Magento is one of the widely used eCommerce platforms, because of the advanced features and scalability it offers to the merchants worldwide. It has a fair market share of building a great majority of the top 1000 retail businesses around the globe, just because it suffice the needs of every small to medium and large enterprise.
The increasing number of online users and the availability of reliable eCommerce platforms have encouraged the established businesses as well as the newbies to set-up an online store and start making money. This has raised a demand in eCommerce web development, and most of them are turning to Magento which ultimately raises more opportunities for the developers. Best option is to hire an eCommerce web development company to setup an online business website.
The high demand of Magento has made the web developers to sharpen their skills to serve clients with what exactly they are searching for. If you are also aspiring for a bright future and want to grab worthy projects, you have to avail knowledge and gain expertise in eCommerce development. Following are some of the resources from where you can grab information and learn tips and tricks from the programming gurus.
1. Magento’s Official User Guide
To master the art of developing, restructuring and customizing a website, a developer’s most authentic resource is the user guide. The official user guide by Magento has firsthand knowledge of how this platform is developed and how it works. This simple guide proves helpful for the entire community that includes the developers as well as merchants. Whenever a merchant decides to expand the business and add product lines to the store, he or she can refer to the manual and seek guidance. With respect to the developers, it saves quite enough time in knowing the platform.
2. Open source theme and extensions
Magento has a huge community that is helping each other across the borders regardless of the ethnicity and cultural constraints. The developers and agencies are creating beautiful themes and impressive tools to allow merchants achieve a sales target and help the juniors to learn from their end products. These extensions are open source and most of them are free to download, which gives the beginnersan opportunity to install, modify and configure a plugin over a store as a mock exercise. One such resource is FME’s Magento Extensions which showcase digital products for the merchants to enhance appearance and functionality of their online stores.
3. Official Documentations
Magento is an open source platform which gives the developers a free access to the code. The official documentation allows them to know the code of each component and continue practicing by modifying it further.
The developers can benefit from the heaven of information as it includes details about each version of the different Magneto editions like community, enterprise, and cloud-based platform. It is one of the valuable resources for the beginners as well as experts to know about a version release, notes, warnings and third party licenses.
4. Stack Exchange
Magento is said to be a bit complex while coding for perfection. It is a full-fledged eCommerce platform which requires expert knowledge and skills to develop an e-shop or a business website. The well experienced and professional developers can grasp most of the information from the user guide and documentation, whereas the beginners find it difficult to understand. In such a disappointing situation, they can switch to Stack Exchange and seek expert opinion.
Stack Exchange is a goldmine of valuable questions with its useful replies for all the programming needs because the users are rewarded for posting the most relevant and reliable answer to a question. It is assured that a user finds the most viable solution for the problem, he or she is looking for.
5. Professional Online Courses
Professional courses are designed to educate the candidates about the practical use of an application or software. A university graduate might have studied different programming languages, but lack the courage and skill to develop something from the scratch because they have not practiced what they are taught. Magento is a specialized form of programming where developers are required to learn the framework and code in a way that correlates with the core functionality of the platform.
There are courses and introductory sessions, both online and offline, that are arranged to give an overview about Magento in general or about the changes that will take place in the upcoming version. These are equally beneficial for merchants, developers and agencies to attend and get to know what is happening around. The beginners need to select the courses that start with the basics and teach the advanced coding methodologies as well after reviewing the course outline and the institute.
6. Reading Magento Bloggers
Magento bloggers keep an eye on the recent development and change in the platform and report it on their personal or corporate blogs along with statistics and case studies. These blogs are governed either by certified developers, agencies, or Magento itself to deliver deep insights. Some of them include DLTR, Practical eCommerce, Inchoo, AheadWorks, MageStore, etc. these are the most reliable resources for enhancing understanding and getting the latest news updates.
7. Conferences and Meetings
National and international conferences are inaugurated once in a year, but are considered a complete round up of the year. The online communities need to discuss the modern challenges, suggests solutions and study the case studies of different retailers who are already overcome similar issues.
In addition to the local community, Magento also arranges official meetings in different cities and counties. These events give the developers the opportunity to interact with retailers, merchants, eCommerce web development companies, system administrators and other fellows of the industry. The merchants share their experience of managing their Magento store who addresses the common issues to the community. They learn a lot from an event, meet professionals, have some clients and friends as well.
Conclusion
Learning web development is a continuous journey as the technology is developing at a fast pace and creating more challenges for the community. To equip yourself to overcome any of the challenges, one needs to believe in continued professional development, acquiring new skills, and frequently interacting with industry professionals.
Author Bio: Simon Walker has an influential presence in eCommerce consultancy with an industry rich experience of 7+ years. He supervises the creation of valuable themes and extensions at FMEextensions, which is a commendable Magento Development Company. His portfolio includes some of the notable eCommerce development projects, which are primarily for Magento platform. You can reach him on Twitter and Facebook.
