Optimized Magento Modules

If you are presented with an option to select either Ferrari or Honda, you might go for Ferrari most definitely because it offers more power, more speed and also more glamour. But what if it eats 10 gallons of fuel an hour than what 3 gallons of fuel Honda takes in and also the associated costs. There are several factors which contribute to the judgement of optimal performance. Adapting to these factors and standards assures that you get better performance in a well arranged budget. Because if you are out of budget, your Ferrari remains parked in your garage.

To drive your Magento store in an efficient way, you need to look at many factors that will contribute to the optimized performance. Magento is the latest eCommerce platform which comes packed with fabulous and at initially somewhat complicated development architecture. This architecture is designed in a way that solves most problems to develop efficient plugins, as it is based on configuration based MVC (Model View Controller). In MVC, the work flow is sub divided into separate components such as models, views and controllers. Controllers are responsible for managing user requests like translating URLs to routers and perform dispatching (functions calling), they are not responsible to actually dive into the database and perform any query instead Models are used for this purpose. At the end Layout component is responsible to render the result to the user’s browser.

So developing Magento plugins in this way is highly optimized because you develop code separately for each component, no conflicts with each other, easy to manage, debug and to be able to upgrade at any time. The target is to develop a module which takes lesser resources and runs smoother. Below are few of the points that are necessary to develop optimized Magento modules.

Magento follows Zend framework and its programming requirements. An easy task is to see how a particular functionality has been implemented in core files to get an idea. Following these standards assures hassle-free code.

Instead of developing multiple queries, “Table Joins” should be used which will reduce your number of queries and greatly enhance the speed and resource utilization. Keep in mind that Magento also makes several queries whenever any page is loaded. So developing optimized query is a breath of your module.

JavaScript and Prototype:

Though many people like JQuery but keep in mind that loading additional libraries will add to more resource utilization. May be in future releases of Magento versions Prototype is eliminated but for all times working with default library will do much better than loading additional.

Custom Configuration Options:

While developing a Magneto extension, it is much wise to allow maximum configuration of the module.

Not all features are required at all times and hence they might need to be turned off. Your customers should be able to enable or disable any feature which will certainly optimize the performance.

Do not mess up code by implementing functions and classes within controller files (classes). It definitely will work but is not an optimized standard. Magento has introduced folder hierarchy in a rock solid structure. Put all the functionality in block files and call them from controller classes.

These are some of the points if followed will produce efficient results for you. It will help you to easily debug or extend the functionality. If you are producing resource consuming products in a market, you will definitely lose the race shortly. Better plan ahead for optimized development structure to push your place up in the market.