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Magento: Beginner’s Guide, a solid introduction to managing Magento stores
Often enough when you’re a Magento developer you can find yourself in a position where by a client is overwhelmed with options. They don’t know where to click, what all the fields are or mean and simply don’t know where to start. Typically with Magento training I have to provide around a week of my time per project for training a client on the subtle aspects of Magento, through from managing static blocks, to pages, to categories and products. Managing orders, importing and exporting, it all needs to be taught well so a client isn’t confused when they’re left to manage the site on their own. Now, I can provide them with this book once I’ve done training them as a reference for them to look back on for instructions and help when they need it.
What does it actually contain?
Magento: Beginner’s Guide by William Rice covers the entire back-end Magento system from a store owner’s point of view and teaches them a variety of aspects about managing their store. The fantastically written chapters include:
- Installation of Magento – covering how to get Magento installed on your server and leading you through the install process.
- Categories, Products and Attributes – covering the basics of all three and showing you how to set-up and manage both categories and attributes. (Click here to download this as a sample chapter)
- Taxes – this chapter alone saving hours of time in explanation covers how to set-up and manage the different varieties of tax rules in the system.
- Adding Simple Products – guiding you through how to set-up a simple product in Magento and what each of the fields does/means.
- Minimum Customisation of Your Store’s Appearance – leads you through the elements of Magento you have control over in your administrative back-end.
- Beyond Simple Products – guiding you through the ever important grouped and configurable products and their practical uses for your store.
- Customer Relationships – how to manage customers, newsletters and your contact form for your Magento store. Setting up and managing what features users have available to them.
- Accepting Payment – guiding through what Magento makes available to you in the form of accepting payment on your website and the configurable options that are presented.
- Configuring Shipping – taking a similar approach to the Accepting Payment chapter except guiding you through the shipping side of set-up and configuration.
- Fulfilling an order – the most important task for any Magento store owner in actually processing the order once it has come through guiding you through the process from start to finish.
- An appendix of broken down short step-by-step instructions – useful for quickly referring back to doing key tasks quickly without all the padded long explanations in between that you may not need second or third time around.
But is it any good? How does it come across?
Simply put Magento: Beginner’s Guide covers it all. It takes a personal one-on-one tutoring approach to take you through all key and important aspects of Magento. It comes across as friendly and helpful, making you feel like you don’t have to be an idiot not to know how to work with a certain feature or part of Magento. This guide is great for the completely uninitiated going into Magento and it’s great for the experienced that really just want to grasp the full power of Magento’s administrative back-end.
Can I train my staff with this book?
Before reviewing it myself I passed Magento: Beginner’s Guide onto a couple developers in the office. One of which who had worked with Magento before and one who had never looked at it. Both read the book back to front and came out with a proper understanding to the back-end of Magento, saving me from days of staff training on the topic.
Who should buy Magento: Beginner’s Guide?
People who should buy Magento: Beginner’s Guide include:
- People who like to be walked through things one-on-one
- Anyone who is getting into Magento as either a store owner or a developer for the first time
- Anyone who wants to train others in Magento
- Any store owners, who want a great reference when they’re stuck or can’t quite remember how to do something (and don’t want to pay for support from a developer/agency)
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Introduction to directories for Magento developers
New developers to Magento can find it a puzzling system in terms of system architecture. In this article I hope to shed some light on some of the key directories in Magento and what they do so any Magento developers out there aren’t quite as confused when unzipping their first set of Magento install files.
Here’s seven key things you need to know the location of at some point when developing with Magento and the directories that they are stored in.
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The templates file
/app/design/ is the core storage folder for template files. With it breaking down into adminhtml/ for administration templates, frontend/ for frontend templates and install/ for installation templates.
Within these you’ll find your default template set aptly named default. In your template set folder are your individual theme folders that come with Magento.
layout, locale and template are the core directories that contain the files that make up your themes.
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The skin files (resources, components, resources)
In /skin/ you’ll find your CSS, images, Flash, JavaScript and any other resource files that relate specifically to templates in the system. You will also find the adminhtml, frontend and install directories distinction here.
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Language files and e-mail templates
/app/locale/ is your core directory. With sub-directories for each language set installed for the store. You will find .csv files for each of the modules installed on the system relating to their translations. You’ll find the Magento e-mail templates in /template/email/ within your language directory in /app/locale/.
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Core configuration
/app/etc/ contains all configuration files for Magento. From the local.xml file which contains your database configuration, amongst other things. To your modules/ folder which contains the declaration of modules in the system.
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Local, core and community modules
All modules for functionality are stored in /app/code/ and are broken down into the following folders:
- community – for modules installed via Magento Connect.
- core – for modules that come with Magento by default.
- local – usually for locally developed modules
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Media files
All images uploaded to the system as well as the images resized dynamically by the system are stored in media/.
When importing media files via system profiles (Magento’s name for batch processing), /media/import/ will be your folder to place the images for the products.
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The var directory
The var directory is used for several functions in the system:
- Backups are exported to backups/ by the built in system backup tool.
- The system cache is stored in both cache/ and session/ folders.
- Data import for default system data import profiles is set to import/.
- Data export for default system data export profiles is set to export/.
Hopefully this has given you a good indication as to the important directories in Magento’s file structure. I hope you can now go away and navigate around Magento’s default folders with ease.
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