Magento Tutorial for Beginners (Part 4)
How Magento Does Themes Different from Others
The term ‘theme’ probably sounds to you a familiar ring. Either as an audience, a creator, or both, you’ve experienced the sea of available web applications options via its themes. A theme has largely two types of users – First, the audience–type who experiences it from the aesthetical and usability standpoint by browsing through a store – And second, the creator–type who goes through an additional layer of the theme experience by taking part in building the theme.
To the first user type, a store experience is defined by the ability of a store to fulfill his/her tactical and emotional demands. To the second user type who must fill the creator role, it is the efficiency with which he/she is able to complete a set of development tasks that determines the store experience. We recognize that it is the accumulated experiences of both user types that determine the final profitability of the store, therefore neither user’s experience can afford to be overlooked.
Because we know that as designers you’ve already got the graphical end of things best covered (servicing to the audience–types), we figured we’d just help you along by building an out-of-this-world theme management to maximize your work-flow efficiency and take your creativity to the next level. Here’s something we thought might get you drooling:
1. Maximum customization power
With Magento you can update the look and feel of your store in the category and product level, giving you greater marketing and promotional power as well as a store with endlessly unique design. Ever imagined presenting each product in its own customized product info page? Magento gives you the power to do just that and more, by providing a quick way to customize your product presentation in a per-product and per-category basis.
2. Multiple themes
Magento gives you the ability to load multiple themes at once, allowing you to swap between a default store design and temporary event/season-specific ones — All at the command of a few key strokes.
3. Uninterrupted workflow
With Magento’s fully object-oriented programming, all modules are immediately accessible via template tags from any template files. And because Magento comes feature-rich right out of the box, you’ll never again have to be dependent on a programmer to finish the simplest tasks for you. Magento also thrives on an extensive network of knowledgeable community members (including the official Magento Team), so you will never need to think twice about where to get guidance should you need it along the way.
4. Minimize debugging time
Any designer can recall those precious hours and minutes wasted looking for the unclosed markup scrutinized by your validator. The validator may tell you what’s wrong, but it never seems to tell you where it’s happening. Magento’s modular backend brings with it a modular template system that minimizes the amount of (X)HTML you need to handle at once. Less the mess means less the fuss and more the sanity for the truly important things in life.
Really, the best part of what Magento offers you though, is an application that thrives on its flexibility, leaving you with nothing much to worry about except devising your brilliant plans for your next ‘wow’ front-end. The sky is the limit for this application, and we hope you have fun applying it to your store.
