We bang on a lot here at e-commerce website design about Magento being the king of e-commerce. Granted it is very very good as an e-commerce platform, but how is it at being a CMS for content? Adam posted a little while ago about this very fact: Magento as a CMS

The conclusion was – yes it is quite useful in a number of ways but doesn’t really compete to the worlds number 1 blogging platform. Wordpress.

Wordpress, like all good CMS systems is an extensible, open-source beast that allows the user the ability to create a number of different site ideas from one simple installation. Whether you want a blog, a complete website or even an e-commerce site – Wordpress has it all (after a couple of plug-ins of course).

As Wordpress is easy to install, easy to configure and even easier to maintain it interested me enough to pick up the Wordpress 2.9 e-Commerce book from packtpub.com to see how well it can maintain it’s easy of use when e-commerce was thrown into the mix.

First Impressions

The book is very well styled, the flower on the front cover – perhaps a lotus or something similar – fully compliments the content therein, it’s a theme that has been carried out through a lot of Packt publications and is one that I’ve always wondered about. Do people really think flowers have anything to do with building e-commerce systems? Only in the abstract. That of the installation of a tiny seed to the gentle application of nutritious back links and a healthy dose of direct payment gateways. What you end up with is a fully blossomed online store.

Packaging aside, the content is really well written, like it’s been crafted by mother nature herself – enough of that, stop it, stop it now.

In total there are 11 chapters, and a fair appendices – meaning that this book has been well researched – always check for a lengthy appendices in these types of books, you don’t really want to fork out £27.99 on something somebody made up out of thin air…

What we expect from this book

What do we expect from this book? Well picking it up and reading through it I was expecting to have a nice healthy, relatively simple e-commerce website set up in a matter of hours – guess what. I did. Not only is this book easy to follow but it is also very practical in the way it teaches you – just like all of Packt publications that I have had the pleasure to read so far. I can almost guarantee that if you read this book and followed it’s steps from 9am on a Saturday morning you will have a fully working Wordpress e-commerce website (and one hell of a stiff neck) by 2am  Sunday morning.

Outside the box

What does this book teach us that is outside of the scope of e-commerce design? Well for starters this book is for those who enjoy wordpress. Pure and simple. Anything from useful wordpress plug-ins (All-In-One SEO plug-in is given a mention) all the way to useful themes and payment gateways.

Come on – who is the intended audience for this book?

It may surprise you when I say this but I’ve gone through this book with a fine tooth-comb and I cannot see a simple piece of writing that has left me scratching my head – honestly – I struggle to even find the few snippets of HTML that are interspersed rarely throughout these pages. There is literally nothing in this book which would scare the average designer. The number of beautifully detailed images depicting the workings of the e-commerce system are all screen-shots of the CMS! This book is so easy to read and easy to follow that even the Magento Fox would gladly bury his paws in it.

Final thoughts

If you are serious about making an online venture with an e-commerce store then this book is well worth a read – heck – it’s even worth a read if you are head-over-heels in love with Magento. Always useful to have a backup plan…

This book wraps the world of e-commerce up in one almighty phrase – user-friendly. When has an e-commerce site been user-friendly all the way from installation, customisation, theme creation and online selling? Not many times that’s for sure.

Thanks for visiting our magento blog. Take care and we’ll be back with another book review very shortly!

Its that time again…the time when we put aside our computer screens and pick up a brand new “smelling of the earth” book. However – in our line of work it is almost impossible to avoid the subject of IT, Web Design or even E-Commerce. We don’t mind – in fact we relish these moments!

So without further ado let me introduce you to our upcoming book review:

Magento 1.3 Sales tactics cookbook (by William Rice)

What I am hoping for in this book is a lot of focus on the sales side of magento – what makes a good online business a good business – and how magento can make it happen.

We will be receiving this book from the fantastic people at www.packtpub.com, who so generously offered us this book to review and then next week we will publish our opinions on this book and give you an honest rating based upon our findings.

As always thanks for visiting our magento blog and if anyone else out there needs their books reviewing  – you know where to send them.

Magento 1.3: PHP Developer’s Guide by Jamie Huskisson – Review by Robert Kent

As you can see from this angelic image, we found the Magento 1.3: PHP Developers guide beside the pearly gates of heaven. Heaven-sent has never had a truer meaning than this, the length of time that we have waited for a decent developers guide for the Magento platform has seemed almost biblical…..

