Should we go through the process of migrating to Magento 2, or should we explore pastures-new?

If you run an online business, then the chances are that you have heard of Magento or maybe one, who already using it for your trade. Similarly, if you are a consumer then chances are there you would have purchased at an online store running on the Magento platform.

First things first! What is Magento 2.0?

A dedicated open source e-commerce platform that comes with absolute flexibility over the shopping cart, as well as provides complete control over functions: Authentications,out-looks of the online store.

It owns a wide parade of tools and features to help in building efficient e-commerce websites.

There are three separate editions of Magento 2.0:

Magento 2.0-Open Source: 

It comes for free of cost, which suits the Startups or Small-medium businesses exceptionally.

Magento 2.0-Enterprise Edition:

Premium edition, a perfect fit for Medium and Large scale businesses, that comes down with extensive features like enterprise management tools and marketing variables.

Enterprise Cloud Edition:

This version has an add-on option, which eliminates the need for self-hosting using the SaaS and relatively expensive which makes it less preferable in the market.

Let’s buckle up & dive in to grasp some more content on Magento 2.0..,

Why should we migrate to Magento 2.0?

Performance & Scalability:

Magento 2 comes with an upgraded indexer that helps to enhance its query performance speed. The strategy of indexing is to convert business data into various fields, such as Users, Stores, locations, prices etc by creating index tables and updates to it regularly which could be easily extracted when the business requires.

Checkout Process:

Check out process a constant factor, which determines the sales and customer experience on the site. Magento 2 comes with a two-step process: Review & Payment; Shipping details.It.also considers visitors as guests which eliminate the login or registration procedure, makes it user-friendly and comes with a dynamic shipping rate (ie) country, state, location accordingly one can integrate payment in a go.

Easy to Upgrade :

If you own online business, you need software that makes upgrading easy. Because bug keeps coming daily which needs to be resolved by upgrading to a new version of the built software. When yours can be upgraded easily, you may encounter security issues and could be exploited. It could slow down your sales and people might break into your system.

Extensions for integrations:

Magento2 helps you to carry out important activities for your online store by enhancing features and functionalities in one stroke,it includes customizing and personalizing your e-store as you want. It allows businesses to integrate with payment gates like Braintree,Paypal etc and customers can their payment options from it which boosts sales.

Instant purchase:

This service helps customers to place orders quickly and comfortably without undergoing the usual checkout process. When customers visit the online site to make purchases and they click on the Instant purchase tab which appears on the chosen product page, immediately it redirects to a confirmation page followed by the details of the shipment. It provides customers a bigger satisfaction compared to longer procedures.

Email marketing automation:

Magento2 has popped out with a  new feature (ie) dotmailer email marketing automation. It allows traders to create a campaign in minutes. One can create automated campaigns via emails, SMS, Push and other channels and manage direct emails of your e-commerce. This, the toolset is easy to use and additionally they provide personal assistance.

Reporting:

This is a key feature for success in e-commerce. Magento 2 gives froth twenty different reports through its web interface. It gives insights into three main critical areas, namely orders( No of orders, payments, taxes, shipment fee details), products( Products ordered, canceled, sold) and customers(No of users registered) and gets updated periodically.It helps in maintaining data and metrics, which supports building business management.

Magento 2 still holds so many features to run your business passively without a downfall, above discussed ones are just a few  essentials which would help you to have a successful lookout;

One-Line facts on Magento :

• Magento powers, up 1.2% of the internet.
• 2,50,000 online stores run in Magento’s platform.
• It has one thousand plus themes and extensions.
• Two lakhs, Magento developers are found around the World.
• Magenta has 1500 and plus global partners,across.
• Daily 5000 new ones are downloaded, purchased too!

Get a head start on learning Magento 2!

Be prepared to work with the product enhancements and features that are offered in this new technology.

For more freshly built contents Stay tuned for more!

With a few lines of code, you can determine “resources” corresponding to your Eloquent models, and Nova will generate attractive interfaces for common CRUD tasks. Its real power, yet, lies in the customization options.

Moreover, there are four Nova elements you can create:

They are:    

• Tools.
• Resource Tools.
• Cards and
• Fields.

Before going to the steps, let’s know something about Laravel Nova.

So, What is Laravel Nova?

Nova is a single-page application which is built with Laravel and Vue Js. It is smooth as silk and writing the custom components is simple and easy.

Moreover,  Laravel Nova is the administration dashboard designed by the team behind Laravel.

