Chapter 1. Understanding the Platform Architecture

Magento is a powerful, highly scalable, and highly customizable e-commerce platform that can be used to build web shops and, if needed, some non-e-commerce sites. It provides a large number of e-commerce features out of the box.

Features such as product inventory, shopping cart, support for numerous payment and shipment methods, promotion rules, content management, multiple currencies, multiple languages, multiple websites, and so on make it a great choice for merchants. On the other hand, developers enjoy the full set of merchant-relevant features plus all the things related to actual development. This chapter will touch upon the topic of robust Web API support, extensible administration interface, modules, theming, embedded testing frameworks, and much more.

In this chapter, a high-level overview of Magento is provided in the following sections:

• The technology stack
• The architectural layers
• The top-level filesystem structure
• The module filesystem structure