基本上开发magento是一个毕竟复杂的工作,那么如何让一个网站的店主或者管理人员来做这个开发功能呢?
答案就是最近发布的magento构件概念,这个构件是在magento 开源社区版1.4,企业版本1.6上发布.
我们可以看出,新的1.4版本将会对目前的插件市场进行一次洗牌,以后将会有更加灵活性,方便组装的插件出现.
如同drupal的cck,和joomla的k2 组件一样.内容的再组织将会非常方便.不懂程序也可以容易的实施.
官方文档如下:
Overview
Magento Widgets allow business users with no technical knowledge to easily add dynamic content (including product data, for example) to pages in Magento Stores. This allows for greater control and flexibility in creating informational and marketing content through administrator tools, enabling intuitive and efficient control of content such as:
- Dynamic product data in Marketing Campaign Landing Pages
- Dynamic Information such as Recently Viewed Items into Content Pages
- Promotional images to position in different blocks, side columns and other locations throughout the storefront
- Interactive elements and action blocks (external review systems, video chats, voting and subscription forms)
- Alternative navigation elements (tag clouds, catalog image sliders)
- Create interactive and dynamic flash elements easily configured and embedded within content pages for enhanced user experience
- And lots more …
What are Widgets?
Magento Widgets are frontend blocks with a predefined set of configuration options. These configuration options are displayed in a special edit form in the backend panel when a widget is being added or edited by a store owner. The ability to easily set widget configuration options allows for the full control of widget placement on a page to store owners.
Configuration options for selecting a product link widget to be inputted in the header of all product pages and in all Pages using a Three-Column layout
The Magento Community Edition Version 1.4, and the Enterprise Edition Version 1.6, facilitate the ease of using custom frontend extensions even more by introducing this new concept of customizable Magento Widgets, which can help Magento contributors and commercial extension developers provide more control over the frontend extension behavior and visual block placement to store owners.
How to Develop a Widget
Typically, developing a widget doesn’t differ much from developing a regular Magento extension which provides frontend functionality. If you want to allow a store owner to define different configuration options per block instance and to have full control over the placement of the block instance on a page (that also includes ability to add block into a CMS page or CMS static block) – the widget format will help you to do so.
Extension can then have any number of Magento Widgets. Widgets are typically related to the functionality which is provided by the extension itself. You can also develop widgets which add configuration options and placement control to the functionality which already exists in extensions.
Your Magento extension can also create and add pre-configured widget instances to defined pages right upon the extension installation.
You can package Magento extensions with widgets as you would any other extension and then upload them to Magento Connect under the Widgets category.
There is a new tutorial available in the Magento Knowledge Base which covers creating custom widgets:
- Tutorial: Creating a Magento Widget, Part 1 is a quick introduction to widget development which describes creating simple widgets for adding social bookmarking links on a page.
- Tutorial: Creating a Magento Widget, Part 2 introduces widget configuration options. You will learn how to define widgets configuration options that can be modified by a store owner and create another simple widget which adds a configurable list of bookmarking links on a page.