Magento 1.4 Themes Design

Customize the appearance of your Magento 1.4 e-commerce store with Magento's powerful theming engine

• Install and configure Magento 1.4 and learn the fundamental principles behind Magento themes
• Customize the appearance of your Magento 1.4 e-commerce store with Magento's powerful theming engine by changing Magento templates, skin files and layout files
• Change the basics of your Magento theme from the logo of your store to the color scheme of your theme
• Integrate popular social media aspects such as Twitter and Facebook into your Magento store

In Detail

Magento is a popular open source e-commerce project. Whilst it comes with a number of default themes to change the look and feel of your store, many people, both new to Magento and old hands, struggle with even the more basic aspects of customizing Magento themes. When you read this book you'll learn how to change the basics of your Magento theme, create a new custom theme and much more.

The book is a step-by-step guide to theming Magento, aimed at readers with little technical expertise. The first chapters introduce Magento 1.4 and Magento themes, covering Magento theme hierarchy and the key components of a Magento theme: templates, skins, layout, and locales. Later chapters delve into changing the basics of your Magento store, including methods for changing the logo of your store, adding a custom favicon (favorites icon) and integrating Twitter and Facebook into your store. More advanced topics include customizing Magento templates and XML layout files to alter a theme to your own needs and creating a custom print stylesheet.

In short, the book provides guides to common aspects of theming and customizing Magento 1.4 and equally useful step-by-step walkthroughs of integrating more unusual items in to your Magento store.

A practical guide to customizing and creating Magento 1.4 themes

What you will learn from this book

• Install and configure Magento 1.4
• Customize the appearance of your Magento 1.4 e-commerce store with Magento's powerful theming engine
• Learn the fundamental principles behind Magento themes
• Change Magento templates, skin files, and layout files to achieve your theming goals
• Change the basics of your Magento theme, from the logo of your store to the color scheme of your theme
• Customize product view pages in your store to maximize customer interest
• Create a new Magento theme using the Base theme as a beginning
• Using the font-face declaration in Magento themes
• Integrate popular social media aspects such as Twitter and Facebook in to your Magento store
• Customize templates for e-mail sent to your store's customers
• Avoid common pitfalls with Magento
• Style your store for printing more effectively

Approach

The book is written in an informal tone with clear, step-by-step guides through the major tasks in the book.

Who this book is written for

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.