Niklas Hammarstr̦m РNews, Interest, CV

This must be one of the hardest tasks I’ve tried so far. With my small e-commerce project I needed a CMS in the background and wanted to continue my testings of the Magento eCommerce platform.

Before I started the new project I had the design for the entire site coded in perfect CSS/xHTML and thought it would be easy to just hock it up to Magento. But boy was this a misstake, I have now read several hundred pages of the online documentation for Magento and so far I haven’t managed to get my new design working ontop of the CMS.

The biggest problem so far is the way the entire design is structured with XML and small snippets of HTML. Basically you store your HTML skeleton in the app/design/frontend/theme/default/template under different sub-categories. And then you have the rest of the structured in the app/design/template/frontend/theme/default/layout as blocks of XML that are calling for the html files.

It looks like this,
<block type=”page/html_notices” name=”global_notices” as=”global_notices” template=”page/html/notices.phtml” />

<block type=”page/html_header” name=”header” as=”header” template=”page/bimp/header.phtml”>
</block>

Okey it gets even weird’er when it comes to css and images, since they are stored in a different part of the three structured and called through a lot of different sets of rules.

I’m not a coder, I haven’t written a single line of code for more then three years. I should probably leave this to the professionals. So I will probably post this a new project on GAF if I don’t solve these issues before the weekend.

Things are finally progressing. It took a while to get the designer to make a design for my new project but now it’s finally in the hands of the CSS/xhtml coder and I will get all the pages back on monday. I’ve been thinking about making this a affiliate project, but now I can tell you it will be a 100% e-commerce project.  I’ve established contact with a good supplier within the EU, that will drop ship to my customers.

I feel that I can’t give you the entire business yet, but since it will be online before the end of June I promise I will write more about it during next week. Last year I made some tests on the Magento platform and until last week I had plan to use that for this project. But a friend of mine introduced me to Shopify that already have a great working platform with everything you need to a good price. And the best thing is that you can style it any way you want.

I’ve been testing the Magento plattform for a while and I must say it’s good – but complicated. I don’t find there menu very logical. But the system is great for an e-commerce entreprenur that can have one CMS for several stores.

I’ve tried to modified the layout of the store and it’s both easy and not easy. If you know your CSS you can basically have one design for each product page. But that also makes it difficult. I find if very hard to make a good overall design, but then again I’m no designer.

Unfortently I don’t have that much time at nights to work on these small projects but I will give you a more detailed report furter on.