Magento 1.4 Themes Design Book Review

Magento 1.4 Themes Design Book provides in-depth explanation, guide, tutorials and HTML/CSS/layouts/PHP code examples to design website themes for Magento Commerce.

About The Book

The book is written in an informal tone with clear, step-by-step guides through the major tasks in the book. This book is aimed at web designers and web developers who are not familiar with Magento at all, and at Magento designers and developers who are more familiar with Magento 1.3 than Magento 1.4. The book assumes knowledge of HTML and CSS and an awareness, but not in-depth knowledge of, PHP syntax.

Review of this Magento theming book from the net :

I have read many books about Magento and in my opinion Packt Publishings are some of the best. Although there are some good general and cookbook style Magento books around I think Magento Theming is an area that requires a dedicated book and I would say that if you are serious about your ecommerce store and getting the most from Magento I think Magento Theme Design 1.4 by Richard Carter is well worth a read - cover to cover.

It is also important to note that many of the books currently available for Magento are based on version 1.3 that this book is currently as up to date as you can get (as far as I am aware all of the book is relevant to the recently released version 1.5) being based on 1.4, this is especially important as there has been some significant changes in the area of themes in version 1.4 from 1.3.

There is no doubt that Magento theme designing can be daunting and the more knowledge you have of HTML, CSS, XML and possibly of other CMS themes the less steep the learning curve well be. There is also certainly a big incentive to change the default theme as to me it is very ugly. The results you can get from just some of the techniques in this book can be make a huge difference to the look of you Magento store.

Overall I enjoyed the style of the book and particularly found the build up of Richard's example site useful. A great feature of the book is that you can download the code used in the books which includes css files, xml files and even the images used in the examples.

If you have no CSS skills at all probably best to start with a good CSS book. Overall a great book for anyone looking to improve their Magento theming skills.

Another book review:

This 280-pager is dedicated to Magento's design related aspects. Those of you who've already done some work with Magento know that not only is the design architecture quite complex, but it is also using a terminology quite different from what you might know from other shopping carts or content management systems. A Magento layout, for example, does not refer to something a designer would produce in Photoshop, but rather to a set of XML directives which control the overall appearance of a certain page. Likewise, a template in Magento is not a collection of items which compile the browser output, like in osCommerce for example, but rather a single file formatting what is called a block in Magento. After the first chapter, which provides an overview of the way in which the Magento frontend presents itself to the user, introduces several showcases of popular web stores using Magento and explains how the software is installed on the server, the author Richard Carter explains the Magento-specific terminology and how the individual parts of the theming system relate to each other. He mentions the Magento multistore setup and draws attention to the fact that thanks to the fallback-system, one does not have to duplicate entire themes but rather change only those that are relevant to the current project.

In the ensuing chapters, the author looks at theming in more detail and provides a range of examples, so that readers can gain their first hands-on experiences by following what is being done in the book. For my taste, there's a slight tendency to overuse full-page screenshots to support the explanation, however, the examples are well documented and easy to follow. The last chapters deal with the way in which transactional emails in Magento can be customised and contain a step-by-step description of how social networks and services such as Twitter and Facebook can be integrated into a Magento installation.

In summary, I would recommend this book to Magento-ians who have already got their feet wet with Magento and know their way around the admin panel. If you want to know which knobs to fiddle with in order to make appear Magento the way you want, this book is for you.

Minor Issues

There are several flaws though, sometimes incorrect information is provided. For example:

The base theme is in the app/design/frontend/base/ directory. The second package contains the custom theme's default theme in the app/design/frontend/default/ directory, which acts as a base theme within the package. The custom theme itself, which is the non-default theme, is in the app/design/frontend/our- custom-theme/default/ and app/design/frontend/our-custom-theme/custom- theme/ directories.

Actually the app/design/frontend/default/ directory contains Magento's bundled default theme, not any custom theme.

Other times the English is confusing:

Default themes in Magento 1.3 In Magento 1.3, the default theme acted the way the base theme did in Magento 1.4, providing every file that your Magento store required to operate.

Since the book is talking about Magento 1.4, I wonder why the author wrote "did".
If I were the book's editor, I would rewrite it as follows:

In Magento 1.3, the default theme used to provide every file that your Magento store required to operate. This has changed with Magento 1.4, where all required themes files is provided by the base theme, and the default theme simply contains additional resources like CSS, images, JavaScripts, and locale files.

Conclusion

I still highly recommend Magento 1.4 Themes Design as a useful resource for Magento theme development.