I wanted to give our sales people some notifications from customer offers. It seemed a bit more personal to set these as coming from the customer, with the information they sent, while tying it into a Magento 2 template for easy modification. This brought me to the transport builder part of Magento 2’s framework.

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We’re one of the unique shops in America that doesn’t have a POS system in place. 99% of our business comes from online orders through a sales channel. As we grew, we began to establish a presence and added some internal customer service and sales people. Our CEO is very money conscious. As a result, we never spent money on a stand-alone POS. We’ve instead turned to the Magento 2 back-end ordering system. This is where we found a lack of separation of internal sales and consumer sales reporting.

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You’re always looking for ways to speed things up when you work with a catalog of 125,000 SKUs and growing. Management of the catalog is no different. Magento’s built-in import can’t handle the load and some of the other import modules might be out of budget. Fortunately there’s a way for you to tackle your inventory management issues at the database level.

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Magento’s view is built by a collection of blocks. Some blocks are cached to boost performance. Some blocks are left out of cache because they’re unique to a session or dynamic. Magento 2 does a good job of sorting out most of that for you. Eventually there will come a time when customization interferes and you find yourself excluding blocks from cache.

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I’ve been working on getting our new website moving quicker. We have a large catalog and some semi-fancy functionality that slows things down a bit. I tried installing redis and turning that on. It works well, but for page caching, it just wasn’t quite enough. I have now turned my attention to varnish.

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You have all the tools you need to build a custom module that will show database stored data to your users. They can even manage that data. Now let’s talk about personalizing data and securing user pages. The last step to this is securing the data so only your authenticated users can see their own data.

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Now that we’ve jumped into custom blocks, let’s talk about ways to include them in the web site. I’m not talking about simply creating a custom page. We can add navigation menus and include them in menus of other areas of the web site. Layouts are an easy way to do this.

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I’m still amazed at the number of young programmers who don’t know what “CRUD” is. A word like that sounds very academic to me. Magento 2 makes it fairly uniform and simple to do basic database functions within your collections.

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I remember the days of typing out all of my SQL queries. I enjoyed it. There was one time I even considered going the DBA route. Enter in modern times and the age of the ORM. This brings us to a talk about Magento 2 and how it uses collections.

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