Winnipeg Web Design

Magento for Dummies – Installation & Templating

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

Today I am going to try and help you with some basic magento information that will hopefully make e-commerce a breeze. Magento Commerce is an e-commerce platform designed for growth. It is a beast when you first tackle templating, and must be taken step-by-step.

Install

First, grab yourself a copy of magento and install it locally. Follow the instructions provided, and make 100% sure all permissions are set properly.

Once you have this done, go to your store admin… most likely http://localhost/admin. Take a quick look around at all the admin sections. Below I will briefly touch on the important sections.

• Dashboard – contains a quick glimpse of sales, orders, and search terms.
• Catalog – contains all the information regarding your products and categories
• CMS – contains static pages / and blocks that you can use throughout the site. (more on this later)
• System >> Configuration – allows you to change the theme, and many other aspects of our store

Now that we have a basic understanding of the admin, let’s take a look at some terminology needed to begin templating. Basically you need to know two separate directory structures.

• Theme files – /app/design/frontend/default/your_theme
• Skin files – /skin/frontend/default/your_theme/

Theme files store the actual templates and layout structures (XML files) and the Skin files are the normal CSS/JS/Image files. These are required to be separate!

Breaking down the theme files some more… we have two key parts:

• Templates – outputs the actual HTML
• Layout – control what templates are used, and can information is passed to them

*** More detailed info here

I suggest downloading this blank theme and play around. In my next magento tutorial we will continue on.

I should also mention at this time that you should also buy the following book from packt, Magento: Beginner’s Guide. This was the first book I read when considering tackling Magento. It has all the installation steps, how to manage products / categories, as well as payment information. It was a great book for beginners, which I am sure most of you are!

Related posts:

1. Joomla Series Part 1: Organizing Your Content.
2. Joomla vs. Drupal vs. Custom CMS

Written by Brenley Dueck