Top 15 Magento Interview Questions & Answers

1) Mention what is Magento?

Magento is an e-commerce platform created on open source technology, which provides online merchants with an exceptional flexibility and control over the content, look and functionality of their e-commerce store.

2) Mention what is the architecture of Magento? What are the different versions of Magento?

Magento architecture is a typical PHP MVC (Model-View-Controller) application, where all the Controllers will be in one folder and all the Models in another, etc.  Based on their functionality files are grouped together, which are referred as modules in Magento.

Different version of Magento includes

• Magento Enterprise
• Magento .go
• Magento Community

3) Mention what technology does Magento use?

Magento use PHP as a web server scripting language and MySQL for database.

4) Mention what is the difference between Mage::getModel() and Mage::getSingletone() in Magento?

• Mage::getModel(): It always creates a new object
• Mage: :getSingleton(): It always look for an existing object and if not then creates a new object

5) Mention what are the basic features of Magento?

Basic features of Magento includes

• Reporting and Analytics
• Product and Catalog Browsing
• Customer Accounts
• Order Management
• Payment
• Site Management
• Shipping
• Search engine optimization
• Marketing promotions and tools
• Checkout
• International Support

6) Mention what is the limitation of Magento?

• Magento is supported by PHP, comparatively to other e-commerce solutions, Magento might be slow in performance
• It becomes a complex system if it is not using object-oriented programming
• Magento requires much space and memory

7) Explain how you can enhance the Magento performance?

To enhance the Magento performance

• Disable the Magento log
• Combine external CSS/JS into one file
• Disable any unused modules
• MySQL Query Caching
• Enable Magento caching
• Enable Gzip compression
• Optimize your image

8) Explain how you can show a certain number of products for guests in Magento?

In the toolbar block you will see

app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Block/Product/List/Toolbar.php

there is a method:

Public function setCollection($collection);

Inside there is a piece of code:

$limit= (int)$this->get Limit();

If ($limit) {

$this ->_collection->setPageSize($limit);

} 

You have to change variable $limit; you should override that block in the local pool, not change directly in the core.  In order to see whether the customer is a guest, you can use this code

Mage:: getSingleton('customer/session') -> isLoggedIn()

9) Mention what all billing information can be managed through Magento?

From the client Magento account, you can do following things

• Update your billing address
• Add a credit card
• View your billing history
• Add a PayPal account
• Produce a print ready receipt

10) Explain how you can change Magento Core API settings?

To change Magento Core API settings, you have to

• Go to Admin menu, choose System -> Configuration
• Select Magento Core API on the left side of the Configuration Panel, under Services
• Tap on to expand the General Settings section and you can
• Type the name of the Default Response Charset that you want to use
• Determine the Client Session Timeout in seconds
• Click the Save Config button when complete

11) Explain how Magento can be made more secure for the client?

Best practices for Magento includes

• Using a strong password and changing them at regular interval
• Disable remote access to Magento Connect Manager
• Disable Downloader on production sites
• Restrict access to safe IP addresses

12) Mention what is the benefit of applying Connect Patches in Magento?

In Magento, applying connect patch

• It enables easy installation of packages with installation; it overwrites any existing translations for the same time
• For enhancing security, by default Magento Connect uses HTTP to download extensions instead of FTP
• With a dash character in the name, extension developers can now create extensions
• Magento administrators will be informed now who tries to install an extension with insufficient file system privileges

13) Explain how you can move Magento to another Directory?

To move Magento to other Directory you have to follow the following steps.

• Suppose you have Magento installed in the following location

http://www.guru99.com/store/

• On visiting your site, you want Magento to be the first thing to come up

http://www.guru99.com

• Let assume you have a directory structure like this

/home/username/public_html/

• Which means Magento would be installed here

/home/username/public_html/store/

• Login to the backend of the Magento first and go to

System -> Configuration -> Web

Update the Secure and Unsecure URL for your store and then link to your site via SSH and then go to the directory, where you will be shifting Magento

cd public_html/

• Now, transfer all the files from the store directory to the directory you are in

mv store/* store/.htaccess

• Delete the cache data

rm –vf var/cache/

Now Magento is moved to another directory.

14) Explain how you can reset Magento file & Directory permissions?

You can reset Magento file & Directory to their default and secure permissions, by following commands from the directory where Magento is installed

find . –type f –exec chmod 644 {} \;

find . –type d –exec chmod 755 {} \;

chmod +x mage

15) Explain how you can configure Magento to work with another domain?

To do that, in the admin area, you have to change the Magento Base URL option. To do this, visit to your Magento admin area> System > Configuration and click Web on the left menu. Select the Unsecure option after that edit the base URL field to change the URL that will be used for normal (HTTP) connections.