Magento is a complex system and without proper tools, development for the system can get complex, especially for beginners. In this article, we will examine some of most useful Magento development tools and extensions.
Mgt Developer Toolbar Module
This free Magento extension helps developers to understand what is going on in each request.
It is capable of showing the layouts and blocks involved in building content of pages, loaded models and collections, as well as controller action and params. It also allows you to quickly clear cache, toggle displaying block hints and so on.
It has the ability to show profiler output. Very useful for beginner and average level developers.
http://www.mgt-commerce.com/magento-developer-toolbar.html
Magento Debug
This is another Magento debugging toolbar based on the one for Django framework. It has similar features to the Developer Toolbar, but has a different look and feel to it. Up to developers to decide which suits them better.
https://github.com/madalinoprea/magneto-debug
MageTool
This tool is built to be like Zend Framework. It allows you to automate common operations, such as creating a module, controller, model, etc. It also allows for operations, such as clearing cache and re-indexing data. All of this is available from the command line.
Magento PHPUnit Testing
Code quality and scenarios are easy to test with this extension. Implementing a bridge between Magento
specifics and PHPUnit. It allows you to find configuration problems, errors in rewrites and
check if a module behaves properly with a set of incoming data.
Easy Template Path Hints
This simple extension is useful to quickly turn on block hints by passing an additional parameter
to the controller. Using it, you can avoid going to the backend and enabling the option explicitly.
http://www.magepsycho.com/easy-template-path-hints.html
We hope this article will help you to get started with Custom Magento development. Please leave a comment if you know of any useful current or future Magento developer tools or extensions.
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