Magento: Beginner’s Guide, a solid introduction to managing Magento stores

Jamie Huskisson — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 10:48:21 +0000

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)

Tags: book reviews, magento, magento development

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Adding an unsubscribe link to a Magento newsletter template

Jamie Huskisson — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 18:00:38 +0000

A quick tip for Magento developer’s here, in how to add an unsubscribe link into a newsletter template so that the person can unsubscribe from the newsletter if they chose to do so.

Simply add {{var subscriber.getUnsubscriptionLink()}} into your template in order to output the link for the user to unsubscribe. This even works for people who aren’t registered customers of the Magento installation but that you’ve imported into your system as subscribing to the newsletter.

Full example of a link in your template to unsubscribe:

Unsubscribe

Tags: code tidbits, magento development