Now that time is at an end….kind of.

This book was first published in January 2010 as a guide for the 1.3 platform. Anyone reading this in march now knows that Magento has already reached the 1.4 stable status and thus might presume this book to be out of date and not very useful at all (quite harsh for a book that is slightly newer than 2 months old!). However will this guide – like all good guides – stand the test of time?

Now before I start my review let me say a couple of things about it’s intended audience. First of all this book is for a developer - hence the big title. If you are a designer with absolutely no PHP experience, I highly recommend you leave this book alone and go look for it’s slightly more attractive sister… “Magento 1.3: Theme Design” – by Richard Carter.

There are a few things that we look for in books – most importantly are the words printed within, however we all read and learn differently so it’s hard to give a definitive review of any printed page. Bearing this in mind I will attempt to divide this opinion into easy-to-swallow sugar-paper pieces (say that 10 times fast…).

And then judgment did begin…

Presumptions:

It is presumed that you will have a good understanding (and preferably a few years of experience ) in PHP5. It is also presumed (though not highly so) that you are using this guide in order to take you magento sites to the next level – literally hoist them up to somewhere you could not reach before. This means that you should at least know the layout and structure of a magento site – such as what is involved in the overall process of getting hard code to display, as a module, on a magento CMS or category page. This means knowing how a php file affects the phtml files which are in turn controlled by the XML files. It is also worth noting that it is also highly recommended to be somewhat proficient in XML when tackling this book. Otherwise you could <become><lost></lost></become>.

Coverage:

Amazingly, for such a compact book (this assessment is based on the old back-breaking HTML 4 libraries and bibles from back in the day) there is one hell of a lot of information contained within. This information is laid out in easy to follow chapters that take you through the process of creating said chapters in a step-by-step fashion. To give you an idea of the content for this book here are a few chapter titles of note:

• Building a payment module
• API Integration
• Magento’s Architecture

Not only are the chapters step-by-step but all source code in actually printed within – now this is really a big help as many a time I have had a book such as this where the only copy of the source code comes on the supplied disk – which inevitably I lose almost straight away. Literally as soon as the book has been opened the disk has buried itself behind my wardrobe or somehow lodged itself between neighboring buildings. It remains a mystery that I do not feel the need to solve, my only solution is avoidance of those kinds of books.

Basically this book talks to you about the ins and out of “extending” magento, why it is important and how best to approach it. Letting you get to grips with some of the deeper functionality of the Zend Framework and also outlining files and folder structures and telling you the importance of each.

It does help a beginner to the software understand the principles of the system very well – and all from a functionality point of view.

Where am I:

Where am I? That is a question that I have had to ask myself many a time when following a written PHP guide or some other developers book. It happens all of a sudden, some of you might know what I’m talking about, here’s how it goes…

You are following the guide willingly – all is going well – you are literally copying everything word for word…but then you suddenly realize you have no idea where you are, what you are doing or even what book you are reading…It is a very strange occurrence but it is a common symptom of copying text. It doesn’t go in and before you know it you have forgotten everything.

Does this happen with our featured book? No. No it doesn’t. Didn’t to me anyway…but I am puzzled as to why this is so. It does follow the same format as a lot of other guides that have caused me to fall victim to this symptom. I can only put it down to the fact that the tutorials really do flow quite nicely…

Unanswered Questions:

There are always unanswered questions when it comes to learning anything but I still thought that I’d be best to put this section in. Not that I have any unanswered questions – see below.

Overall:

I had no delusions when we gained possession of this book. I knew there would be no images of gorgeous web design and amazing flash animations. I knew this book would not show the design side of the functionality. I knew that this book was solely for the purpose of extending magento stores through the use of functions/xml and code snippets. I also knew that I would also be disappointed because of this.

Perhaps it is the small designer in me screaming in frustration but whenever I approach a website to slay it becomes a two headed hydra…you attack one neck with your arrays, loops and $variables – you attack the other with css/javascript and wherever possible some nice pretty colours.

If I were a pure programmer I would love this book and perhaps take it to bed with me……As I am not – this book will remain on my work desk – ready and willing whenever I need it. This means that my review for Magento 1.3: PHP Developer’s Guide is also a twin-headed beast, factored on my two frames of mind…

Pure Programmer – 9/10

Overall Developer – 6/10