E-Commerce made easy: Magento
I attended the Magento Webinar today and if you haven’t heard of Magento you soon will if you’re building ecommerce websites. I was very impressed with the attention to detail this team has made to front end designers and developers. They’ve taken this cart and made it highly adaptable on the front end.
Websites And Stores
The concept is similar to looking at a large company. You have a headquarters that determines pricing, products and other administrative needs. Normally a company’s headquarters also collects sales data. Each physical location or store has a layout and selects different products from the main catalog to sell within the store.
Magento represents the same concept. Each website represents a company headquarters with different products, customers and administrative needs. The stores represent the different ways in which a customer can see the products your website sells. Magento can handle multiple stores and multiple websites.
Website Structure
Magento is structured to have the ability to produce multiple websites. Websites as we know them separate data and sessions. Taking those 2 key pieces of information Magento has built a cart that can handle multiple “websites” from a single interface. A website in Magento shares it’s configurations with a series of stores. Stores in turn handle language localization, product visibility settings and how the store is displayed. Essentially you input all the base information in like your products, customers, and order information into the website while the store determines how the website looks to the end user.
Store Interfaces and Themes
Interfaces represent a collection of themes which contain the frontend design files like css stylesheets as well as the interactive components like javascript files. They lay within a very specific folder structure that the system uses to collect the information to apply to the store layout.
The key is that the structural layout information is contained in XML files. Now you don’t need to know XML inside out to be able to use the XML files but you will have to learn which attributes you’ll need to change to adapt the layout of your pages. There are also files that contact the HTML markup blocks placed within the folder structure. As a designer/developer you can alter the XML and/or the HTML markup blocks yourself.
Fallback Method
The fallback method that Magento has in place makes it easy to alter structural elements on the page without having to reinvent the whole layout. You simple create a new skin folder for the new theme, apply your specific change to that specific area then make adjustments in the administration panel. Layout changes are going to be a snap with this feature.
Awesome Tool
The team presenting the Magento Cart introduced a very neat tool from a design perspective. They mentioned that it will be in one of the next releases but that the short code to implement it is in the user forums at Magento. With a simple admin switch this code will place red path markers around each structural block on the page. You can use this to find the file you’ll need to alter the contents of that block. After having used other carts without this feature, I was impressed. The time you’ll save by having this tool is amazing!
Find the Magento Ecommerce Cart at : http://www.magentocommerce.com/
While you can download Magento right now, the cart isn’t scheduled for official release until March.
If anyone else attended the webinar please post your comments.
Web Out
Des
Rebecca:
Im looking to redevelop my site using magento. Could you contact me to discuss E: rebecca@sassijewels.com.au
Ph: 0061 8 8390 0309
Matt:
Yes Magento is very amazing I used it since 2 months.
You can see my website to see an example of a shop made in Magento: http://www.website1service.com
What Do You Think?