Blog

Robert Egginton

January 2018

5 must-have Magento utilities for developers

We don’t normally do list posts at C3, but there are so many utilities that we find indispensable as developers that we ended up with a whole goody-bag full. Enjoy! And let us know in the comments if there are ones that you couldn’t live without but we’ve missed.

In no particular order:

1. n98-magerun for M1 / M2

I lied. This is first for a reason. Command line tools for Magento 1 and Magento 2: “The swiss army knife for Magento developers, sysadmins and devops.” It was such a brilliant tool for Magento 1 that Magento incorporated something similar into Magento 2 (though n98-magerun2 still adds more functionality so it’s worth grabbing!)

2. C3 Environment Banner for M1 / M2

The number of times live sites would have been accidentally changed is too many to ~~count~~ admit to. This extension adds coloured banners to the frontend and the admin panel to let you know visually if you are on a development, staging, preview or production site. It is guaranteed not to display anything on the frontend for production (or if it does not find a named environment). It picks up the current environment from the server variable “APPLICATION_ENV”. There are versions for Magento 1 and Magento 2.

3. Mage Security Patcher

In fact, the Mage Security Council have a number of super-useful tools that aid with maintaining the security of Magento, but we’ve picked this one in particular as it saves so much time when applying patches. And particularly in Magento 1 you need to apply patches regularly. The great thing about this tool is that it is rather more intelligent than a straight diff patch – it will also update template files in custom themes where it can.

4. Scope hints for M1 / M2

Visual reminder if there is any specialisation of system config, product or category data. For example, if you are looking the web settings in system config at the default scope and there are specialised values to give different websites their own domain, those settings will be highlighted for you in the default scope so that you know that there is more detail to drill down to. I know! Good, isn’t it?

5. Magicento

PHPStorm plugin for Magento developers. If you use PHPStorm (that would probably be hint 5b – PHPStorm is pretty great too), this invaluable plugin for both Magento 1 and 2 (sadly, you have to purchase one for each) adds understanding for factories, template paths etc. that PHPStorm by itself would not be able to follow or autocomplete. It does much more than this, but that’s a pretty good start.

That’s our list! We’d love to hear from you what your top Magento tool would be.