Table of Contents for
Magento 2 - Build World-Class online stores

Version ebook / Retour

Cover image for bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition Magento 2 - Build World-Class online stores by Jonathan Bownds Published by Packt Publishing, 2017
  1. Cover
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Magento 2 - Build World-Class online stores
  4. Magento 2 - Build World-Class online stores
  5. Credits
  6. Preface
  7. 1. Module 1
  8. 1. Magento Fundamentals
  9. XAMPP installation
  10. Magento
  11. Summary
  12. 2. Magento 2.0 Features
  13. An introduction to the Magento order management system
  14. Magento 2.0 command-line configuration
  15. The command-line utility
  16. Summary
  17. 3. Working with Search Engine Optimization
  18. Store configuration
  19. SEO and searching
  20. SEO catalog configuration
  21. Google Analytics tracking code
  22. Optimizing Magento pages
  23. Summary
  24. 4. Magento 2.0 Theme Development – the Developers' Holy Grail
  25. Magento 2.0 theme structure
  26. The Magento Luma theme
  27. Magento theme inheritance
  28. CMS blocks and pages
  29. Custom variables
  30. Creating a basic Magento 2.0 theme
  31. Summary
  32. 5. Creating a Responsive Magento 2.0 Theme
  33. Composer – the PHP dependency manager
  34. Building the CompStore theme
  35. CSS preprocessing with LESS
  36. Applying new CSS to the CompStore theme
  37. Creating the CompStore logo
  38. Applying the theme
  39. Creating CompStore content
  40. Customizing Magento 2.0 templates
  41. Summary
  42. 6. Write Magento 2.0 Extensions – a Great Place to Go
  43. Using the Zend framework
  44. Magento 2.0 extension structure
  45. Developing your first Magento extension
  46. The Twitter REST API
  47. The TweetsAbout module structure
  48. Using TwitterOAuth to authenticate our extension
  49. Developing the module
  50. Summary
  51. 7. Go Mobile with Magento 2.0!
  52. Adjusting the CompStore theme for mobile devices
  53. The Magento 2.0 responsive design
  54. The Magento UI
  55. Implementing a new CSS mixin media query
  56. Adjusting tweets about extensions for mobile devices
  57. Summary
  58. 8. Speeding up Your Magento 2.0
  59. Indexing and caching Magento
  60. Indexing and re-indexing data
  61. The Magento cron job
  62. Caching
  63. Fine-tuning the Magento hosting server
  64. Selecting the right Magento hosting service
  65. Apache web server deflation
  66. Enabling the expires header
  67. Minifying scripts
  68. Summary
  69. 9. Improving Your Magento Skills
  70. Magento knowledge center
  71. Improving your Magento skills
  72. Summary
  73. 2. Module 2
  74. 1. Magento 2 System Tools
  75. Installing Magento 2 sample data via GUI
  76. Installing Magento 2 sample data via the command line
  77. Managing Magento 2 indexes via the command line
  78. Managing Magento 2 cache via the command line
  79. Managing Magento 2 backup via the command line
  80. Managing Magento 2 set mode (MAGE_MODE)
  81. Transferring your Magento 1 database to Magento 2
  82. 2. Enabling Performance in Magento 2
  83. Configuring Redis for backend cache
  84. Configuring Memcached for session caching
  85. Configuring Varnish as the Full Page Cache
  86. Configuring Magento 2 with CloudFlare
  87. Configuring optimized images in Magento 2
  88. Configuring Magento 2 with HTTP/2
  89. Configuring Magento 2 performance testing
  90. 3. Creating Catalogs and Categories
  91. Create a Root Catalog
  92. Create subcategories
  93. Manage attribute sets
  94. Create products
  95. Manage products in a catalog grid
  96. 4. Managing Your Store
  97. Creating shipping and tax rules
  98. Managing customer groups
  99. Configuring inventories
  100. Configuring currency rates
  101. Managing advanced pricing
  102. 5. Creating Magento 2 Extensions – the Basics
  103. Initializing extension basics
  104. Working with database models
  105. Creating tables using setup scripts
  106. Creating a web route and controller to display data
  107. Creating system configuration fields
  108. Creating a backend data grid
  109. Creating a backend form to add/edit data
  110. 6. Creating Magento 2 Extensions – Advanced
  111. Using dependency injection to pass classes to your own class
  112. Modifying functions with the use of plugins – Interception
  113. Creating your own XML module configuration file
  114. Creating your own product type
  115. Working with service layers/contracts
  116. Creating a Magento CLI command option
  117. 3. Module 3
  118. 1. Planning for Magento
  119. Technical considerations
  120. Global-Website-Store methodology
  121. Planning for multiple stores
  122. Summary
  123. 2. Managing Products
  124. Managing products the customer focused way
  125. Creating products
  126. Managing inventory
  127. Pricing tools
  128. Autosettings
  129. Related products, up-sells, and cross-sells
  130. Importing products
  131. Summary
  132. 3. Designs and Themes
  133. The concept of theme inheritance
  134. Default installation of design packages and themes
  135. Installing third-party themes
  136. Inline translations
  137. Working with theme variants
  138. Customizing themes
  139. Customizing layouts
  140. Summary
  141. 4. Configuring to Sell
  142. Payment methods
  143. Shipping methods
  144. Managing taxes
  145. Transactional e-mails
  146. Summary
  147. 5. Managing Non-Product Content
  148. Summary
  149. 6. Marketing Tools
  150. Promotions
  151. Newsletters
  152. Using sitemaps
  153. Optimizing for search engines
  154. Summary
  155. 7. Extending Magento
  156. The new Magento module architecture
  157. Extending Magento functionality with Magento plugins
  158. Building your own extensions
  159. Summary
  160. 8. Optimizing Magento
  161. Indexing and caching
  162. Caching in Magento 2 – not just FPC
  163. Tuning your server for speed
  164. Summary
  165. 9. Advanced Techniques
  166. Version control
  167. Magento cron
  168. Backing up your database
  169. Upgrading Magento
  170. Summary
  171. 10. Pre-Launch Checklist
  172. System configurations
  173. Design configurations
  174. Search engine optimization
  175. Sales configurations
  176. Product configurations
  177. Maintenance configurations
  178. Summary
  179. Index

