Magento is a system for building and managing online stores.
This platform was first released on March 31, 2008 but has not been supported since 2018. Instead, one can use Magento 2. Using Magento, you can view sales statistics in your stores, manage customers, manage products, create store pages and new product categories, and edit the system details which were defined (store name, username, etc.).
The version changes between Magento 1 and Magento 2 are expressed in the way the menu is arranged and in the visual interface of each platform.
While in version 1 the menus were deeply designed, in version 2 it is a Flat design platform: A dark gray color in all menu, with smaller list of categories. In version 1 the menu list was large, but each option contained little content.
Manage your online stores using the Magento platform
The menu in Magento 1
Magento 1 has a top horizontal menu with the following options:
Dashboard – Sales statistics that can be segmented by date or product type, and total sales (in the selected currency).
Sales – A more detailed description of sales. More developed queries can be implemented from the base view in the dashboard, such as Shipments, Orders, and more.
Catalog – Manage the catalog of sales products, move a product from one category to another, add categories, delete categories, and more.
Mobile – a tool that deals with the compatibility of the store’s website for mobile, iPhone, Android, and more.
Customers – Store customer management.
Promotions – Determining pricing rules in the regular product catalog and using shopping carts.
Newsletters – a customized mailing system, through which mailing can be sent according to the type of users: registered customers and interested parties who have not yet purchased.
CMS – Content Management System. It can be used to set a new page, a new widget, and surveys. It can also be used to delete and edit these items.
Reports – View product reports, sales, shopping carts, customer reports, and more.
System – Configuration of the store website: change of design, granting permissions to store employees, managing your personal account as the store owner, and more.
The menu in Magento 2
The menu in Magento 2, on the other hand, is located on the left side of the screen. It has no color changes between main and subheadings, everything appears in white font on a dark gray background:
Dashboard – Like the Dashboard in version 1, including changing your account information as a store owner. The equivalent in version 1 is done in the System tab.
Sales – Sales management is the same as version 1.
Products – Search and manage products according to a variety of categories and characteristics in dedicated queries. Management includes moving products from category to category, deleting them and viewing existing information about them. One can create a new product page using a simple editor. One can add a video product and not just an image in the graphical interface.
Customers – customer management. Great advantage in version 2: You can send a “Welcome” email to new customers.
Marketing – a wide menu that optimally expresses the Flat Design pattern.
It is the equivalent to the Promotions menu in version 1, where you can set pricing rules for catalog and shopping carts. In addition, it contains the Communications menu, contacting customers via email and dedicated newsletters that can be edited in the template, as well as the SEO & Search menu for managing the promotion.
Content – Manage pages, add, edit, and delete pages and widgets, as well as edit design templates across the store. Clicking on the “Pages” option will display a list of all pages, without the structure of Parent-child pages, but simply a list of all the pages we have built.
Only by clicking on which of them one can display its attribution compared to other pages. It is slightly cumbersome but has a convenient tabular search interface that can be filtered by page names.
Reports – Manage sales reports, purchase cards, customers, products and more.
Stores – Moving from store to store for editing purposes. A button designed for a user who runs several stores simultaneously.
System – Manage your store system. New options compared to version 1: Clearing cache from a specific page within a certain store (Page Cache), option to download Magento 2 as software instead of using a browser and a manual update interface that can be checked even if no automatic update message has been received.
Partners & Extensions – a market screen that compares Magento 2 developers with each company’s logo and a brief explanation of the development interface.
Programmers in Magento 2
Programming in Magento 2 is based on PHP code. PHP is a language invented by the Greenlandic programmer (Denmark) Rasmus Lardorf and developed in a variety of versions up to the current version No. 7, by a pair of Israeli developers from the Technion, Zeev Sorsky and Andy Guttmans.
PHP is a server-side language with a code structure like that of C and Java.
It is designed for dynamic products, meaning web pages. They are dynamic because the software only produces them and cannot test them.
The test is done only from the browser and is therefore a dynamic product (unlike a non-dynamic product such as an executable software that can be tested using the programming language itself).
Using PHP code, one can build the store for the customer. Even when building it with Magento 2 manually, the code created is PHP code so the person in charge of the store programming must have knowledge of PHP.
In the event of a bug in the store, they will be solvable especially quickly if a person with knowledge of this programming language is sitting in front of the computer.
Zend Studio – The ultimate PHP development environment for Magento developers
Zend Studio is a development interface that contains the PHP language.
It allows creating modules and then to match it with related pages files such as HTML, XML and more.
The advantage of Zend Studio is that both in the module itself and in the dynamic codes of HTML & XML, programming is done using shortcuts while typing the code.
It greatly shortens the writing of the code and makes this task particularly easy and efficient.
In Zend Studio you can optimally predict whether the pages one has created will work as expected thanks to this feature.
Programming PHP in a manual editor without this interface will make the task much more complex.
Features required by a programmer for Magento 2
The programmer must be proficient in the PHP language, writing store pages based on all the association files, module programming file, HTML page, XML files, and more.
He should have experience working with UI (User Infrastructure) and UX (User Experience) architects, i.e. fulfilling GUI requirements alongside functional requirements of store operation.
Specializing in PHP alone provides the basic conditions, but in practice the programmer must be familiar with application development environments that optimize the production of code pages and interface with Magento 2.
In this way, the work becomes much more efficient and easier to implement and the page creation is done amazingly fast. It is important to apply this knowledge to the user’s mobile site as well, as most purchases are made from smartphones and not necessarily from the PC/MAC desktops or laptops.
The mobile-friendly website at Magento 2 should be accessible, easy to use and have a safe shopping environment that will make the new customer stay and purchase what they have planned.
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