Laravel Nova is a gorgeous backend tool for configuring and administering your multiple database tables.

This article provides a step by step approach, to create a tool!

Steps for Building tool for Laravel Nova:                                                         

• Initial Step: Pull Laravel Nova into your application

If you have already installed Nova, you can skip this step.

The first step is to add Nova to your existing Laravel application.

Here is how you can install:

• Download and unzip the freshest Nova release into a nova folder in the root directory of your Laravel application.

• Tell the Composer where to find Nova using a local ‘path’ repository.

This is what you should do:

“repositories”: [

   {

       “type”: “path”,

       “url”: “./nova”

   }

],

• The third step is to Add laravel/nova to the required section of your composer.json file

This can be done as:

“require”: {

   “php”: “^7.1.3”,

   “fideloper/proxy”: “^4.0”,

   “laravel/framework”: “5.6.*”,

   “laravel/nova”: “*”

},

• Update your dependencies using

composer update

• Install Nova with the help of Artisan using the command:

php artisan nova:install

php artisan migrate

You can view the installation by browsing to http://<your-app>/nova.

• Initializing your tool

php artisan nova:tool sbine/route-viewer

This is how initialization needs to be done.

This command will create your tool in nova-components/<YourTool>. It will then assist you to install its NPM dependencies, compile them, and update your parent application’s composer.json with the new tool dependency.

Added, it will also symlink your tool’s directory to your vendor directory, as though you had installed it via Composer.

• Registering your tool

Your Parent application needs to activate your tool once your scaffolding has been done. Open app/Providers/NovaServiceProvider and attach your tool to the tools() method. It will be residing in the src directory under the name you used in the Nova tool command.

use Sbine\RouteViewer\RouteViewer;

public function tools()

{

   return [

       new RouteViewer,

   ];

}

Once this is done, your tool should be available with a fancy landing page.

It will look just like this picture.

• Write some code there

You can find all your code for your tool in the folder nova-components/<YourTool>.

Every tool ships with a routes/api.php file for you to register your individual routes. Everything registered here will be prefixed with /nova-vendor/<your-tool-name>/.

• Upload your tool to Github

Create a new repository on GitHub, and put your code to it.

git init

git remote add origin git@github.com:<your-name>/<your-repository>.git

git add.

git commit -am “Initial commit.”

git push origin master

• Make a release

You can tag the versions of your users can rely on a particular version, rather than whatever’s on the master. To tag a version corresponding to your recent commit, use git tag <version>:

git tag 0.0.1 && git push –tags

• Submit it to Packagist.org

To make your tool installable with Composer initially, you need to register on Packagist.org.

Log in, go to ‘Submit’, and insert your repository URL.

Your Packagist.org entry won’t automatically update when you launch new code by default. To do that, you will need to create a GitHub Service Hook.

You can also manually update it by using the ‘Update’ button, but experts recommend automating this process.

• Install it in a new Nova app

We are all done! Now you can install your package in any of the Nova apps.

composer require sbine/route-viewer

Just like in step 2, you will need to register the tool in your app/Providers/NovaServiceProvider in order to use it.

For additional information on Nova tools and other types of customization, take a look at the official documentation.

Final Words

These tools would definitely get you a high standard for Laravel.

If you have any queries, jot down your comments in the comments section below!

Thanks for stopping by!

So, E-Commerce sites have great importance in this present world. Moreover, most of the E-Commerce sites are built with Magento 1.0 to Magento 1.9. But the problem is there comes an security issue which needs to be taken a high concern.

One more shocking news is that PHP has officially announced that it is stopping security updates for PHP 5.6 and 7.0 in December 2018.

In this article, we have stated how you need to secure your E-Commerce Website built with Magento and running on PHP frameworks.

So, when are the security updates ending for the versions 5.6 and 7.0?

• For PHP 7.0 security updates have got stopped by 3rd December 2018.
• For PHP 5.6 security updates have got stopped by 31st December 2018.

Why the security updates got ended?

Every single version of PHP is supported only for two years. In these couple of years, all the bugs and security issues gets fixed. Once the two year period gets over, each domain of PHP is supported for another year only for critical security issues.

Once the support period gets over, the branch comes to End of Life which means it cannot be supported any more.

Since PHP 5.6 is the final phase for PHP 5 release, the support for this version has been increased for four months which has got over by December 31st, 2018.

What happens if you miss updating PHP 5.6 or 7.0 of your Magento website?

