Sometimes we need to debug the extensions created by other developers to fix possible issues or adjust some functionality. Also, it is a well-known situation in Magento when you have to debug and resolve the extensions conflicts.

In the beginning, Magento was one of the biggest PHP applications. The main purpose of that platform was to cover all needs of store owners being universal and flexible. So, Magento store owners got a big and interesting e-commerce platform and the developers got a big “battlefield” for their implementations. A lot of things have been changed from year to year: servers became more powerful, Magento much faster and the number of platforms, developers and extensions has grown significantly. As a result, every store owner has a wide choice of the solutions that might be implemented for their stores. Unfortunately, very often it’s hard to predict how good is some add-on for a specific Magento installation because of different reasons. You are installing first, tenth, thirtieth extension and then realize: the store is much slower than it was before.

If you are a web developer, there’s one thing you are doing from day to day, no matter how good you are. You can write a good code, and you may know your work like a pro, but usually you have to integrate your solutions into different systems which were, unfortunately, created by someone else. Here we meet the thing that can turn into the nightmare for you if you are following a wrong way – the debugging.

We continue to share our experience with Magento developers by publishing the next set of Best Practices in Magento coding. If you missed our previous article, here it is.