Michelangelo van Dam has a new post on his site sharing some helpful hints you can use to test your e-commerce application, be it WooCommerce or other popular PHP-based e-commerce packages.

I'm participating (as much as possible) in the #30daysoftesting challenge organised by Ministry of Testing and SauceLabs. If you're interested, read the full 30 Days of E-Commerce Testing article and join this fun and educational challenge.

The 2nd challenge on the list was to read and share interesting blog articles about E-commerce testing. Since I'm working as a PHP professional I thought it would be great if I oriented my focus on testing PHP based E-commerce platforms. I picked WooCommerce as it's an easy to install and use E-commerce solution. For Magento, PrestaShop and others I've added useful links at the bottom of this article.

He then gets into the details of WooCommerce and what it has available from a testing perspective. He also includes links to a few resources for more general WordPress testing too. The remainder of the post consists of links to more information about testing the other popular e-commerce packages: Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart, Sylius and Laravel-based packages.

The Cloudways blog has posted a new tutorial for the Laravel users out there showing you how to create a "live search" box for the contents of your site. They use an e-commerce example and make use of some simple Javascript to return results from a backend script.

Whether you have a blog or an ecommerce store, a search bar is always an essential component of the UI. However, the days of simple search bar is over. These days, a live search bar is much more efficient than a simple search bar because it displays similar content in real time. This increases the chance of landing a sale because the customer could see the largest selection of related products.

The article starts off with the prerequisites for following along including an installation of PHP, MySQL, Apache and Laravel. They include an optional step of setting it all up on a Cloudways server but this isn't required if you want to do it locally. The tutorial then walks through the setup steps and creating the migration for the "products" table it will search. It also shows the creation of the controller and routes for the search endpoints and the view with the Javascript to make the Ajax request. It finishes with a way to test the result and a screenshot of what should be returned.

The Symfony blog has a new post featuring an interview with Pawe? J?drzejewski, the founder of the Sylius project - an ecommerce platform based on the Symfony components.

Sylius, an e-commerce project based on Symfony components, recently released its 1.0.0 stable version. After several years of work and thousands of commits from hundred of contributors, Sylius is now ready to take the e-commerce world by storm. We chatted with Pawe? J?drzejewski, founder and leader of the project, to celebrate this milestone.

In the interview Pawe? answers questions about the project itself, why it stands out from some of the other ecommerce projects, the state of ecommerce and why they chose Symfony components as the base for the project.

Tomas Votruba has a post to his site showing you how to combine EasyCodingStandard and PHPStan on a Symfony-based ecommerce project. This is the second part of a series comparing the code of three popular Symfony ecommerce packages (part one is here).

In the last post, we looked at the static analysis of 3 Symfony E-Commerce projects.

Lines of code, Duplicated code, Cyclomatic complexity or Method length. These metrics are very rarely used in practise (even though there is a sniff for that).

Today, I am going to show you how you can check them with tools that can help you keep your code better on daily basis - EasyCodingStandard and PHPStan.

He's provided the code he used to analyze the packages - ShopSys, Sylius and Spryker. He goes on to talk about some of the tool choices and the resulting code violations from the PSR-2 checks. He also covers some of the "cleaners" that helped to remove some dead code and the violations uncovered by PHPStan.

The Scotch.io site has a tutorial for the WordPress users out there needing an ecommerce solution and wanting to integrate it seamlessly into your site. They show you how to integrate Snipcart, part of a platform that handles a lot of the common ecommerce tasks for you.

Even though an exponential amount of online tools keep popping up, WordPress remains a domineering web behemoth. More than 25% of active sites run on the famous CMS. Quite a chunk of the whole world wide web.

[...] Many front-end developers I've met and talked to enjoy working with a lean, quick e-commerce solution like Snipcart. But, they also want to give more autonomy in familiar CMS to their merchant clients. Since many of them use WordPress, I thought I'd write this article to provide them with a useful resource.

The post then breaks the process down into a few different steps, each including code and screenshots as needed:

• Installing the required plugins
• Show products in the theme
• Integrate Snipcart's shopping cart
• Update inventory with webhooks
• Add Snipcart data to WordPress admin
• Quick edit of inventory

If you're interested in the full code required for the integration, you can see it over on this GitHub repository.

On the Liip blog there's a post about the release of Magento 2, the latest and hugely reworked version of the popular eCommerce platform. The post walks you through the installation of this latest update using a pre-configured Vagrant machine.

