Nick's Site

Tomorrow, several other Classy Llamas) and I will be heading to San Francisco to attend the x.commerce Innovate Developers Conference! This is very exciting for a couple of reasons:

1. The idea of x.commerce is very ambitious. It is the first platform that aims to be first full-spectrum, end-to-end eCommerce platform. It’s exciting to be a part of something like that.
2. Secondly, Magento will be testing their Beta Developer Certification Exam I’ve been a big supporter of this and it will be awesome to be one of the first to take this new exam and become a Certified Magento Developer!

1. Lastly, it will be great to meet & greet the other Magento developers and partners.

We’ll be updating our Classy Llama blog with updates as we can!

Alan Storm has a great module called Layoutviewer that is great for front-end developers.  It allows you to see the layout that Magento will use to render a page. This can be useful to debug what layout updates have been applied to a page.  One way or another, it usually ends up in most of my development sites. Here is a nice little shell script you can copy-and-paste or download to easily add it to your project:

#/bin/bash
VIEWER_HTTP_DOWNLOAD="http://alanstorm.com/2005/projects/MagentoLayoutViewer.tar.gz"

# If we are in the root, then we need to go into app/code/local.
if [ -f "index.php" ]; then
    cd app/code/local;
fi

curl -so - $VIEWER_HTTP_DOWNLOAD | tar xvzf -

(
cat <<'ConfigFile'
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
    <modules>
        <Alanstormdotcom_Layoutviewer>
            <active>true</active>
            <codePool>local</codePool>
        </Alanstormdotcom_Layoutviewer>
    </modules>
</config>

ConfigFile
) > ../../etc/modules/Allanstormdotcom_Layoutviewer.xml

Also, here is a little bookmarklet that you can use to show the formatted XML for a page using the installed module: Display Layout Just drag it to your bookmarks bar! You can also download the attached shell script. It will (from the htdocs folder for your Magento site) download the layoutviewer module.