Over an year ago, I started working on the Magento platform. In last year’s spring, a colleague from Optaros took the Magento Developer Plus certification exam. Since then, I began to like the idea of taking the certification exam, more as a motivation to learn the ins and outs of Magento.

Few months ago I was enrolled into a company study group for the certification. This was the first time I was sponsored for a certification (yes, until now everything was with my money). Preparing in a study group was a whole different experience.

Those who have more experience in a field balance the situation for the others and can give better examples from their own experience. It’s easier to understand from concrete examples then to try to imagine the scenarios yourself.

The certification is available through Prometric. So when you decide that you’re ready you can go to the website to purchase the voucher and schedule the exam.

The price for a voucher is 260$, not exactly cheap, but if you get to convince your boss to pay, it probably won’t be so bad. 🙂

But let’s get to the more interesting subject, the preparation.

Materials
Magento is not doing very good on this subject, there are very few materials and they are not centralized.

My sources were:
– Magento® Certified Developer Plus Exam Study Guide – it is compulsive to read the guide and try to find answers to all the questions in it;
– Magento training – especially Fundamentals of Magento Development
– blogs – I don’t want to give any names, there are a lot of people that write about the problems that they encounter and blog about the exam.

Unfortunately there isn’t a way like for PHP, ZF and Symfony where you can find all you need in one place, basically it depends on your luck and searching skills, there isn’t an “official version”. Things become weird when you find different approaches that are version specific.

How did I prepare
I began with the video training. It’s not perfect by it’s very helpful. I think the problem with most certifications is that you don’t get to work with all the available modules, just like in PHP you don’t get to work that much with sockets and streams.

Even though you don’t get the code and sometimes it is hard to follow and transcribe the examples, I think that the video tutorials are one of the most important sources at the moment.

Secondly, with the Study Guide in my hand, I began to try to answer the questions from it. When I joined the Study Group, the work divided between all the members in the group. My advantage was that it was the second generation of the group and we could profit from the documentation already developed by the first group.

If you’re preparing by yourself, I think the most important thing is to start, that’s the hardest part. And if you don’t know where to start, Google search the Magento questions, there are already a lot of people that are posting the explanations.

Answers for the questions from the first chapters are the easiest to find. As the number of the chapter is getting bigger, the number of Google results decreases.

But after the first questions, you should understand what is all about and in theory you will no longer need the documentation.

Use Mage::log(Varien_Debug::backtrace(true, false)); for stack trace and xdebug (http://xdebug.org/) to see what’s going on behind the scene. With patience, all the questions find their answers.

Because it was a group, the study was easier for me, but even so, to be sure of the explanation I has to dive deep in the code.

The exam
Some of the questions are difficult, but there are also accessible ones. The questions in the exam are off all levels of difficulty.

For Plus, the exam takes 2h not 2.5h as it is specified in the guide.

If you opted for Plus, there are 11 questions from Enterprise and advanced difficulty questions, of which 7 correct ones are required to pass. Basically this is the difficulty difference. For this questions it matters how much Enterprise experience you have.

In the guide for each exam, the questions are broken in percentages for each chapter.

Because in the non Plus certification there are no Enterprise questions, you only have to answer the necessary percentage from the full exam in order to pass and it’s not required to have a certain percentage from a certain chapter.

Things that are done regularly are analyzed in detail, it is important to understand how each function that is approached in each chapter works and what is the purpose of all those tags in the xml files.

Usually there are things you work with, or at least with which there is a good probability you have been working from the modules listed in the guide.

Post exam
Before you leave the room you’ll know if you’ve passed or not. When you exit the room you’ll receive a printed paper with the correct number of questions from each section from the total number .

In case you haven’t been successful you’ll receive by mail from Magento a voucher with a discount for a future attempt. They state that you should study at least 3 more weeks before you try again. Anyway, after you’ve taken the exam you’ll have a better view over your overall knowledge for a future attempt.

After few days (3 in my case) you will be able to see your profile on the Magento website as a reference.

The diploma got to Romania in about a month, the delivery address is the one from the Magento website account.

Best of luck!

Another year has passed without native unicode support for PHP. Yes, PHP6 is not here yet, in case anybody was still asking…

But, the version that is now here is PHP 5.4. With this version only refinements were added, there weren’t changes as big as there were on PHP 5.3. In PHP 5.4, the big addition are “traits” and, my favorite, the new version for closure.

As the keywords for last year were Drupal and Magento, this year the keyword was only Magento.

A couple of months ago, more or less forced by the circumstances, I’ve taken the Magento Plus certification exam. For this certification, Optaros, my employer, had a major influence. We had been more or less made to take the exam and we also had to be part of a company level study group.

I haven’t been part of a study group since faculty, and I must admit that I’ve forgotten how useful it is. Colleagues with more Magento experience (unlike me who I’ve been working with Magento for a little more than an year), had helped a lot to clarify issues and to document them.

But more about this in another blog, that will follow shortly (I hope)…

Anyway, after studying Magento in so much detail, I must admit that I have a lot more respect for the platform. After you analyze the backend architecture, a different picture is emerging. The architecture is very interesting and quite flexible, which makes you overlook some of it’s shortcomings.