Product configurations

Aside from the process of adding new products to your store, there are a number of configurations you should review that affect how products are managed and presented. The goal of any Magento store is to sell, and the ease with which customers can shop, as well as the presentation of the categories and products, greatly affects the success of any e-commerce venture.

Therefore, this section of the checklist may be a lengthy, yet necessary, process. There are no set recommendations, either, for most of these settings, as we find different intentions for each site we build. As with all Magento configurations, don't assume each setting's purpose is clear.

Some product categories lend themselves to long listings of products, each on its own line. Other products may be better suited to a grid layout of no more than six products to a page. Magento's immense flexibility means you not only have a variety of presentation options; it also means you have to be willing to experiment and test. And that, my friend, is one of the exciting aspects of configuring a Magento store.

Catalog

The Stores | Configuration | Catalog | Catalog configuration section has, perhaps, the most panels of any section in Magento. I'm going to break each panel down into its own subsection in order to address the many configuration choices.

Storefront panel

This is one panel with which we encourage you to experiment, as it dictates how products are to be displayed when a customer views a category in your store.

  • List Mode: Set the default category view to Grid Only, List Only, Grid by default, or List by default.
  • Products per Page on Grid Allowed Values: On grid view pages, there will be a drop-down menu to allow customers to select how many products should appear. The values you use here should be a multiple of how many products appear on each row. For the default of three products in each row, use values that are evenly divisible by three to avoid having an incomplete last row.
  • Products per Page on Grid Default Value: Set the default number of products to display on a grid layout category page.
  • Products per Page on List Allowed Values: This uses the same methodology as for the Grid Allowed Values, except that you're not concerned with multiples of products per row, since each row only contains one product.
  • Products per Page on List Default Value: As you can imagine, this is the default number of products that appear in a list view. As with any view default value, this can be a number larger than the smallest number in your list of allowed values.
  • Allow All Products per Page: If your categories don't contain a very large number of products, you may want to allow customers to select All as one of the allowed values. Setting this value to Yes will automatically add All to the drop-down menu of allowed values.
  • Product Listing Sort by: Customers can sort views by Best Value, Name, or Price. This selection determines the default sorting of views. Position is one of the more misunderstood concepts of Magento configurations, so allow me to explain. If you go to a category detail screen under Products | Categories, you'll find under the Category Products tab a list of products assigned to that category. The last column is labeled Position. By entering values into these fields, you dictate a manual sorting order for those products, in ascending order of the position value. For instance, if you want to feature products in a special order, you might enter position values of 10, 20, 30, and so on. The following screenshot shows how we can dictate the sorting order for the Jackets category so that the items are in ascending order according to the values entered into the last column.
    Storefront panel

    Tip

    If you do not enter position values, Position sorts by the products' ID values. In this example, if I leave the position values at their default value of zero, these products would appear in this order: Ottoman, Chair, Couch, Magento Red Furniture Set.

