CUSTOM IZING MA GENTO THEMES

Magento is built on a fully modular model that provides you with nearly unlimited flexibility. By nature of the application, this approach to programming is mirrored in the way you will develop themes for your

store. In this chapter, we will explore what that means for you and exactly how to go about developing a theme for your store with Magento.

This chapter helps you understand how to modify an existing template. From there you will gain the comfort and knowledge to develop your own. Do not forget that you are still building off the base package rather than completely from scratch.  Our ultimate goal is that you be able to customize your store to look and behave exactly as you want it to, but that your theme directories will contain the minimum number of files

to make that happen and rely on the base theme for everything else.

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THEME VARIATIONS OR NON-DEFAULT THEMES

A theme variation can contain as many or as few theme files as you see fit for your need. Theme variations allow you to easily create minor variations to your default theme that can be applied to your entire store, subsections of your store, specific pages in your store, or to a separate but related store. When working with a custom design package, you can either modify the default theme for that package or create another theme

in that design package in addition and load it alongside the default.

Examples might include:

• A replacement parts section of your website that requires a less media-rich product page

• A section of your website that previews next season’s products but does not yet offer them for sale

• A seasonal creative change that you want to apply to your entire website, but only for a limited time

• A branded website for another division of your busi ness that needs the same overall branding as the parent site, but requires other modifications based on their catalog and business processes.

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: Filling the fields on the General tab in Magento

 

Each of the fields in the General tab is described next. Fill in the fields for your Product.

 

1.     Name, DescripIon, and Short DescripIon

Your customers will see the product Name at the top of the product's page. A Short DescripIon appears below it, and a DescripIon below it.

 

When shoppers List the products in a Category, they also see the Name and Short DescripIon as shown in the following screenshot:

2.     SKU

SKU stands for Stock Keeping Unit. This is a standard term in the retail industry. Each item in your store must have a unique SKU. For more about SKUs, see the Wikipedia arNcle at http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Stock_Keeping_Unit.

3.     Weight

This field is the product's weight. Usually, this field holds the shipping weight, and not the actual weight of the product. You usually put the actual weight of the product in the product's descripNon. You usually use this field for calculaNng the cost of shipping.

For example, the Product DescripIon for the laptop states that it weighs 2.84 pounds. However, the shipping weight would be much higher because it includes the box, accessories, packaging, and manuals.

Our coffee store is an excepNon because we sell products by weight. So, we will take the unusual step of using the Weight field for the product's actual weight.

 

 

Most of our coffee will be sold in one-pound bags. However, if we want to offer a half-pound or two-pound bag, we'll need to create separate products for each of them.

 

4.     Set Product as New from Date and Set Product as New to Date

The default layout for Magento's home page shows blocks that display the shopper's recently viewed products, and products that the shopper chooses to compare. You can also add some code to your store's home page that will display new products. The new products will appear at the botom of the page. Magento can also put

new products into an RSS feed and send email announcements of new products, for customers who subscribe.

A new product can be included in the new product display, RSS feed, and/or email announcement.

SeNng dates in the fields for Set Product as New from/to Date makes the product "new" to Magento. If you use any of the above features, you will need to fill in these date fields. However, if you don't highlight "new" products in your store, you can safely leave these fields blank.

5.    Status

Enabled makes this product acNve and displays it in your store. Disabled makes this product inacNve and hides it from shoppers. I prefer to keep a product Disabled unNl I've filled out all the tabs, and double-checked my work.

6.    URL key

Some features can cause a web page to rank higher in search engines. Designing a page to appear as high as possible in search engines is called search engine opImizaIon, or SEO. It is part science and part art. A full discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter.

One feature that helps a page's search engine rank is a URL that has relevant search terms in it. For example, brew-me-a-cup.com/product/1234 is not a search en- gine friendly URL. However, brew-me-a-cup.com/kona-fancy-wholebean gives a search engine more informaNon to index.

The URL key field creates a search engine friendly URL. Because a URL cannot have spaces or special characters; you cannot use them in this field. If you leave this field blank, Magento will generate a search engine friendly URL for you. It will base this URL on the product's Name.

7.     Visibility

This field determines whether the product will not display at all in your site (Nowhere), display on the pages of your site (Catalog), show up in search results (Search), or both (Catalog, Search). Note that even if a product's Status is set to Enabled, you must have its Visibility set to Catalog or Search, or your shoppers won't be able to see or find it. If you have the Status set to Disabled, then the Product won't show up in the Catalog no mater what you've set the Visibility

to. However, you can set Visibility to Search for a Disabled product.\

 

8.     Allow Gi† Message

This field determines if customers can add a giG message to this product during checkout. Yes and No are self-explanatory. Use config means that for this product, Magento will use the sitewide seNng for giG messages. You will find that seNng under System | Sales | Sales | Gi† Messages.

9.     Save and ConNnue to Pricing

In the upper right corner of the New Product page, there are two butons:

Save will save what you have entered into this tab, and advance you to the next tab. Save and ConInue Edit will save the informaNon that you entered and keep you on the same tab. Because there is a required field on the next tab, you will want to Save this tab and proceed to the Prices tab. This is because you must fill in all required fields before the system will allow you to save the product.

 

What just happened?

Now that you have filled in values for the Atributes on the General tab, you are halfway in compleNng the minimum informaNon for this Product.

 

You have a few fields under Prices to fill out. Then, it's on to the opNonal informaNon under the rest of the tabs.

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