The Magento E-commerce platform is a highly customizable online store, with the full source code provided for advanced manipulation and coding.  With the flexibility, however, often comes the challenge of performance optimization.  For example, the default product listing screens only select a subset of the fields from the database that are directly necessary to render the listing.  In the event that the product listing needs to be customized to pull additional information from the database, the underlying PHP code needs to be updated as well.
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