Here are a few golden rules for Magento development. They may not be news to serious techies, but they may help retailers assess potential developers to ensure that they are working with a proper best practice agency
Don’t Hack The Core.
It may provide a quick (and lazy!) way to deliver what you need but it will come back to haunt you – normally in the form of unforeseen consequences. It will definitely cause problems if you ever want to upgrade your Magento infrastructure to the latest version. If you want to save time and money in the mid and long term then get your developers to do it right!
Use a Module.
If you need to change the way that Magento works then create a module, or create a separate theme. That way you can test your changes on different installations, disable the functionality if a problem arises, and reinstall the functionality when you upgrade your platform.
Have a Staging or Development site.
A place to test all your developers work, where you can see it working properly (and sign it off) before it goes live sounds like a good idea – right?! That’s why its industry Best Practice!
Manage the code base properly.
Control changes and modules with proper software configuration management best practise. I know that sounds a bit geeky, but it is important that your developers have some kind of repository system, so that they can make organised and logged changes to your precious live environment.
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