Now that a new year has begun, I wish I’m going to publish more, I think in the last period I haven’t been very “productive” when it comes to publishing, either text or code.

Also this year I want to take at least another certification exam. As the Magento certification was set only for this year, I still have a lot of options on my plate.

That’s about all for 2012 and plans for 2013.

I wish you an excellent 2013!

This is a small project for Microsoft Windows users!

It is a Text To Speech utility written in HTML and JavaScript. The application runs as a HTML Application.

I’ve written this application 3 times already, because I lost the first couple of versions. Finally I thought that maybe others can benefit from it.

For the Linux users one alternative is: eSpeak.

More details on the project page.

Sometimes we need to overwrite an observer. The first way that usually comes in mind is overwriting the model. Usually is named Observer.php, because this is the “best practice”.

And NO, you don’t have to overwrite the model. Observer.php doesn’t extend anything anyway and usually contains all of the module’s observers, so you can’t overwrite the same observer in more than one module.

How it works?
In magento when a new observer is added, it must have an unique identifier. This identifier is the key!

Actually, there is another element: “area”. When Mage::dispatchEvent(…) is performed, events will be dispatched using “area” and “identifier”.

For example, the admin notification system, which is observing “controller_action_predispatch”, will run:

1=> "global"(area)
2=> "controller_action_predispatch"(event)
3=> "adminnotification"(identifier)

then:

1=> "adminhtml"(area)
2=> "controller_action_predispatch"(event)
3=> "adminnotification"(identifier)

If the event was in the frontend area, it would be: “global” then “frontend”.

Overwriting
Overwriting is in fact a observer defined in the same config area as the original event (global, frontend or adminhtml), attached to the same event and with the same identifier as the original observer (e.g. adminnotification).

Let’s say we have to overwrite “adminnotification”. This observer is in Mage/AdminNotification. The unique identifier is defined in etc/config.xml:

 1...
 2  <adminhtml>
 3...
 4    <events>
 5      <controller_action_predispatch>
 6        <observers>
 7          <adminnotification>
 8            <class>adminnotification/observer</class>
 9            <method>preDispatch</method>
10          </adminnotification>
11        </observers>
12      </controller_action_predispatch>
13    </events>
14...
15  </adminhtml>
16...

From the example above we can see:
– area: adminhtml
– event: controller_action_predispatch
– identifier: adminnotification

The module activation file will be: app/etc/modules/CP_AdminNotification.xml

 1<?xml version="1.0"?>
 2<config>
 3  <modules>
 4    <CP_AdminNotification>
 5      <active>true</active>
 6      <codePool>local</codePool>
 7      <depends>
 8        <Mage_AdminNotification/>
 9      </depends>
10    </CP_AdminNotification>
11  </modules>
12</config>

I’ve added dependencies because without the original module, this module will be useless.

There’s a “best practice” to name a module that is overwritten with the same name as the original module.

The configuration file for this module, will contain practically everything you’ll need for the overwriting: area, event and identifier. The file is located in app/code/local/CP/AdminNotification/etc/config.xml:

 1<?xml version="1.0"?>
 2<config>
 3  <modules>
 4    <CP_AdminNotification>
 5      <version>0.0.1</version>
 6    </CP_AdminNotification>
 7  </modules>
 8  <global>
 9    <models>
10      <cp_adminnotification>
11        <class>CP_AdminNotification_Model</class>
12      </cp_adminnotification>
13    </models>
14  </global>
15  <adminhtml>
16    <events>
17      <controller_action_predispatch>
18        <observers>
19          <adminnotification>
20            <class>cp_adminnotification/observer</class>
21            <method>overwrittenPreDispatch</method>
22          </adminnotification>
23        </observers>
24      </controller_action_predispatch>
25    </events>
26  </adminhtml>
27</config>

The observer should contain all the new logic. The file is in app/code/local/CP/AdminNotification/Model/Observer.php, just like you would probably expect from the structure above.

1<?php
2
3class CP_AdminNotification_Model_Observer {
4
5  public function overwrittenPreDispatch(Varien_Event_Observer $observer) {
6    // noua logica din observer
7  }
8}

Disabling
Disabling is preaty similar to overwriting, the difference is in the config and the fact that an observer file is not needed anymore, because there isn’t a new logic.

The new config.xml file is:

 1<?xml version="1.0"?>
 2<config>
 3...
 4  <adminhtml>
 5    <events>
 6      <controller_action_predispatch>
 7        <observers>
 8          <adminnotification>
 9            <type>disabled</type>
10          </adminnotification>
11        </observers>
12      </controller_action_predispatch>
13    </events>
14  </adminhtml>
15</config>

My elePHPants family!

My elePHPants collection has just doubled, now I have 2!

I wanted an pink elePHPant, to keep company to my old elePHPant.

Also this time I’ve turned to eBay. A quick search found another elePHPants breeder, this time is: Herman J. Radtke III. This time I’ve ordered it directly from his site, without eBay, only because eBay would calculate the shipping fee wrong.

Even with the right shipping fee, the new elePHPant wasn’t exactly cheap:

Not exactly cheap taking into consideration that the price for an elePHPant is about 5 euros in bulk.

But now I have a happy elePHPant family!