In simple words, it would make your website more vulnerable to the attackers. If in case, your website gets hacked, these things will happen subsequently:

• Admin credentials will be imperilled.
• Customer data such as credit card details will be stolen.
• A significant drop in search engine ranks which will ultimately lead to losing your customers.
• The database will get manipulated.
• Your website will be slower compared to your competitors.

I’m not aware of my website’s current PHP version! How can I find?

• This can be done by just logging in to your Control Panel. If you have SSH access, you can type the following command:

php -v

• Added, you can make use of online tools since there are a plethora of tools available already!

• Yet another way is to call your hosting provider and ask them about the PHP version used in your site.

So, How should I secure my Magento 1.X Site?

There are a couple of ways to secure your site. The primary method is to upgrade your Magento 1.x site to the latest Magento 2 version. The next method is to upgrade to PHP 7.2 and apply the patch for Magento 1.x.

• Upgrade your Magento 1.x site to the newest Magento 2 version

• The recent version Magento 2.2.6 runs on PHP 7.1.x. Therefore switching to the latest version of Magento would definitely help you and protect your site.

• Added, it will also increase your website’s performance.

• Upgrade to PHP 7.2 and implement the patch for Magento 1.x.

• This second method can be done when you start upgrading to the next version provided by the Magento.

If you aren’t aware of the upgrading, we are here to assist you! Check out the following section!

How should I upgrade PHP from 5.6/7.0 to 7.2 and secure Magento 1.x?

Before starting the development of the site, you need to have a version control system like GIT which manages the record of changes you make with the code. Version control can also be used for favourably backing up your code.

• Step 1: Back up your site

To perform the back up for your Magento site, you need to follow the mentioned steps:

• Log in to your Magento Admin Panel.
• Click on the System menu and under the Tools category click on Backups.
• Now select Database Backup and enter the name of backup. It is highly recommended to use enter date in the backup name for future reference.
• Mark the box next to the “Put store on the maintenance while backup creation” and click on the Ok button.
• At last, the back up will get downloaded to your computer.

• Step 2: Code and Media Backup

• To backup code and media files, you can follow this guide.

• Step 3: Check for Compatability extensions

• This is going to be a critical thing which you need to give importance to. You need to upgrade to the next version if you need them to support.

• If there is no such update from your extension vendor, you may ask your developers to customize the continuation to support PHP 7.2.

• Step 4: Update your current PHP version

• To secure your website, it is mandatory that you need to update your PHP version.
• To update, go to your web hosting control panel and upgrade the PHP version.
• If you aren’t aware of that, you can look at this.

• Step 5: Apply the Patch

• Magento has released the latest version PHP 7.2 patch specifically for Magento1.9 customers.
• This patch will make your website compatible with PHP 7.2 and make it secured from attacks.
• You can download patch links here
• If you need assistance with applying the patch you can refer to this article.

Never forget to ensure that the security of the website is a part of the SEO process:

Generally, security issues aren’t given importance in SEO processes. Connect your website to Google Search Engine Console and get notified about Security risks and issues to enhance your SEO performance of the site.

To Close

Security has become a major concern which needs to be noted. If you don’t give importance to your website, it may result in vulnerability leading to losing your business as well as customers.

Hope this tutorial would have helped!

If you have any queries, jot down your comments in the comments section below!!

• Happy Reading

In this blog, we have listed the prime 10 PHP testing & Optimization tools and PHP frameworks which makes the tester’s and developer’s work apparent to test the code in PHP and report the bugs.

Before moving with the tools list, it is important to know the difference between Frameworks and Tools.

Basically, there is not a much difference between Frameworks and Tools. They both are joined up with each other. In the virtue of developing a new software or language, you use tools and tools can be developed by their own Frameworks.

Let’s dive in..!

• Storyplayer

Right off the bat, Storyplayer tool is an automation tool for both the functional and non-functional requirements of the code written in PHP. Primarily, it is built in Data Sift. Data Sift is an independent provider of social data, blog data and news data. This tool is used to test both the ends of the websites. It comes up with an easy usage and feature-packed. The Freshest version of StoryPlayer that is available in the market is version 1.5.

Tangible Benefits

• The tool is used for testing web-app or API.
• Enables component as well as end-to-end testing.
• Enables Testing End-to-End platforms.
• The tool is designed for both Developers and Testers.
• Can also be used for testing code written in other languages other than PHP.
• Works with web browsers and platform combinations.
• Can be extended with own Plugins as well.

