There are many available tools to help make Web Development projects quicker and more productive.
We will look at how a Magento Web Developer can help increase productivity, to turn on or off those common features all from the front end of Magento while developing on a site.
Magento Developer Toolbar
Magento Developer Toolbar is a powerful and must have plugin to any Magento Developer that lets you quickly access regular used functions without having to keep multiple tabs open with the admin backend
By using this plugin we can measure the performance of the site and see what is happening in the background such as database queries or which events or observers are called further optimising the Magento store as we will only choose what want to call rather than calling unnesseary events which may lead to less performance.
The plugin itself sits on the top right of the page, showing key page statistics on a per page basis and is unobtrusive and can be expanded to show more detailed statistics to aid further web development.
Using this plugin has enabled us to continuously review a Magento site performance by only calling what is needed aswell as speed up the Magento development build time.
Key Features
- Requests: involved controller classes, modules, actions and request parameters
- General Info: website id, website name, store id, store name, storeview id, storeview code, storeview name and configured caching method
- Handles: overview of layout handles
- Events/Observer: overview of events with its observers
- Blocks: overview of block nesting
- Config: enable/disable frontend hints, inline translation and cache clearing
- PHP-Info: output of phpinfo()
- Profiling: output of Varien_Profiler with function execution time, function count and memory usage
- Additional Information: version information, page execution time and overall memory usage
- DB-Profiler: Number of executed queries, average query length, queries per second, longest query length, longest query and detailed query listing including simple syntax highlighting of SQL
Plugin Resource
Download from the Magento Commerce Directory