Top Nop Tips for nopCommerce Development

One of the most popular and reliable platforms available in today’s market is nopCommerce. The catching features offered by nopCommerce website development make it easier for developers to ensure their plugins’ performance. Sigma Solve Inc. delivers end-to-end eCommerce development solutions using nopCommerce. As a leading nopCommerce development company, we help our customers take their eCommerce to the next level using next-generation tools and technologies.

Top Nop Tips for nopCommerce Development

Now that we know what nopCommerce is, let’s look into some of the tips and tricks for effective development.

1. Use Existing Plugins and Extensions

Before you start developing your online store, be sure to check out the nopCommerce marketplace and see what extensions, plugins, modules, and features are already available to minimize development time. Most developers waste a lot of time during development, instead of utilizing the support and features of the platform. There’s a healthy variety, meaning that you can experiment with different combinations to verify that your specific needs are met.

2. Avoid Modifying/ Erasing Source Code

In the tech field, things change and evolve rapidly with constant patches, updates, and bug fixes. To avoid complications with other extensions and future nopCommerce updates, we strongly recommend making changes and customization only at the theme/plugin level. In the case of proprietary modifications, ensure that you use partial classes in separate, easy-to-identify directories if needed. It’s best practice to recreate the directory tree in a single subdirectory to allow easier access and approach when upgrading nopCommerce in the future. However, in a unique scenario where you can’t accomplish your needs without altering the source code, we suggest that you submit your change to be included in updated versions of nopCommerce.

3. Implement Cache Management

With performance in mind, consider carrying out Entity caching with ICacheManager (per request) and model caching with IStaticCacheManager in instances that seem right. During implementation, it’s a good rule of thumb that your first resource for best practice is nop source code. The catching features offered by nopCommerce website development

 make it easier for developers to ensure their plugins’ performance.

4. Make the Most of Event Consumers

Rather than overriding something in nop.services, when possible use an IConsumer as a less invasive method for your customization. By utilizing ICustomer, you can add different functionalities without running the risk of breaking other installed plugins. You can check out the usages of IEventPublisher on nopCommerce’s source to see what’s available.

5. Utilize AttributesXml

A quick and effective way to associate non-searchable information to any BaseEntity is through generic attributes. Nonetheless, they usually require additional data calls to work well. The solution to eradicating this performance hit is to store information in AttributesXml whenever it’s possible.

6. Test Your Website on All Major Web Browsers

One major issue that web developers face is incompatibility after the website is finished. Different web browsers use different default values for various CSS properties. You should run multiple tests for your website on major browsers like Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Most of these top web browsers will even offer developer tools to help you. Chrome and Firefox both offer Chrome DevTools and Firefox Developer Tools respectively, each useful tools that allow you to edit, debug and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live on any web page.

7. Automatically Copy Views to the Output Directory

With plugin development, one of the bottlenecks for developers is the need to rebuild your project after every view/CSS/script file update. A pro tip is to build a console app whose sole purpose is to monitor specified plugin directories and automatically push any updates to the output directory (such as a git repository) upon saving. This will help you work your way around this holdup and improve your development speed.

Read more