Back in the day…we had a wide selection of buildings, some big, others slightly smaller. We called these strange places “shops”.  In these “shops” lived a few humble “staff”, whose job it was to patrol the “shop” and keep a wary eye out for miscreants and vagabonds. They were also required to “face-up” the aisles and sometimes mop the floor.

Stock was laid out in the open…a very dangerous tactic. Many’s a time when a “shoplifter” would…now let me get this right…tip the “shop” up and empty the contents into a large ‘duffel bag’ or ‘hoody’ and then scarper away pockets bulging.

In the days of old the rules were simple – either you had a shop and sold your products – or you didn’t. If you did, you would make money but due to shoplifters and duffel bags you might also lose money.

Ecommerce is the future, but is it the future for some or the future for all? According to all those boring statistics, the world wide web is gradually catching up with high-street retail in terms of the number of products being bought. This is still at the time when my broadband speed is only slightly faster than my kettle at opening Google.

It is my belief that the emergence of e-commerce (there are many ways to spell it) as the fast approaching primary source of purchase is because of the psycho/social dis-interaction between human being and money. Now I am no psychologist – all I know is – it hurts a hell of a lot more when I extract a crisp, clean £10 note from my wallet, and, with trembling hands, pass it over the counter to pay for my milk and cheese, than it does when I click a button and spend £10 on a DVD I don’t even have to leave the house to receive.

Stop Press! (or stop-publish in this case)

I have literally just been told, right this second, over my shoulder – amongst the abuse and gestural insults – that the future is in fact “M-Commerce” or “Mobile Commerce“. Descriptions of this new phenomenon are vague at best but the general idea is that ‘ubiquitous’ computing is taking over the world – the fact that you now have a choice as to how and where and why and if and who and when you buy your products means that it literally is all down to you. So what do you do? Do you get on the iPhone and buy your slippers? Do you purchase your cuff-links on your laptop on a beach? Do you buy your dog food while sitting down having a brew in those slippers and cuff-links at home in your computer room? Personally I do all of them…

E-commerce website design is always trying to keep up to date with the latest developments in the world of ecommerce – we did actually know about m-commerce before I just mentioned it…I only added that in there to keep your heart-rate up. Some good news though! We are now hiring for Magento Jobs as well as web design and possibly some SEO. Just see our other posts for details.

To Sum up and get this post over and done with – e commerce (yup, third different spelling on the same post) and m-commerce / “ubiquitous commerce” is almost certainly the future and hopefully we’ll all be ready when it happens.

Next time you walk into a “shop” take a picture…

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

When it comes to designing a content management system from scratch it is important to think ahead and try to anticipate the needs and changes of your client. If you build a system that is rigid yet inflexible you will suffer for it when your client demands changes. The trick is to create a system that is fluid and easily changeable – dynamic.

To put this into some perspective we’ll take our “Complete Computers” as an example.

Say for example the client initially wants to do this:

• Create a computer part
• Choose Image for part
• Write a description for part
• Write a title for part
• Set price for part

These are the bog-standard things that should be implemented for the computer parts.

However what if you have implemented this and in a couple of months the client comes back saying that he wants to also be able to apply a discount to all products? In this case let’s say he wants to implement a 15% discount on all products.  With the way we originally created this, it would mean that the client would have to manually discount 15% from each and every product. This gets frustrating if the client has 100’s of products that he now has to spend ours on changing.

The easiest way to escape this conundrum is to set a modifier on the entire “price” column for every product when it is outputted. So in the front-end the discount is applied Perhaps with a piece of code such as:

<?php

$sql = “SELECT * FROM catalog_products WHERE productid = ‘4′”;

$res = mysql_query($sql);

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($res, MYSQL_ASSOC)){

$price = $row['price'];

$multiplier = 0.85; //discount of 15%

echo “£”.($price*$multiplier);

}

?> 

This is easy enough to do but wouldn’t it have been better to anticipate this kind of functionality beforehand?

What you need to ensure is that you have the bases covered before you finish your CMS. Ideally you should always have the basics laid down that any store might require. That is build in the sort of functionality that is expected of a store. Discounts, VAT changes, Shipping costs. All manageable by the client in the admin section.

I find it easier to implement these sorts of much-needed bits of functionality before you move onto the bespoke side of things. This is only part of what I mean by thinking ahead – the rest I will cover in my next post “Building and Testing our database” where we will cover our sample stores database and also try to cover our bases so that we do not need to return to the client in a months time to implement obvious changes.

Hello all, and welcome to my guide on creating a bespoke content-management system (CMS). My name is Rob and I form part of the e-commerce development team here at e-commercewebdesign.co.uk – part of the CreareGroup.

What I wanted to do for my first post was basically jump straight in at the deep end. I am going to give you a step-by-step guide to creating a bespoke CMS. Hopefully this will help you learn the ways of PHP/MySQL as well as understanding the nature of the customer’s site and anticipating any future changes and building in improvements as we go.

Of course what we need is to create (or at least plan out) an example website that requires bespoke functionality.

The most common request that we have had to incorporate into bespoke CMS designs is a “stage system”. What I mean by stage system is the systematic building of a complicated order. This could be the building of a kitchen, a conservatory or even a computer. To simplify it a bit – a bespoke CMS is only really needed when the product on sale is in itself bespoke.

So this is what we will be doing. We will be building a computer shop – “Complete Computers” – one that is bespoke and which allows us to select the hardware and software and we may even go so far as to personalize it – simply to show extra functionality on the part of the order process. We will also be validating each stage so that it only proceeds when each stage is completed to a satisfactory standard by the user.

The steps I will show you in this series of blogs will include all of the following and probably a lot more.

• Thinking ahead – covering your bases when it comes to database design
• Building and Testing our database
• Creating and Separating the front-end and back-end systems
• Creating the stage system
• Creating the session
• Creating the shopping cart
• Implementing the payment gateway

There are more areas to cover than this but hopefully this will give you all a taster of what is to come. If you have any suggestions or questions about any of this then don’t be afraid to post.

Thanks and hopefully you’ll look forward to my second instalment in a few days time – most likely called “Thinking Ahead” where we will go over all the possibilities of what our store could entail.

Adding a search function is the number one standard in designing e-commerce websites. They should all have one as they allow customers to quickly and conveniently locate what they’re looking for. It’s similar to asking an assistant in a supermarket where a particular product is. You may know where the cereals are, but it can be difficult to locate the exact brand amongst the hundereds on offer. The same rule applies to an online shop, browsing through categories can be a long process.

In terms of design, once again Amazon wins out. The bar should be located at the top of the page, above the fold where it can be seen instantly. Use a standard white background for text entry and surrond it in a dark colour to make it stand out. You should also make it as long as possible so that users don’t have their queries cut off. Some search functions suggest words as you’re typing to make the process easier but I think some less experienced users would find this confusing and off-putting.