What does a Magento developer do?
If you’ve been exploring different ecommerce agencies to work with, you may well have come across Magento a few times by now. But what does a Magento developer do? How is a Magento developer different from other web developers?
The simplest answer is that a Magento developer develops Magento websites, but that’s not particularly useful or comprehensive as an answer, is it?
So, what is Magento development?
The first step is to look at what Magento development is, and to understand that, we need to understand what Magento is. Magento is an ecommerce platform built to allow web developers a stepping stone in creating ecommerce websites – websites that allow you to sell products, services or downloadable content to customers. Rather than building the same core features of an ecommerce website (a product catalogue, shopping cart, checkout) each time, Magento provides these core features ready for customisation.
Magento development covers a huge range of skills and tasks, from installing and configuring your Magento store to building Magento themes and developing custom features for your website.
What does a Magento developer do?
A Magento developer works to build, support and improve Magento websites. Typically, designing and building a Magento website requires a team of Magento developers, web designers and others to fulfill all of the skills required. A Magento developer is simply a web developer skilled with the Magento platform.
A Magento developer may work as a freelancer alone, or within a Magento agency such as Peacock Carter. Magento developers can be roughly split in to two separate skillsets themselves:
- Frontend Magento developers build Magento themes and work to replicate the design a web designer provides in to Magento – ensuring that your website looks great, and is responsive (mobile-friendly) so that it works effectively on smartphone and tablet devices.
- Backend Magento developers focus on building features for your Magento website, whether that’s via existing Magento extensions or bespoke code.
Magento developers can also become a Magento Certified Developer (MCD), Magento Certified Developer Pus (MCD+) and a Magento Certified Frontend Developer, which means they’ve passed an exam of multiple choice questions relevant to that field.
Typical Magento developer tasks include:
- Installing and configuring Magento
- Building Magento themes from provided designs
- Optimising Magento’s performance / loading times
- Configuring Magento’s stores to support multilingual and multicurrency set ups
- Installing, testing and configuring payment gateways such as PayPal, SagePay, Authorize.Net, etc
- Integrating other business systems in to Magento – including accountancy software, custom relationship management (CRM) software, and other business applications
- Performing audits of Magento websites for search engine optimisation
And, of course, if you’re looking for a Magento development agency in the North of England, we can recommend a good one!
Magento 1 DIY book
We’ve been at it again here at Peacock Carter: after the Magento 2 Theme Designs book was released late last year, we’ve since acted as technical reviewers for Apress’ new release, Magento 1 DIY.
The Magento 1 DIY book, by Viktor Khliupko, aims to empower smaller business owners, allowing them to create their own Magento store, and get up and running.
What does the book contain?
The book is a respectable 221 pages in length, and covers content split in to five key sections:
- Set up – this section covers installing and configuring your Magento store, and your product catalogue
- Sales generation – a look at techniques to promote your products, from social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, to more traditional digital marketing like search engine optimisation (SEO) and paid advertising (PPC)
- Growth – this chapter looks at how to automate key ecommerce processes in Magento
- Enterprise – a walkthrough of Magento Enterprise’s key features, and how you can replicate them in Magento Community using existing third party extensions
- The final section, Custom Magento Development, covers deeper customisation of Magento for those new to the platform
The Magento 1 DIY book provides a good overview of Magento’s functionality for those interested in ecommerce and without web development experience.
Our involvement with Magento 1 DIY
Peacock Carter’s involvement with the book comes from our involvement as technical reviewers on behalf of the publishers, Apress. As technical reviewers, we were tasked with verifying the technical correctness of the book’s content and any code samples, as well as providing guidance on best practice for Magento development and configuration. This content is then fed back to the author before the book is published.
Our director, Richard Carter, has authored 4 books on the Magento platform, and been involved in the technical reviewing of content in many other publications.
If you’d like to work with Peacock Carter on your next Magento project, please do get in touch.
Filter Magento payment options by shipping address
We’re really pleased to be able to announce the release of a free module for Magento today: the rather catchily named “Filter Magento payment options by shipping address” module.
Peacock Carter have developed a Magento’s module to allow you to filter the payment options available by shipping address (what we’d call “delivery address” in the UK!); This module allows you to restrict how a customer pays by country. The module is available for free download and use from our Github account.
Development of “filter payment options by shipping address” module for Magento
A Magento Enterprise client based in the Middle East required that the “Cash on delivery” payment method be made available to any billing address but limited to just one shipping country.
Cash on delivery is a very popular payment method in the Middle East. Cash on delivery operates as you would expect: you check out from your Magento store as usual, selecting “Cash on delivery” as your payment method (rather than delivery method). A courier then delivers your purchases, and collects payment for the order at the same time.
Our Magento client only wanted to offer this option in the UAE, and none of the surrounding countries they operate in. The client’s website sells computer games and a large proportion of their clients are under 18 years old, and don’t have their own credit cards. Our client found that this customer group would therefore often use their parents’ work address as the billing address, and this meant that the payment address was often outside the UAE itself.
Compatibility with Magento Community and Magento Enterprise
The development of the Magento module allows the client to control which payment methods are displayed for which products, and is tested on Magento Community versions 1.9.0.1+ and Magento Enterprise 1.14.0.1+.
Proud to be organising North East Ecommerce
Peacock Carter are really proud to be the new organisers of the North East Ecommerce meetup group.
Tony, the previous organiser of the group, did a superb job of organising the group, providing plenty of food for thought for ecommerce store owners. Both Peacock Carter and Alex Goodacre, our meetup co-organiser and long term member of the group, are keen to do the same!
What is North East Ecommerce?
The North East Ecommerce group is a free-to-attend meetup held on a monthly basis in Newcastle upon Tyne. The aim of the group is to help share knowledge and experience for merchants running online stores. Previous talk topics at North East Ecommerce have included:
- Optimising eBay listings
- FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon)
- Search engine marketing for your ecommerce website
- An introduction to Magento – by us!
We will be keeping the event free of charge, of course – partially thanks to the brilliant Campus North. The timing of the event will also remain as it was, in the first Wednesday of each month evening slot.
As a leading ecommerce agency in the North East, we feel very lucky to be able to support the meet up and bring our experience of running other website events such as WordPress North East and Magento North East. Organising North East Ecommerce will also be a fantastic opportunity from us to hear from owners of ecommerce websites of all sizes and fine tune our knowledge to be able to best help them.
If you have any suggestions of topics you would like to see covered at a future event, please let us know via hello@peacockcarter.com, and we’ll do our best to find a suitable speaker.