Greetings fellow developers! Today I’ll try to explain the principles of EAV system and Magento’s implementation of it. This is a tutorial / explenation for beginners, so please be patient and even try to draw the logic on a paper if you don’t understand it. A small notice before we start. I won’t use specific SQL query examples since this will be a simplified example of principles of the EAV.

As you know, Magento has a built-in contact form that can be used for general contacts. That form isn’t part of any CMS page, you cannot edit some introduction text, you cannot add phone numbers administration, and you cannot see the breadcrumbs. If you wish to edit text in that default contact form, you will need to update front-end files. Luckily, there is an alternative.

Note:You might notice that this is one of our oldest posts. Upon writing we made one error in the code that was never corrected. Now, this post article is updated and we have fully working instructions. Hope this will help.

If you are a developer, editing your contact form HTML is an easy task. You only need to open file:
app/design/frontend/default/[yourtheme]/template/contacts/form.phtml and you will find your way around.

When I had first contact with Magento platform, I had to create a custom module for it. I thought to myself – how hard can it be? How wrong I was… I didn’t even know where to start…

Anyway, as I already knew the principals of MVC (Model – View – Controller) architecture, and had fairly good knowledge of object orientated PHP, all I needed was the basic file/folder structure for my custom module.

Just a small notice before I start: there are numerous tutorials / blog posts that explain the contents of those files, and therefore I won’t go into that.