bret Williams, Jonathan Bownds
  • Release date: June 2016
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781785882364