  • Use Flat Catalog Category and Use Flat Catalog Product: As discussed in Chapter 8, Marketing Tools, flattening category and product records can speed up database lookups, thus decreasing page generation times.
  • Allow Dynamic Media URLs in Products and Categories: If you want to insert images into product and category descriptions, you may want Magento to use dynamic URLs to preserve the image link regardless of changes you make to design themes. If you're set on your theme and where you want to store images, set this to No, as it can help reduce the amount of server processing time needed to render description content.

Product reviews

By default, Magento allows viewers to submit reviews for products. This panel determines whether non-registered customers — or guests — are allowed to submit reviews for products.

Product alerts

The alerts configured in this panel pertain to emails that can be sent to customers when product prices or stock availability changes. If you set Allow Alert When Product Price Changes to Yes, then customers will see a link labeled Sign up for price alert on each product page.

Product alerts run settings

If you have activated your cron jobs, Magento will process any customer-subscribed pricing and stock availability alerts according to the schedule you specify in this panel. You can also receive email alerts if an error in the processing occurs.

Product image placeholders

See the section Placeholder Images earlier in this checklist for information on uploading placeholder images.

Recently viewed/compared products

In this panel, you can set how customer-selected recently viewed and compared product lists are handled, especially if you are operating a multi-store installation.

Price

How you choose product price sharing — globally or by website — affects how currency conversions are applied to prices.

Layered navigation

In most cases, automatic calculation of price steps in the layered navigation sidebar will work fine. However, in some cases, you may want to set your own steps for each store.

Category top navigation

If you want to limit the depth of your top menu category navigation, enter the maximum level you wish. Zero (0) means all levels will be displayed.

Search engine optimizations

This panel contains several settings that can affect how well your site is indexed by search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

  • Popular Search Terms: Enabling this feature adds a link to a page of search terms used in searches on your site. This helps search sites identify links generated by popular searches and can help in your rankings when those terms are used in the search engines.
  • Product URL Suffix and Category URL Suffix: By default, product and catalog page URLs end in .html. You can specify any suffix you wish, but you may also want to have no suffix, as is the common practice for many websites.
  • Use Categories Path for Products URLs: If you want URLs for products to contain the category name in the path, such as http://www.storedomain.com/furniture/living-room/ottoman, set this to Yes.
  • Create Permanent Redirect for old URLs if URL key changed: During development and setup, I generally set this to No, as there is no reason to have Magento create a lot of redirects as you edit product URL keys. However, before launch, you should set this to Yes so that future updates will create redirects. These redirects mean that older links still showing in search engines will lead visitors to the correct pages.
  • Page Title Separator: Enter the character you wish to use in URLs as a substitute for blank spaces. It is generally accepted that a hyphen (-) is better for SEO than an underscore (_).
  • Use Canonical Link Meta Tag for Categories and Use Canonical Link Meta Tag for Products: Search engines — especially Google — can penalize you for duplicate content. In an e-commerce store, categories and products can be accessed through a variety of URLs. For instance, http://www.storedomain.com/ottoman and http://www.storedomain.com/furniture/living-room/ottoman take the user to the very same page (Magento knows how to interpret both URLs). To Google, these are two different pages, both with the same content. Therefore, Google might penalize your site for having duplicate content, when, in fact, it's not. Canonical link meta tags are, as the name implies, meta tags in your page header that contain, for lack of a better term, the definitive link to the page. That is, if Google analyzes multiple URLs, but each one has the same value for the canonical link meta tag, then Google understands that these pages are really one in the same and treats them not as duplicate pages, but simply alternative link paths. An example of a canonical link meta tag, for our example ottoman, would be <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.storedomain.com/ottoman" />, and it would be the same regardless of the URL used to arrive at the ottoman page.

Catalog search

Your site will most likely have a site-wide search feature, with a search field somewhere on the page. Allowing your visitors to be able to search your site to find products is one more way you can increase the usability of your Magento site.

  • Minimal Query Length: This represents the minimum number of characters that are required in order to do a search of your site. While the default value is 1, we usually set this to at least 3. Searching for one letter among all the possible categories and products of your site doesn't really make sense. Three may even be too small. Experiment and find the ideal minimum. In most Magento themes, the search field is auto complete, meaning that once the user starts typing into the field, Magento is immediately searching the database for possible matches, displaying them just below the field. This minimum value dictates how many letters are typed before Magento starts this searching process.
  • Maximum Query Length: Enter the maximum number of characters you wish to allow for a query.
  • Maximum Query Words Count: To keep searches fast and efficient, you should have some limit to the number of words that are used in a Like search.

RSS feeds

Go to Stores | Configuration | Catalog | RSS Feeds and enable any RSS feeds you want Magento to create.