Baobaz Blog

Have you ever tried to read the complete list of features Magento comes with? Gosh, it's huge. And it's even more impressive when you look at Magento Connect and all the extensions available there. However, if you are reading this blog entry you are probably looking for something which is not available yet. Or maybe you are a developer who just loves to play with the code. Either way, for serious business reasons or just because of your hack-ish nature, developing a Magento module is fun.

Let's create something really really simple. The module. You might wonder what that nifty module will be doing. Well in this fist part it will does nothing but being declared in Magento!

Where to begin?

Take a loot at the directories structure of your Magento installation. In app > code > local, create a directory, which will be a kind of container for your modules, in Magento it's usually called code pool. If you wonder how to name it, I can say that company name you're working for is probably a good one. It is in my case ;)

So let's create it

Then, in this container we should create the module. For the purpose of this blog let's call it "Reader" (in next few parts the reason of using this name should clarify, if not... well.. it's still sounds good ;) )

So far, so good. The next step is a little bit more complex, but still simple. Let's change current directory...

Hm... where are we?

Now, you must tell Magento about the module. To do this you must create an xml file. Take your favorite editor and create a file called Baobaz_Reader.xml (as you probably guessed the name consists of <container_name>_<module_name>.xml

Now put this into your file

Save file. And.... Voilà! That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for man...gento. :-)

To be sure that Magento knows about our new module let's login to admin panel. Navigate to System > Configuration, choose Advanced, from Advances section (yes, it's on the left).

You should see Baobaz_Reader at the top (or somewhere there) of the "Disable modules output" list.

OK, OK, OK... I admit that our nifty module makes nothing so far but be patience, in a few next parts we will add some more useful features.

To be continued...