Magento is the fastest growing PHP-based eCommerce solution based on the Zend Framework. This robust CMS helps developers to enrich their store with more useful functionalities with custom modules. Developing a Magento store to get the desired look and feel is not as easy as you might believe, and may take hours due to the wealth of features available for you.

This book will provide unparalleled guidelines to develop a much faster and captivating Magento store by writing custom modules and powerful customizations. This book covers everything from common development tasks to customization of your store as per your needs.

If you choose to work through all the recipes from the beginning, you will have a development platform ready to work with Magento. You will also explore different ways to customize the look and feel of a Magento store to facilitate your customers and create a better user experience. Integration of Magento with WordPress to add striking functionality to your store will be accomplished in just a few steps. The Magento security measures have been taken care of in some cool recipes by editing the parameters in the admin panel. Setting up a master slave setup for Magento database is discussed along with other database optimizations in the database section. Developing new modules and widgets for Magento is elaborately described in many recipes. Magento's performance optimization is the most important part of this book, which is armed with some easy and incredible recipes dealing with YSlow, Page Speed, Siege, Apache bench, Apache configuration, php.ini optimization, and caching with APC or Memcached. The work procedure behind the wall is explained in an easy manner so that both a novice as well as an experienced developer could benefit from it. This book also has some recipes which are not only useful for Magento but also for any other LAMP-based project.