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this in march now knows that Magento has already reached the 1.4 stable status and thus might presume this book to be out of date and not very useful at all (quite harsh for a book that is slightly newer than 2 months old!).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

In order to achieve a greater rate of conversions, a bold and clear ‘add to cart button’ should be added to each product page and it should be made to stand out from the rest of the content so that it is easy to locate for any shopper. Use reds, blues and images to display it so that is is easily noticable to the user.

It is also important to use the correct terminology. Using terms such as ‘buy’ or ‘order’ may scare the user into thinking they are commiting to the purchase right now, whereas ‘add to cart’ or ‘add to basket’ acts as a nice first step in the buying process where the user may only still be browsing.

The example above, taken from PFT Central shows a good usage of an ‘add to cart button’. It stands out using a bold red color, and by using button styles it looks ‘clickable’. The terminology is good and the small trolley icon is good for people who may not speak or read English. It is easily noticable on the page and the use knows exactly what it means so this is how I would reccommend doingthis type of button.

It is important to have a virtual shopping basket or ‘cart’ viewable at all times so users feel like they have it ‘with them’ whilst they are browsing your site, and it also keeps them aware of what’s in there and that they can add or remove items at will, just as in real life.

The Amazon shopping basket is great example:

The blue colour makes it stand out perfectly and its slim design makes in non-obtrusive. The details are kept brief and important showing quantities, prices and a product title which when clicked upon takes you to the product you’re buying – a nice touch. A very important feature is the ‘edit shopping basket’ button which is nice and clear and assures the user that they can always add or remove items nice and easily.

The two ‘Proceed to Chekout’ buttons are also very prominent here and are located near the shopping basket because it’s likely that you’d want to check what’s in your basket before checking out.

One final point I’d like to make about shopping baskets is to keep the name consistent. Don’t go switching between cart, basket or trolley at will as it could confuse less experienced users. The basket is there to reassure and to be convenient to users, following these guidelines and taking a page out of Amazon’s book will help you on your way.

As previously explained, as site search function is a must for any e-commerce website as it allows users to find what they’re looking for. However it is not unusual to be flooded by a huge number of search results in such an instance, so an option to narrow the criteria of a search is a very useful tool. If you searched for ‘Lord of the Rings: Return of the king’, you’ll no doubt be given results from CD, DVD and Video Games which match the search keywords. Narrowing it to a search within ‘CD’ would ensure only the soundtrack would appear from the search.

I think Zavvi has it right. It’s not too complicated either. You don’t want a hug list of categories to navigate through, just the main ones which will really help in narrowing down your search.