Design, develop, and deploy feature-rich Magento online stores with PHP coding.

If you are a PHP developer who wants to understand the architecture of Magento, learn how to extend the system with PHP code, add new features, and integrate Magento with a third-party CMS, this book is for you.

You are expected to be a confident PHP 5 developer. No experience of Magento development is expected, although you should be familiar with the operation of Magento. No experience of the Zend framework is expected.

What you will learn from this book

• Install and upgrade Magento to get ready for development
• Get familiar with the architecture and internal structure of Magento
• Learn about the best modules available and what they can do for you out of the box
• Build a Shipping module for your Magento store to give users options for receiving their items once they have paid for them
• Create a payment method for Magento and the various aspects that go together to complete the payment process
• Speed up your module creation process using the Module Creator script
• Build a basic brand-management module for Magento to manage brands and display their details
• Integrate your favourite CMS into Magento including a walkthrough of integrating Wordpress into Magento
• Create, update, delete, and retrieve customer data from within Magento by implementing the customer API
• Integrate Magento data into an existing external web application or script using the Magento Core API
• Import/export files to retrieve and store information from and to external sources using Excel Spreadsheet or CSV data

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Some interesting examples of beautiful sketches for website prototypes for your daily inspiration, collected by Antonio Lupetti on woorkup.com.

When you start designing a new website it’s very useful to sketch out a first idea of page layout using paper and stencil. This approach help you define easily a working draft of the final version of your website. In general this is a top-down process: you can start sketching first the main sections and then adding more details progressively.

If you are a graphic or web designer you should understand the importance of color combinations. Nice colors and color combinations are much coveted among graphic designers, interior designers and landscapers. You must have used Kuler in Photoshop CS4. ColoRotate is a similar kind of online color palette creator that lets you browse through the color palettes, create new palettes and share them with the online community.

There is a sliders mode as well. This will bring up color sliders for editing the colors. You can choose various modes like RGB, CMYK, LAB, HSV, HLS, NCS while adjusting these sliders. You won’t need to remember the color values and jot them down as you can download the palettes directly in .act format.

You can also browse through the palettes , sort or search for palettes based on tags. There’s also a very information description about colors and how the human eye perceives colors, color models. Checkout Learn Colorotate

It seems that Doctrine 1.2 has attract more and more the developers interest. My last post inspired from  Juozas Kaziukėnas was about combining Zend Framework and Doctrine ORM and the differences between the frameworks.

Today, Jon Lebensold from ZendCast has put together an video introduction to Doctrine 1.2 integration with the Zend Framework. Doctrine is a fantastic ORM (object-relational mapping tool). If you’ve jumped from NHibernate or Hibernate and are itching to have a powerful tool for handling database relationships, Doctrine is probably your best bet.

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Juozas Kaziukėnas has posted a new series of posts about combining Zend Framework and Doctrine ORM and the differences between the frameworks.

It was quite common to use Zend_Db_Table as base models class, but it was simply not practical. When you start dealing with relations and hierarchical data types it starts to get really tricky, because simply Zend_Db_Table doesn’t provide an extensive enough functionality. So half a year ago Zend Framework developers started to look for better solutions.

An alternative (and a very powerful one at that) was found in Doctrine – an object relational mapper tool that sits on a database layer. Doctrine 2 will even be the first ORM with seamless integration between the Zend Framework (and Symfony). He briefly touches on what some sample code might look like and the command to build out your model classes from predefined YAML files.

After evaluating possible solutions I decided to stay with Doctrine for a long time. I don’t know any other solution coming, I definitely don’t want (mainly because I don’t have time) to invest on creating my own library and Doctrine is simply awesome when you get used to it. After all this time I can say that it was a right call – Doctrine is on a way to being officially supported in Zend Framework

He then goes on to talk about the benefits of Doctrine and why it can save time. Well worth a read and following the rest of the series.

• Zend Framework and Doctrine [First Part]
• Zend Framework and Doctrine [Second Part]