An Introduction to Magento: Open Source Ecommerce
17 Aug 2008
Posted by Jake Rutter as Magento, Magento Tutorials, Open Source, Web
I have been learning Magento for the past few months, for a client’s website that I have been working on. Its a pretty robust Open Source Ecommerce plaform that is built on the Zend PHP Framework. At first, it was rather daunting trying to find my way around the software – its pretty robust and the documentation for creating a theme feels rather incomplete. It’s nothing like WordPress which I would take in a heartbeat, if they had a solid enough Ecommerce plugin, I have been spoiled by the WordPress Theme engine for quite some time now.
To make my way around Magento, I have been finding bits and pieces of information scattered across many websites. To make it easier for others, Im going to try to assemble the basics here for you.
The hardest piece for me to grasp has been the folder structure, you have to bounce between two places to build a theme, here is a rundown.
http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/Magento-folder-structure/
- /skin//
/ – is where design package css and images are - /app/design is location of design packages (layouts, templates, translations)
- /app/design//
– theme customizations - /app/design//
/layout – .xml files that define block structure for different cases in website flow - /app/design//
/template – .phtml (html with php tags) templates - /app/design//
/translate – Zend_Db compatible translation files
Common Template Path Hints
getSkinUrl('css/styles.css')?>
getJsUrl()?>
Online Resources
Category Magento, Magento Tutorials, Open Source, Web
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tomislav Bilic
September 4th, 2008 at 5:32 am
Hi Jake,
This is a good PDF to print and read before any actual coding. It helps in understanding the basic logic behing Magento themes.
http://inchoo.net/ecommerce/magento/designers-guide-to-magento-pdf-download/
TechDivision
October 23rd, 2008 at 4:40 pm
We were also struggling to understand the structure and ideas behind Magento. And it was a very hard fight, I can tell you. But after a while of working with Magento, you´ll see the advantages and the efforts of this eCommerce-Solution. And these advantages are defninitely worth the hard work. The guys of Varien did a fantastic job….
A Rahim Khan
May 1st, 2009 at 2:45 am
I am trying to catch magento for almost a month. It seems to be not well document and the most irritating is the XML stuffs. Can you suggest some good materials to start magento. Thanks in advance