In order to speed things up with building admin sections under System > Configuration area in Magento I wrote a little blank extension. Hopefully its a step or two beyond “Hello world” level. I named the extension “CoolDash”, short from CoolDashboard. Name holds no special meaning, just something I popped out of my head. First thing you might notice when you open config.xmls and system.xml is the attribute naming. I intentionally used names like “somecooldashmodel2″. I found it extremely difficult, error prone and annoying to get around in scenarios where different areas of config files use same names for attributes with different meaning, like “customer”, “catalog” and so on.

Due to the “complexity” of Magento’s xml files, developers can waste great amount of time on “unnecessary” things.
When I say “complexity” I say it with purpose. XML files are not so complex by them selves, but due to extreme lack of documentation and changes Magento pumps in every new “major” release, people are lost among things that should really be sideways. Anyway, in this little article I will show you how to create basic, startup structure for your module to get it shown under Magento Admin main top menu.

As you can see on the picture below, I am creating a menu item with title “ActiveCodeline_SampleModule1″.

Unlike good old WordPress that “every kid in the block” knows how to create a plugin for, Magento is a whole new system. It requires extensive knowledge of OOP, ORM’s, MVC, and few other stuff. This is why not “every kid in the block” can write a module for Magento, and this is why I love it. However, unlike WordPress, Drupal and other community driven systems out there who keep in mind backward compatibility things with Magento things are a bit different.

One of the things that caught my eye and made me wonder about the consequences is the Observer and override functionality that probably most of the serious custom made Magento modules will utilize. Utilizing Observers enables you to observe and execute some action inside the “customer work flow” or even some admin stuff. Such functionality is heavily known is systems like WordPress and it’s called “hooks”. Besides hooking, another useful an very powerful feature which is actually related more to the OOP concept itself is the overriding. Personally i find the combination of observers and overrides to be the coolest and most powerful stuff in Magento module development.