Magento: Up and Running – New on Premium

Eric Steele on Jul 4th 2011 with 10 comments

Tutorial Details

- Topic - Magento
- Availability - Premium Exclusive
- Format - Screencast

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Getting started with Magento themes is far more intimidating than it needs to be. This tutorial will get you familiar with Magento’s theming file structure, how Magento makes your life easier with a theme fallback system, and how to use layout configuration files.

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By Eric Steele

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http://www.apollo-designs.com Web Design Wolverhampton
I currently use joonla /virtuemart for my e-commerce, but keep reading about Magento. Is it much better than virtuemart ? And does it have much CMS funcionality ?

http://www.clikyz.com Hammy Havoc
Yes, Magento has a CMS system, but I don’t particularly care for it. It is good, but certainly isn’t intuitive.

http://www.magikthemes.com Ashish @ Magik Themes
Based on our past experiences of developing Magento themes i believe your article is to the point. We have noticed that customer’s constantly ask for installation and configuration support even after we give PDF manual attached with every theme. I think it’s because the complex Magento architecture which is not easy for someone new to Magento world. Article like your are cool breeze for developers like us who can focus more on developing new themes.
Dave
This tut is probably a very good idea. I got my first crack at working on Magento recently. It’s not too bad. There are a lot of features, and the admin interface is OK.
It is somewhat big and piggish, though. It did remind me of Joomla somewhat – it’s large and ungainly, but fortunately not nearly as bloated as the J-word. You can actually find things in the admin if you look around for awhile. I still would give its admin only about a C grade. Joomla gets an F from me.
Re: templates, if you have to edit code and FTP it to the server to work on templates, I give it a downgrade, given the systems around (such as Lemonstand), that make template editing easy, and even fun. Unless the newest Magento is doing this, I won’t choose it for my own sites.
A curious byproduct of this obfuscation is that a cottage industry for template development emerges. It’s too confusing to do without spending lots of time figuring it out. To get that recent job done, I was able to futz around with Google searches to find what I needed. It would have been hard to discover what I needed on my own, and I hope you guys make some money helping people do this.

http://www.clikyz.com Hammy Havoc
You would seriously rate Magento higher than Joomla! in terms of ease of use? Magento is horrid compared to Joomla!, especially in terms of back-end administrative interface.

http://www.tabletpcunion.com tabletpcunion
I used to use zen-cart as my e-commerce website. Magento is much batter than that. I’ll try Magento later.
http://www.helponclick.com/?utm_campaign=728x90&utm_medium=web&utm_source=nettuts jan

var addthis_config = {“data_track_clickback”:true};
http://www.123webdesignbournemouth.co.uk Bournemouth Web Design
Definitely a much-needed tutorial.
Working with Magento can be much more complicated than other e-commerce platforms out there such as nopCommerce, Open Cart etc – but then it is a powerful beast, and offers a very high level of functionality customisation in comparison to a lot of the others.
No pain, no gain unfortunately.
Many Thanks,
Darren.
Ryan
Great starter tutorial, I especially appreciate that you taught how to create your own local.xml file because so much information out there teaches people to edit the existing xml layout files separately which drives me nuts. I just wish there was more information out there on how to properly use a local.xml since there have been about 1 or two times I had to back down and edit other xml files (not the core of course).
One thing I have to disagree with is that the community seems just as terrible as the documentation which is pretty sad. The only people ever on there are the ones asking questions so it’s literally the blind leading the blind. Hardly any of the Magento staff goes on there anymore from what I have seen.
The best resource I found as you mentioned was Alan Storm, he he the guy that made everything click for me so anyone new to Magento should spend as much time as you can reading his stuff.
Overall my experience over the past year for Magento has been great, its such a powerful shopping cart, it’s just a real bummer that I still haven’t even scratched the surface because documentation and forums are so bad. For example I know that Magento can integrate with wordpress, but anything I find on it is usually out dated or badly explained.
Keep it up with the good Magento info!
Pat
Nice tutorial! Easily the best introduction to Magento’s XML based templating system ive seen. Would love to see you continue your theme building process and cover some of the more commonly used/modified xml blocks.
Thanks for a great tut…