I’ve downloaded my M2 sample from the official Magento website, there I also found an archive with sample data. For a setup I used a pre-configured Vagrant machine according to the installation guide for Magento server. This installation guide offers two options: easy and advanced. Let’s try the easy way first ;) M2 has an installation wizard, so it is supposed that even a none technically prepared user can install it successfully. And indeed, it looks easy.

He walks through some of the issues he had importing the data during the installation, ultimately, falling back to a command line call to push the large sample data into the platform.

You can find out more about this release and get the latest version over on the Magento website with plenty of information about what's been improved, added and how to get started using this latest version.

Marc Morera has posted an interesting article to his site suggesting a re-thinking of how event listeners are used in applications and libraries.

Let’s talk about Event Listeners. Do you know what an Event Listener is? Well, if you are used to working with Symfony, then you should know what is intended for. If you don’t, don’t hesitate to take a look at the Symfony documentation. This post aims to start a small discussion about how an Event Listener should look like if we really want to keep things decoupled.

The starts with a brief summary of the post (tl;dr) for those in a hurry but goes on to explain things in a bit more detail too. He starts by laying a foundation, introducing what event listeners are. He also shows how they're commonly implemented and used (in Symfony2 specifically but it applies more generally too) to trigger actions in applications. He suggests decoupling things a bit more from the flow of the action and allowing, in this case, access to both the order and the customer (on a "order created" action). He takes it one step further and decouples the sending of an email into a service and then creates an instance of this when needed in the event and not before.

On the Symfony blog today they've posted an interview with Manuel Raynaud, the lead developer on the Thelia project. Thelia is a Symfony-based e-commerce solution that is free to download and use (and can easily be installed via Composer).

An interview with Manuel Raynaud, lead developer of Thelia, a Symfony-based e-commerce solution. Introducing the new Thelia 2 and how it's in perfect harmony with Symfony.

The interview starts with a brief introduction of Manuel and a quick overview of what the Thelia project is about and the current state of things. They get into some of the story behind Thelia and what parts of Symfony (components) it uses behind the scenes. They finish out the interview talking about some of the advantages the project offers and challenges they've faced along the way. There's also a bit about how Thelia is involved in the Symfony events and community.

Over on Reddit.com there's a good discussion (with plenty of feedback) to a user looking for "a PHP ecommerce solution that isn't terrible" to replace their aging implementation.

I've been using Lemonstand V1 for a couple of years now, it's been really decent, though they're zoning it out to make way for V2. They're moving to a cloud hosted monthly cost, without a lot of core features from V1, which means my agency needs to find an alternative. Obviously the one that stands out is Magento, but I've logged in and clicked around and looks so bad. [...] I have recently found "builtwith.com" which seems to show usage stats for different ecommerce systems, though I cannot seem to find anything very good on that list which looks reliable. The most promising thing I could find was called "Sylius" (http://sylius.org/) which looks fantastic, BUT, it's newish, and there are no docs, it's not being supported by a company, it's only being held up by the community. Can anyone suggest any other alternatives to look into?

The comments to the post range from suggestions of other solutions to attempts to reinforce ones already mentioned:

• "I'd go with the biggest names in eCommerce for PHP. That will give you the most leverage. We run our own ecommerce software and when your missing a community, features, and market share, it will be a ruff battle selling customers on your solution who are aware of software like Magento."
• "No, sorry. No joke. Every ecommerce solution I touched is terrible. And Magento is hell."
• "Drupal with the Ubercart module is pretty nice."
• "You have checked out OpenCart, haven't you?"
• "WooCommerce has been pretty good if you're on WordPress. Actually similar to Magento."
• "In my experience none stand above the rest and all have their drawbacks, especially when you just need to getting something slightly custom up and running. We most recently used CS Cart and it was not terrible."

Check out the post for more feedback and suggestions.

On PHPBuilder.com there's a recent post looking at debugging Magento applications with some of the built-in tools the platform makes available.

Magento is the world's most popular open source e-commerce platform, relied upon by countless Fortune 500 and small business alike for selling goods and services of all types. [...] But with Magento's considerable power comes a great deal of complexity [but] it can be incredibly difficult to even identify the origin of an error let alone resolve it. You can however dramatically improve your productivity as a Magento developer by taking advantage of a few key debugging features.

They recommend using four tools built into the platform - the developer mode, logging, template path hints and viewing the raw SQL queries. They also recommend using a few other tools like FireBug and the features of Eclipse to help with code formatting and completion.