Before you start development on magento

I have wasted my lot of time while developing on magento. its only because i was not following some basic things needed before you start development on magento. In my opinion if you follow these 4 tips you should be okay!

1.) DISABLE CACHE : This is the first requirement before you start development on magento. I have seen many people struggling and wondering why their changes are not visible. I also read somewhere that on an average a new developer spends around 2 hours on magento platform wondering why his changes are not visible.

To disable cache

1. Go to System > Cache Management
2. Click on Select All(on left).
3. Select disable from Action dropdown(on right).
4. And Click on Submit.

2.) Enable Logging:

You might need this, as often which writing php code if you miss some braces or use a function which does not exist you will get error something like this:-

There has been an error processing your request
Exception printing is disabled by default for security reasons.
Error log record number: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

In this case you might want to check the DB for error log number, but best thing is to enable exception prininting
To enable exception printing

1.  Go to <magento-installation-dir>/errors folder
2. rename local.xml.sample file local.xml

1
2
3
4
5

<?php
    echo ‘<pre>’;
    print_r(get_class_methods($collection));
    echo ‘</pre>’;
?>

4.) Printing whole object:

You might want to know what values exist in that object then you can use one of the below

<?php
    print_r($obj);
    OR
    print_r($obj->toArray());
?>

If you think that this post helped you in any way, please do write a review or link to this page. Thanks!