This is an era where most of the merchants have their stores on the Magento 2 hosting platform. So after you have understood all the basic programming concepts, you need to know about MVC architecture in Magento 2.
MVC (Model View Controller) is an application that separates the data access through model, the frontend interface with the View and the business logic with controller. Basically the MVC are of two types.
- Convention based: This type of MVC allows you to only follow the instructions provided by the core system to set up the module.
- Configuration based: Here you have to specify everything to your module’s config file before getting started.
Magento is a configuration based MVC, that is, you have to provide some kind of configurations before creating any module or extension. In the Magento system you will find controller, block and template files.
Don’t Modify the Magento’s Core Code
Never edit the core code of Magento that comes with the application, because these codes get changed by the Magento Developers whenever any change occur in the versions. Anything you will change in the core code will overwrite and your system will not work properly.
If you want to change something then use the plugins’ override interface preferences and event observers.
Still, if you think that your core code can improve Magento then please consider contributing via Git.
What is Magento Architecture
Before creating any module, you first need to know about the Magento 2 architecture. The things that you need to know about the Magento 2 architecture are listed below:
- Admin Pattern Library: These Pattern libraries are designed in such way that it develops gradually as the changes occurs to design the community.
- The core Magento Components: the three main components of Magento are Modules basic info that will communicate with the user that is the interface, Themes where you can change the look and feel of the storefront or Admin and Language Packages provides you the translations for the strings that appear on the storefront and Admin that helps you in internationalization(I18n) and localization.
- Magento Service Contracts: An administration contract is an arrangement of PHP interfaces that are characterized for a module. An administration contract incorporates information interfaces, which safeguard information uprightness, and administration interfaces, which conceal business logic from service requesters, for example, controllers, web servers, and different modules.
- Magento APIs: The framework that provides the facility to the developers and integrators to use the services of Magento.
The Extension Configurations
You have to make sure that your extension is configured correctly in its config file, otherwise your extension will not work as expected within Magento.
Know and Use Magento 2 Extension at its Max Advantage
Before using Magento 2 extensions, you need to know that there is a huge difference in Magento 2 and Magento 1. So be sure that you have studied all the capabilities and levels of the Magento 2 framework. These are some of the features of MVC in Magento 2
- In Magento 2 just implement the Validator Interface from Magento\Framework\Validator\ValidatorInterface rather than creating a custom from scratch
- Normally you instantiate a database that will be expensive and unneeded. So if you use Magento framework, it provides resource models for performing the SQL commands on your database.
- You should consider using Magento framework instead of Plow level PHP functionality.
- Rather than querying your database directly, you can use Collection class to retrieve a collections of the filtered values.
Class Initiation
Direct class initiation isn’t suggested since as a result the class is rewritten. If the class is made directly, any rewrites won’t be applied and it breaks Magento’s category rewrite capability. We have a tendency to encourage you to become conversant however we have a tendency to use dependency injection to induce associate instance of a category.
What is Dependency injection?
Dependency injection may be a package style pattern that implements inversion of management for partitioning dependencies. A dependency is associated object that may be used (a service). Associate injection is the passing of a dependency to a object that is dependent (a client) that may use it.
The MVC Pattern
First of all, it is really important that you make sure that your extension fully follows the MVC pattern. The things that you have to consider while verifying that your extension does not violate any of the principles are listed below.
- First you have to make sure that all of the HTML, CSS, XML and Javascript codes are in appropriate files
- The business logic, Configuration and the SQL all have to be implemented in the correct and appropriate places
- Use the recommended logic in a Block, Helper, Template, Controller or any Module
- Check the correctness of the module design
PHP_codeSniffer tool
Always use the PHP_codeSniffer because it will make sure any violations of the coding standard by checking your code. It can be used with the ECG Magento Codesniffer Coding Standard. This ECG tool helps you to check other more common Magento and PHP standard violation that may include:
- Raw SQL queries.
- SQL queries inside a loop.
- Direct instantiation of Mage and Enterprise classes that is not recommended as mentioned above.
- Unnecessary collection loading.
- Code complexity.
- Use of dangerous functions.
- Use of PHP superglobals.
These two tools with the conjunction will together make sure that your code always meet the Magento’s coding standards and also keeping it clean and reparable.
Final thoughts
This tutorial was written to help you get a thorough understanding what is Magento Extension Architecture and how you can install Magento 2 extension. Also, it is about some of the Magento 2 standards that your code should follow. Never edit the Magento core code. I hope this tutorial was helpful. If you still have any questions, feel free to ask and become a Magento champion 🙂
Abdur Rahman
Abdur Rahman is the Magento whizz at Cloudways. He is growth ambitious, and aims to learn & share information about Ecommerce & Magento Development through practice and experimentation. He loves to travel and explore new ideas whenever he finds time. Get in touch with him at [email protected]