What Tools and Extensions are Critical for Magento Development? [closed]

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4609010

  •  25-09-2019
  •  | 
  •  

Question

We're building a nice little community of Magento experts here. I'm curious what Magento extensions and other software tools (IDEs, editors, etc.) everyone is using to help with their development projects?

Both free and commercial tools are more than welcome.

Was it helpful?

Solution

Personal developer surely need

  • PHP IDE (Zend Studio, NetBeans or PhpStorm)
  • LAMP/WAMP on personal development machine
  • X-Debug as a must
  • MySQL client (HeidiSQL)
  • Firefox + FireBug as main browser; Safari 4/5, Chrome, Opera 10, IE 6/7/8/9
  • SSH Client (PuTTY)
  • FTP Client and File manager over SSH (WinSCP)
  • Manuals for PHP, MySQL, Javascript and Prototype
  • Bug tracking system (Jira)
  • SVN to keep own revisions and be in touch with future Magento release from at magentocommerce.com
  • KDiff3 for SVN better sources comparison
  • Image Viewer (XnView) to work with images from time to time
  • Password keeper (PwSafe) for all hostings, mysqls and other passwords
  • Internet access for Q&A, Magento forums and tutorials

No custom extensions are really necessary, X-Debug and own experience help a lot. For beginners Commerce Bug will be helpful.

OTHER TIPS

This list keeps getting longer the more I think about it!

Tools

Common Magento Extensions

  • CommerceBug

    the following extensions are available through Magento-connect

  • HM_DeveloperToolbar

  • ModuleCreator
  • Fontis_Recaptcha
  • Fontis_Australia
  • Tangkoko_CmsSearch

  • TBT_Enhancedgrid and TBT_MassRelater

    occassional use, but recommended:

  • Unirgy_Giftcert and Unirgy_StoreLocator

  • Yoast_Filter
  • Netzarbeiter_GroupSwitcher

  • PhpStorm - I used Intellij Idea for Java development so this came naturally, The biggest thing I love about this that I have been wanting for PHP is conditional break points. Huge for Magento when you are trying to debug something in autoload or something where there are hundreds of calls to a method.

  • Netbeans - I used to use this before PhpStorm, I feel its much faster to learn and configure then Eclipse, I know most people I work with use Ecplise and SVN I think sucks in it compared to these last two and other tools such as find usages and what not

  • I'm on a Mac but on 10.5 so I used Entropy php, but when others in on Snow Leopard come to work I suggest they use Mamp Pro, very powerful for local environment setup. Super quick to get virtual hosts and what not setup, can even use multiple ports and everything.

  • Navicat Premium - For database management

  • Textmate for quick edits and other types of projects

  • Transmit for quick ftp if not using command line, probably the best FTP client ever created

JetBrains PHP Storm 2.0 EAP Builds (They must of named their IDE after you Alan ;) )

Zend Server CE /w Zend Debugger

HeidiSQL

TortoiseSVN

Linux, vim, and custom command line tools to make life easy. Whenever possible, when making changes (like adding model override XML, for instance), I prefer to create a command line tool to do it for me. vim is nice because it is on darn near every server ever, so debugging remotely is about as comfortable as locally. As for linux, the idea of developing without ack/grep and a proper shell is just too much to bear.

Development

Local setup is MacBook, Coda, MAMP, Navicat to manage MySQL, Git or SVN depending on project.

Staging area is on my development server (LAMP) or on client-provided hosting.

For starting projects I have a base template and module set that includes most of what I put into projects.

Modules

Just started using Alan's Commerce Bug. I plan on looking into MageTool soon.

I use Unirgy's Gift Cert and Store Locator often.

Commerce Bug extension from Allan Storm :-)

Aptana/Eclipse for IDE

UltraEdit for quick edits

Wamp

Xdebug

Zend Studio or EditPlus

Subversion/svnmerge.py

PHPDoc

PHPUnit

Jira/Confluence for task/bug tracking and project specifications

You can see how to work with Magento using ZendStudio here, in Magento Webinars Archive

I've been using Zend Studio on Ubuntu for a while now and love it. Combining a powerful IDE and command line tools (grep, etc...) has my vote.

On a side note, I've been working on a Magento extension named "Advanced Developer Tools". I use it (a lot!) to get info about blocks and edit XML and PHTML files by clicking on blocks. It's still beta though.

  1. Commerce Bug by Alan Storm is a Must for all developers.

  2. Developer Toolbar by MGT is another very good tool for Magento analysis.

  3. Netbeans/PHP Storm IDE is recommended.

  4. Git.

  5. LAMP/WAMP.

  6. PhpMyAdmin/ PHPMiniAdmin.

  7. Mage::log and exception Log effective use.

  8. Magento Path Hints.

  9. New Relic.

  10. SQL query log by modifying PDO file.

  11. Module that displays what all blocks delivered from Cache.

  12. Inbuilt Magento Profiler.

Licensed under: CC-BY-SA with attribution
Not affiliated with StackOverflow
scroll top