Teaching magento flow

Question

I am working with magento from last few years and now I got chance to teach magento to few of my juniors. I know most of the stuffs regarding it but I am looking for perfect teaching steps so that my juniors who have 2-3 years of experience in PHP can learn and grasp it properly.

According to my observation:

1) Give overview of magento, whats it and about zend on which its based.

2) Explaining front-end flow and how pages, product,categories are added in admin etc.

3) Admin: Order,catalog, attributes, extension configuration etc.

4) Extension development and so on.

Please provide more suggestions so that I can train them in better way.

Answer 1

What I would do is :

• First Introduce Magento : This involves

  1. What is the purpose ?
  2. When it is built ?
  3. Small description on history of Magento and
  4. Why it is important to study ?

• Now describe Magento folder structure : Try to give some idea on how magento is distributed the application logic in folder wise.

• Introduce admin section of Magento : The purpose of this is to give a proper understanding on what are the features that magento offers by default from admin side.

• Introduce frontend section of Magento : Show the frontend, so that they will understand how frontend is connected with backend. You can use sample data installed magento instance for this.

• Modular structure of Magento :- It is time to explain

  1. What is a module ?
  2. Importance of module in Magento.
  3. Different codePools in Magento and their purposes.
  4. May be you can introduce some core modules and their structure.
  5. Finally briefly explain how modules work together.

• URL processing :- It is now the time to explain how magento process the url. This involves :

  1. General url structure of magento.
  2. Frontname, controller and action theory.
  3. Default routers in magento and what are their purposes.
  4. Show an example.

• Page Rendering process :- You can now deal with rendering of a particular page in Magento. This involves :

  1. What is layout ? How can we specify layout structure in Magento.
  2. What is block ? How they relate to a layout ?
  3. What are layout update handles and how they relate to a page request?
  4. Then explain how blocks, layout update handles together work and thus constitutes a page.

• A small "Hello World" Module - Magento study actually starts when you creates a module in Magento. The above steps are just preliminary understanding that we required in this system to attempt to develop our first module. This involves

  1. Activation file of the module and it is importance
  2. Which codepool is going to hold our helloworld module and why.
  3. Define a block and layout update xml file in config.xml. It is very important to describe the purpose and importance of configuration file for a module.
  4. Use layout update xml file declare your own block and show how layouts and blocks work together in Magento.

• Introduction to Model : It is perfect time to introduce Model section and it's importance. This involves.

  1. Normal model and EAV model, How they differ
  2. Importance of EAV model. Where they are using in default Magento.
  3. May be you can explain setup classes and it's importance.

• Module that involves a CRUD operation : This can be considered as an advanced topic. It involves

  1. Define a new entity in Magento.
  2. Define new entity collection
  3. How can use new table for an entity
  4. The Magento way of creating, reading, updating, deleting an entry from table.

List is endless and make an impression at the end that, no one in the world who completely knows Magento fully. Because that is an ultimate truth and I believe that is the big lesson that we really need to understand and teach. Good luck :)