Although the title might sound silly and so easy, there are lot of people having difficulties with this. At first turning Magento module can be easy as going trough System Configuration > Current Configuration Scope > Advanced > Advanced > Disable Module Output. However, be very careful, this action only disables module output as it says. If your module uses, let’s say some Observer functionality to hook into some part of the system and does some overriding then those actions won’t be disabled.

To fully disable module, you need to go to module config file, like /etc/ActiveCodeline_MyModule.xml, and set it’s active parametar to false, like:

Due to the “complexity” of Magento’s xml files, developers can waste great amount of time on “unnecessary” things.
When I say “complexity” I say it with purpose. XML files are not so complex by them selves, but due to extreme lack of documentation and changes Magento pumps in every new “major” release, people are lost among things that should really be sideways. Anyway, in this little article I will show you how to create basic, startup structure for your module to get it shown under Magento Admin main top menu.

Many developers are familiar with the MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern that is seemingly ubiquitous throughout web frameworks. Looking through the code in Magento, however, we see many other components besides the M’s the V’s and the C’s.