"Magento 1.3 Theme Design" by Richard Carter
Magento Commerce is a powerful e–commerce system. It offers a great set of features, possibly the best existing on the market. Magento's administration interface is relatively easy for anyone and the Frontend is great for buyers. All together it explains why Magento is becoming more and more popular.
When creating a new web shop, shop's design means a lot. It is a part of the individuality of the shop. Often it is a requirement because of the company's style.
While Magento can be easy for the user, it is certainly not easy for the developer. Changing design for Magento involves changing many files in different directories. Magento internals do not allow to change a single HTML or CSS file to change the whole design. The designer must know about blocks, interfaces, skins, layouts and templates. It does not sound simple, right?
Fortunately, Packt Publishing released a yet another great book, now about Magento templates. It is called “Magento 1.3 Theme Design” and written by Richard Carter, the partner of the Michael Peacock, known by his great books as well.
Carter's new book consists from ten chapters. If you are familiar with Magento, you will probably skip chapter 1 that gives a quick overview of Magento. However, if you have a designer, who is not familiar with Magento, he will benefit a lot from this quick introduction. This chapter also shows a couple of customized Magento stores with really impressive design. After reading this book you will be able to customize Magento appearance to the same level.
Chapter 2 is called “Exploring Magento Themes” and describes exactly what Magento themes consist of. This is the base that every Magento theme designer must know. It talks about various components of themes (such as blocks, interfaces or layouts). It clearly and precisely describes all these components and shows how new themes can be created with a minimal changes to existing default themes. I must tell that I am not a designer but I found the information in this chapter very useful for me as a fresh Magento developer. The chapter provided me with an interesting technical information about Magento internals.
In the Chapter 3 the reader starts creating a new Magento theme. The chapter shows how to obtain a blank Magento theme using Magento Connect. Next a new “Cheesy Cheese Store” theme is created using the blank theme. The author shows how to change store logo and rearrange blocks. In the end of this chapter the store already looks closer toward its customers.
Chapter 4 digs deeper into layouts. It is more technical because it describes changes that the designer have to make in XML files. However the author does it very well, so designers will be able to do it. The chapter also describes where all files are located, so there are no open questions left. I wish that official documentation could have the same level of detail and clarity!
Chapter 5 talks about non–default themes. Non–default themes are themes that shops use for special cases like Christmas or Valentine days. This chapter describes how to create such themes.
Up to this place the designer already have a lot of knowledge about themes and can proceed with creating themes. But chapter 6 adds more information. It is called “Advanced Magento themes” and it describes how to completely change the appearance of the store. Did you ever want to make your Magento store to look like Amazon? Read chapter 6 and you can do it!
Chapter 7 goes into details about customizing certain aspects of Magento themes, such as navigation or “page not found” template. Details often is more important than the main parts. If the site has bad navigation or a default Apache “not found” page, it does not look professional. This chapter shows you how to improve these small but important details.
Chapter 8 focuses on social networks and media. It uses Twitter as an example and shows how to integrate Twitter with Magento. Since the popularity of Twitter grows every day, it is very important for e–commerce to advertise also using Twitter. The chapter helps you to set up the connection to Twitter using Magento themes.
Chapter 9 talks about the thing that most shops (and other web sites) forget. It is about printing. Even major shops and web site do not often have a good print version. In my opinion the appearance of such chapter in the book tells about book's quality. No details are missing from the book. The author really knows his stuff and shares his knowledge with the reader. I really like such books!
Chapter 9 not just talks you how to set up a stylesheet for printing, it also provides recommendations about better view of the printed page. Designers, who typically design for the web, will find these advices very interesting and useful.
The final chapter of the book talks about testing and deploying of themes. The author gives links to useful online services that allow to test themes in different browsers. He also describes how to package the theme and submit it to Magento extension repository. This open a lot of opportunities for freelance designers, who now can start developing for the most popular e–commerce platform.
You probably already understood that I really liked this book. If you work with Magento, you simply need it. Even if you do not develop themes, you will benefit a lot if you know how they are created. This book contains a lot of interesting insights into Magento internals. It will contribute to your knowledge and make you closer to the status of the Magento expert. Buy it. You will not be disappointed.