Magic Software IT Blog

In order to customize magento code first step is to learn how to make a module. First of all, we're going to define our module within Magento. For this, we need to create a file called Namespace_MyModule.xml within the Magento folder app/etc/modules with the following contents:

<!--?xml version="1.0"?-->
<config>
    <modules>
        <namespace_mymodule>
            <active>true</active>
            <codepool>local</codepool>
        </namespace_mymodule>
    </modules>
</config>

Next, we are going to create the module necessary folders. Create the following folder-structure within the app/code/local directory: * Namespace * Namespace/MyModule * Namespace/MyModule/etc * Namespace/MyModule/Helper Sometimes, a module also can contains extra folders like Block, Model and controllers, but we are going to skip that within this example.

    class Namespace_MyModule_Helper_Data extends Mage_Core_Helper_Abstract
    { 
        public function test()
        {
            return 'Hello';
        }
    }

We are creating a configuration-file Namespace/MyModule/etc/config.xml which contains XML-code that tell magento info about structure of our module and you might not yet understand.

<!--?xml version="1.0"?-->
    <config>
        <modules>
            <namespace_mymodule>
                <version>0.0.1</version>
            </namespace_mymodule>
        </modules>
        <global>
            <blocks>
                <mymodule>
                    <class>Namespace_MyModule_Block</class>
                </mymodule>
            </blocks>
            <helpers>
                <mymodule>
                    <class>Namespace_MyModule_Helper</class>
                </mymodule>
            </helpers>
        </global>
    </config>

Now our custom module is ready to be used. For example if we want to use helper function, in other files from magento we simply call in this way:

    Mage::helper('mymodule/data')->test();