Magento is now the most popular e-commerce platform in the world, and distinguishing your store from others has become more important than ever.
This book introduces Magento theming to web designers and developers with a basic understanding of HTML and CSS upwards, who want to discover the secrets of theming Magento for both client projects and their own projects.
Chapter 1, Introduction to Magento and Magento Themes, provides an introduction to the topic, including exploring what a Magento theme is, Magento theme terminology including Templates, Layouts, and Skins, and the Magento theme hierarchy.
Chapter 2, Magento Theming Basics, gets you started with your new Magento theme, from enabling a new theme in Magento to changing the logo, customizing the product watermark images, disabling Magento's caches, and using Magento's Template Path Hints tool, as well as creating a new Magento theme.
Chapter 3, Magento Templates, provides simple layout styling for your Magento theme, customizing your store's header and footer, and the search box, and covers how to add a static block to a template, as well as styling your checkout and cart page.
Chapter 4, Magento Layout, looks at adding a local.xml file to your theme, changing the default page template, adding a static block to a page using the Magento layout, changing the order of blocks in Magento's sidebar using layout, removing unnecessary blocks in Magento's sidebar, and adding a new products list to your store's home page.
Chapter 5, Social Media and Magento, covers integrating a Twitter feed with your Magento store, integrating a Facebook page with your Magento store, including social share buttons on your product pages to help increase your store's reach, and integrating product videos from YouTube with product listings.
Chapter 6, Advanced Magento Theming, explores adding a custom print style sheet for your Magento store, using locales to translate labels/phrases in your store, using @font-face in Magento, styling Magento's layered navigation, creating a custom 404 "not found" error page, and using microformats for rich snippets to enhance search engine listings.
Chapter 7, Magento Theming for Mobile and Tablet Devices, walks the reader through how to use CSS media queries to create breakpoints for different device widths, making images responsive to your Magento theme, developing responsive navigation for your Magento theme, and adding mobile home page icons for Windows and Apple devices to your Magento theme.
Chapter 8, Magento E-mail Templates, covers hanging the default e-mail template logo to altering colors of the e-mail templates and altering variables in Magento e-mail templates, as well as adding static block content to your Magento e-mail templates.
You will need access to a working installation of Magento Community Edition 1.8 or newer, and your preferred code-editing software.
If you are a web designer or web developer who is familiar with XML, HTML, and CSS, who wants to learn the fundamental building blocks of creating a Magento theme, this book is for you. A basic understanding of PHP is helpful but not required.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "In Magento, skin files are located in the /skin/frontend/ directory."
A block of code is set as follows:
* {
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
img {
border:0;
vertical-align:top;
}
a {
color:#1e7ec8;
text-decoration:underline;
}When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
* {
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
img {
border:0;
vertical-align:top;
}
a {
color:#1e7ec8;
text-decoration:underline;
}New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "You might notice that there are many superfluous blocks in the sidebar, such as the BACK TO SCHOOL and COMMUNITY POLL blocks, which would not be required on a usual e-commerce website."
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