Creating a separate Magento Store View for Magento mobile App

Here we are going to create a separate Magento Store View for our Magento mobile application. Of course, we have an option to use existing Store View, but it’s much better to create a separate one for Magento mobile application, which does not depend on changes made to the layout, design, and so on of the main website Store Views. Also, this way the orders created via mobile application are separated from the website’s orders and it’s much easier to track or filter them later. Before we continue, let me first explain the basic concept of the Website/Store/Store View features in Magento:
– We can manage multiple Websites from one Magento installation
– These Websites can be defined for different domain names (for example,www.firstdomain.com, www.seconddomain.com)
– Each Website can have one or more Stores defined
– Inside each Store, we can define one or more Store Views

– This concept is implemented in Magento through different levels of possible configuration values, called Scopes

Configuration Scopes in Magento:
– Global: Configuration level that applies to entire installation.
– Website: Website is the parent of the Store. Different Websites can be defined on different domain names. Each Website consists of one or more Stores. Websites can share the same customer data between them, depending on the configuration we choose.
– Store ( a in togroup of Store Views): Stores are a Website’s children level of configuration. Categories and products are managed at this level, which means that we can define a different root category for each Store and each store can have completely different catalog structure.
– Store View: Store Views are children configuration levels of the Stores. Every Store needs to have one or more Store Views defined to be browsable in the front end of Website. The catalog structure of each Store View inside one Store will be the same. Each Store View allows different presentation of the data in the frontend (for example, different language, different theme, and so on).

How to do it…
1. Log in to Magento admin area.
2. In top menu of the Magento admin, click on System and then choose the Manage Stores menu option.
3. Here a list of Websites, Stores, and Store Views that are currently present in your Magento installation will be shown. Click on the Create Store View button in the top-right corner of the screen in order to create a new Store View.
4. In the New Store View screen, we have to choose the Website/Store group in which our Store View will be created.
5. Under the Name field, enter the name of new Store View for our mobile application. For example, English mobile.
6. Field Code must be filled with a unique string (for example: my_mobile_store) that will be used by Magento to uniquely identify the created Store View.
7. Next, we want to set the Status field to the enabled option in order to make it active for our mobile application.
8. We can leave the Sort Order field empty as it is not essential for our current needs. Click on the Save Store View button and our new Store View will be displayed on the Manage Stores list.

How it works…
In Magento, we can define multiple Websites, multiple Stores, and multiple Store Views. Stores are basically virtual groups of Store Views. All Store Views under one Store share the same catalog products. This is important because when we create a new Store View and set it to be under our current website store, all categories that are defined in our main website store will automatically be inside our mobile Store View too.
If we make some global product/category change under the main Store, it will also be reflected on our mobile Store View.
There’s more…
In Magento, we can also change the categories and products on a Store View level and it will not affect other Store Views under that Store. So if we want to display some product in a different way, add a different description or price, or change some other attribute for just the mobile Store View and you will find that it has not affected the other Store Views under that Website; it is very easy to implement. That is the main reason for creating a separate Store View for mobile applications.
Did you know that…
Store Views inside the same Store also share the same customers, so the customers that are registered on our website can easily buy from their mobile devices on our mobile Store View with the same user credentials.

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Source

Lesson 3: Creating a separate Magento Store View for Magento mobile application