Building websites with Magento and Bolt CMS

What I've learned building shops and sites on Magento and Bolt, and why APIs and custom modules are my favourite part.

A lot of my web work has been on two platforms: Magento (both 1 and 2) for e-commerce, and Bolt CMS for sites that are more about content than checkout. Sites like Buzz Catering Supplies and EntirePro are the kind of thing I build.

The part I enjoy most isn’t the theme. It’s the plumbing: connecting a site to other systems through APIs and writing custom modules so the platform does exactly what the business needs.

Magento 1

Magento 1 was where a lot of serious PHP e-commerce started. It’s built on Zend Framework 1, configured through a lot of XML, and stores products with the EAV model, so attributes are flexible but queries get heavy.

What it taught me:

Rewrites are a blunt tool. Overriding a core class works until two modules try to rewrite the same one. Observers on events are kinder to everything else.
Keep the core clean. Anything in app/code/core gets lost on the next upgrade. Local and community modules are the place for changes.
Caching and indexing matter. A slow Magento 1 store is usually missing a cache or fighting its indexers.

Official support ended in 2020, but plenty of stores still run on it, and the community-maintained OpenMage fork keeps it patched.

Magento 2

Magento 2 is a different beast, and much nicer to extend:

Dependency injection instead of hard-coded class names, configured in di.xml.
Plugins (interceptors) let you run code before, after or around a public method, without replacing the whole class.
Service contracts give modules a stable PHP interface to build on.
REST and GraphQL APIs come built in, so the same contracts are available to other systems.
Composer handles modules and updates like any modern PHP project.

The trade-off is weight. It needs a properly tuned server, and a build step (compiling DI, deploying static content) before changes go live.

Bolt CMS

Not every site needs a shopping cart. For content-led sites I like Bolt CMS: it’s PHP and Symfony underneath, with Twig templates and content types defined in YAML. You describe the shape of your content in config, and Bolt gives editors a clean admin to fill it in.

It’s lightweight, quick to theme, and much easier for clients to live with than a full e-commerce platform when all they need is pages, news and forms.

Why I love APIs and custom modules

Off-the-shelf extensions get you most of the way, but the interesting work is in the last bit:

Integrations. Pulling stock and prices from another system, pushing orders into a back office, syncing customers. Done well, the shop stops being an island.
Custom modules. When a business works a particular way, a small focused module that does exactly that beats bending a generic extension.
Clean boundaries. Using the platform’s own extension points (observers, plugins, service contracts) keeps upgrades possible.

What I’ve learned

Extend, don’t edit. Never change core files. Use the platform’s hooks so the next upgrade isn’t a rewrite.
Small modules beat big ones. One module per job is easier to test, debug and remove.
Treat every integration as unreliable. Other systems go down and APIs change, so log everything, retry sensibly and fail gracefully.
Pick the platform for the job. Magento for serious e-commerce, something lighter like Bolt when it’s mostly content.