Pros Include

• This tool is an Open source.
• It is Simple and easy to test and debug the code.
• Can be used for cross-browser testing.
• Install via Composer as well.

Cons Include

• Without the installation of a composer, the tool will not work.
• If there is no knowledge of PHP, then it takes time to understand the test cases developed in PHP.

Pricing

• As it is an open source tool, it is available free of cost in the market.

• Selenium HQ

Selenium is a free open source web application automation tool. It is also referred to as the Functional Testing web application automation tool.  It contains a record and playback tool for authoring tests. It also possesses a test domain specific language called Selenese. It is compatible with more than one languages like Java, C# (.net), Ruby, Python, and PHP etc.

Selenium HQ comes up with different flavors such as:

• Selenium core.
• Selenium RC(Selenium1).
• Selenium IDE.

Selendroid can be used only for Android while Appium for both Android and Apple.

Tangible Benefits

• Compatible on all Operating System like Windows, Mac, Linux etc.
• Regression Test cases can be automated by selenium.
• Most popularly used automated tool used for automating code in PHP or Java or other programming languages.
• It has its own Web Driver API.

Pros Include

• Cost is low.
• Cross Browser Testing with its Compatibility.
• Supports different Testing Frameworks.
• Easy to Integrate with a different programming language.
• Used with TDD (Test Driven Development).
• Useful for Comprehensive Testing.

Cons Include

• Difficulty in searching Locators.
• Only limited Browsers are supported.
• You cannot write Manual Scripts.
• Performance is slow.

Pricing

• As it is an open source tool, it is available free of cost in the market.

• PHPUnit

PHPUnit is an open source automation tool used for PHP code. It is one of the popular framework used for unit testing. The PHP code here is tested unit by unit to find out the errors and defects in the code. The Process is a little bit slower and it takes a long time but the chances of getting a bug at the end are less due to unit wise testing.

Tangible Benefits

• The tool is used with Command line.
• You can extend the Test cases as per the requirements stated.
• It uses code assertion to test the behavior of the unit.
• It is one of the simple and easy units testing frameworks.
• This tool is a xUnit architecture for the Unit testing framework.

Pros Include

• This is a feature-packed tool for testing low levels like Unit testing or high levels like API or BDD testing.
• It can also be used with other frameworks also for testing.
• It is totally based on PHP, so test cases are also written in that and programmer doesn’t need to learn several languages for that.

Cons Include

• Configuration is not simple and easier here.
• It doesn’t have much amount of resources and documentation.
• It is totally based on PHP so that if the developers don’t know PHP then they can’t write the test cases for the software.

Pricing

• Since it is an open source tool, it is available at no cost in the market.

• SimpleTest

This is used for the unit as well as the Web testing framework. It supports proxies, SSI, forms, frames etc. If you are using JUnit then you will find it more easy to use. This is a part of Drupal core.

Tangible Benefits

• This tool can be used for unit testing.
• It supports the simplest HTML display.
• Test cases are autoloading here.
• It handles cookies when fetching various pages.
• Test cases can be displayed, without a web browser.
• It also supports Proxy, SSI, forms, frames etc.

Pros Include

• It tests each and every part.
• Easy to understand and identifies bugs if unit testing is done.
• Execution will be done at a faster rate.

Cons Include

• Mocking is complicated here.

Pricing

• The tool is free of cost.

• Kahlan

This Framework is generally used for end to end functional as well as unit testing for PHP. It makes use of describe-it syntax and allows mocking dynamically. Workflow here is customized and extensible. Added, It also has built-in reporters and exporters.

Tangible Benefits

• This tool supports BDD testing framework.
• It also supports monkey patch to your code.
• It checks called methods are present.
• Dynamic mocking is present i.e. stubs.
• It requires Xdebug and phpdbg.

Pros Include

• End to end functional testing is done here.
• Codes are customized and are easy to understand.
• Human-readable English makes understanding easier and friendly.
• The speed of execution is high.
• It helps in Semantic versioning to maintain CHANGELOG.

Cons Include

• If new then it takes time to learn the tool for testing.
• Xdebug and Phpdbg are required for the code coverage.
• This framework supports PHP 5.5+ only.

Conclusion

These tools are mainly based on Behavior-driven development or Test-driven development which is for unit testing and end to end testing. There are many more PHP testing framework and tools that are available in the market and are open source ones but the above-recited tools are the most popular among all the tools.