Book Image

Magento : Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Book Image

Magento : Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Magento is one of the most powerful, flexible, and customizable e-commerce systems. It offers you the ability to create and manage a profitable online store. As your online store grows, you can be sure that this robust e-commerce system can handle your needs. However, getting started with Magento can be difficult without the right guidance.Magento Beginner's Guide - Second Edition provides guidance in the form of a step-by-step approach to building a simple, effective online store. The book covers the key features of Magento that will help you get your store up and running. It guides you through installation, configuration, populating your store with products, accepting payments, maintaining relationships with your customers, and fulfilling orders.Magento Beginner's Guide - Second Edition guides you through the installation, configuration, populating your store with products, accepting payments, maintaining relationships with your customers, and fulfilling orders. You will start with installing Magento on a hosting provider or on your local machine for testing purposes. From there, you will learn everything Magento has to offer, from working with products to adding additional functions.After installing Magento, you'll learn how to set up your first store and add multiple stores in the same environment. One of Magento's strengths, the product catalogue, will also be discussed thoroughly. From there we'll continue to set up payment and shipping methods. You'll learn to use themes to give your store the look and feel you need. As well as that, you'll start using extensions to expand Magento's functionality and you'll learn to process your first orders.You will learn to customize the default Magento storefront so that it becomes your personalized store and also about Magento's directory structure and find out where some of the elements of a store are customized. As you work your way through each chapter, your store will grow in scope and sophistication. By the time you finish this book, you should have a complete, working online store.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Magento Beginner's Guide Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Making changes to your theme


In this section we will take a look at how to configure your theme and also look at what kinds of changes can be made.

Kinds of changes

When making changes to your theme, it's important to know what you are working on and where to look. Magento themes are complex for beginners: if you open a theme folder, it will not be immediately clear where to search. It is not recommended that you make many changes to your theme as a beginner.

To paint a picture: it can take an experienced web developer several weeks to really get a grip on Magento's theming system. Because of this, it is a good idea to consult an expert for middle to large adjustments.

Note

Magento beginners are advised to not try making many changes to their own theme unless expertise in PHP, HTML, XML, and CSS is present.

In the following sections we provide some examples of what we consider small, medium, and large changes. This is only as an illustration, based on what we've encountered.

Small changes

In general...