The first chapter goes into the installation of Magento. From my own experience I encountered some problems during this installation, which was that Magento sometimes requires extensions such as the cURL library. Which wasn’t enabled on my PC at the time. I was pleased to find that the author had also written a notice about this problem. The rest of the installation is very detailed and includes many many screenshots throughout the entire book.

When you’re installation of Magento is ready, the author discusses the various things you can do with Magento. Such as adding categories, how to manage your tax rules, adding products, etc. This all may seem very easy. But when you’re a beginner and you don’t know a lot about websites. The huge administrator’s panel of Magento might frighten you at first, preventing you from using the great features it provides you. After having read this book I think you can be quite sure that you can tame this beast =).

However I haven’t really read all the chapters, so far only about 40-50 pages since I was trying to find out more about the technical aspects of the system. Such as the MVC framework it runs on and how the templating system works. Thats why I had stopped reading the book. So I would really recommend this book to anyone who wants to get to know more about using the system. But when you’re interested in getting to know more about how the PHP works, you might want to consider another book. But overall I think it’s a very good manual for beginners.

If you’d like to read a sample chapter of this book you can visit the following link:
http://www.packtpub.com/files/magento-sample-chapter-3-categories-and-attributes.pdf

You can find more detailed information about the book and how you can purchase it here:
http://www.packtpub.com/magento-beginners-guide?utm_source=vincentr.be&utm_medium=bookrev&utm_content=blog&utm_campaign=mdb_000800

I’d like to inform you that I’ve received a free copy of this book to review it, but that my opinion while reviewing it wasn’t really affected by this. Just so that you know that this review is as objective as possible. But if you’d like to get to know more about using the Magento system, this book should help you a lot.

These XML files live inside the layout folder. In the template folder we have the .phtml files wich stand for PHP and HTML I think =). It’s because you can also use PHP syntax inside the HTML. Thank God they didn’t try to reinvent the wheel and make their own PHP HTML syntax kinda like smarty, because I hate learning those. So here it’s a lot easier and u can just use PHP inside the template files. The locale folder simply holds the translations for every text used in the template.

So how exactly do the layout and template files work together? Well, the template files can be divided into three kinds. The first one is the skeleton for example: 2-column.phtml, 3-column.phtml.They contain the main html elements like div=”header”, div=”footer” and inside those we refer to blocks. First comes the structural block, like when we refer to the left sidebar the sidebar will refer to structural blocks like ’subscribe to newsletter’, ‘navigation’, etc. And then these structural blocks will refer to blocks that hold the content. Like inside the header structural block we could refer to the ‘topLinks’, ’search’ blocks.

As you can see I mention the ‘refer’ word a lot . This is where the XML Layout files come in place. Magento has its own XML syntax and each template comes along with one xml layout file, but the page template can have multiple files in its directory. And the XML holds the knowledge to figure out where the template files are pointing to when you call ‘topLinks’ for example, you will have specified some lines so the system will know what to fill in there. for example.

<block type=”page/html_topLinks”  name=”topLinks” template=”page/html/top_links.phtml” />

Or something like that, it’s possible that it isn’t correct because I haven’t used it that much so far. I did create the template and that one works very well . But when creating a new template I’d advice you to take a copy of the default interface and skin directory and start from there. I pasted my HTML under theirs and just copied the PHP lines which filled in the content. The XML layout files where already there and pointed the correct template file(which I also adjusted), so that can save you a lot of time when making a new Template. Just copy the default ones and work your way from there.

Some Tips for when you get started:
1. Turn on the Template Path Hints (these show you what template file is used and where) very handy.
2. When you’re trying to edit blocks: for example ‘newsletter’ block go look in the newsletter.xml. Also looking in the catalog.xml might help a lot.
Between the <default> tags are shown most of the time.

Thats my review, tips & tricks for Magento so far .
It’s a great system,  but it just takes a bit of time to know it properly so you can use all of its potential.

Empire of the Sun – We Are The People

Changelog:

- Added backend admin system
- Added authorization (better roles etc.)
- Added admin core modules (+ override feature)
- Fixxed error handler with buffers activated (all systems: rss, ajax, main and backend)
- Added several core modules ( dashboard, settings, …)
- Base Paths for includes, requires, templates etc. (much more stable when moving the application)
- Created seperation in templates ( private => backend, public => frontend)
- Mod Rewrite feature implented

The admin core modules come standard in the Nexus CMS. But they can be overriden by user modules. They are pretty much the same as site modules but they do not have XML files, rss or ajax request handler which is pretty obvious why =). Also they live in a restricted area, unauthorized users have no access to anything related to the core. When the override feature is activated for a certain module the system will skip scanning for an admin core module but will instantly check if the site module has a control.php file to manage the administration from the site modules. The admin HTML documents are located between the frontend HTML. This override will allow a programmer to keep pretty much every operation of his site in the frontend modules. But if they like they can also create a seperate core module.

You can activate apache’s mod_rewrite from the admin backend (in a core module).  The mod rewrite isn’t actually deactivated so you can still manually type the URL’s more decently when it is turned off. The rewritten URL’s look like this: ?com=News  => /main/News/ or  ?com=Portfolio&offset=3  => /main/Portfolio/offset/3/ . The last rewrite with the variables still has to be implented, but the basic one is already working. You on’t have to define this when you write it in your template, I thought it would be a lot easier not to use some kind of syntax like {LINK=”?com=News” , “/main/News/”} . This syntax was never implented, instead I just created a function in the Template class that runs at the very end before we display. It rewrites all the ?com= links to the correct rewritten links if mod rewrite is turned on.

To do list:

- Implement caching system
- Change language constants and use an internationalisation function instead.
=> These language strings will be stored in the database. The default is hardcoded and in English.
- Add more backend modules

So thats pretty much my latest changes at the Nexus CMS so far . It has been smoothened up a lot, and runs a lot more stable.
So far it’s looking very good and I might release an Alpha version soon.