Magento Certification Preparation / Interview Questions Answers

Hi guys, here is the stuff I collected and created from myriad number of websites/blogs/forums/ magento source codebase during my Magento certification preparation. I have put all the things I found and studied during my preparation in one place, so that other developers who are preparing for the exam can benefit from it.

Credits to all who have contributed these things over the web from where I copied for study purpose. Few credits to me as well as I also have contributed many things in it 🙂 This may contain errors and wrong information and I don’t guarantee it to be completely correct. But this should be a good resource if you want a heads up! Please be aware that you need to go through the study guide and fundamental videos yourself in order to pass this exam.

If you are here to prepare for Interview, then I would recommend you to also go through these links:
Magento Interview questions and answers
Magento Advanced Interview questions/

The below stuff alone will definitely not going to help you much in passing the exam. Not to mention, these resource can also be used for Magento interview preparation.

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Magento Interview questions and answers

Magento Interview questions and answers for freshers as well as experienced developers.

1. Explain Magento’s MVC architecture

First of all, what is MVC?

MVC stands for Model-View-Controller. Any application that separates it’s data access, business logic and user interface is called MVC. There can be two types of MVC: convention-based and configuration-based. Example, cakePHP is convention-based, i.e. you just need to follow the instructions of the core system to get your module ready in just few lines. Magento is configuration-based, i.e. you need to specify each and every thing to your module’s config file in order to get it work. Magento has controllers (for request/response routing), Block (for rendering content), Model (for business logic), Resource/Mysql4 (for database operations), etc (for module-specific configuration files), Helper (for common functions), sql (for setup scripts), layout (for connecting block with templates for each controller action) and template/.PHTML file (for Presentation i.e. View).
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Magento: Difference between order states and statuses

If you are building website in Magento, you may have noticed that there are two columns in sales_flat_order table which are confusing. These are state and status. You might think what is the difference between these two, both having same meaning.

Well, this is not the case. They both are different. State is used by magento to tell if the order is new, processing, complete, holded, closed, canceled, etc.; while Statuses are the one that YOU would be defining at the backend in System -> Order Statuses. Magento displays order STATUSES and not STATES in the backend order detail page to let you know which status is assigned as per your mapping. Remember, multiple statuses can be mapped with one state, while vice versa is not possible. Continue reading »

Magento: Difference between source_model, frontend_model, backend_model

When dealing with Magento Admin’s system configuration, you may have encountered with these models. If you don’t know, these models are used when you add custom fields through your system.xml file at Magento’s backend configuration (Admin -> System -> Configuration).

Okay, so the difference between these 3 models are:

source_model:
It specifies a Model class, where you will be returned with options that can populate in the current field.

Example,

<source_model>adminhtml/system_config_source_yesno</source_model>

this will populate select dropdown with values Yes/No

frontend_model:
It specifies a Block class to add custom render to use as a frontend field type instead of/along with default frontend_type field value (text, textarea, select, etc.).

Example, Continue reading »

Magento Interview Questions

Here is a list of Magento advanced interview questions that I can think off now.
EDIT: There are also Expert interview questions that I added lately.

1. Explain Magento’s MVC architecture
2. How Magento’s ORM work?
3. What is EAV in Magento?
4. Difference between Mage::getSingleton() and Mage::getModel()
5. What are the steps to change the theme of Magento
6. If you want to add/modify core functionality, how will you do it?
7. How will you create a new module in Magento?
8. How will you call a CMS page in your module’s PHTML file?
9. What is codePool in Magento?
10. Explain handles in Magento’s layout Continue reading »