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

Find out more

This is an idea of Jonathan Snook, an web designer and developer that I admire and follow.

He propose a new layout system on extending the CSS property “position” by adding value “:matrix (x,y)”. The Matrix Layouts should be like table-based layouts combined with absolute positioning and without any “hacks” for overflowing.

How this should work? You use the position property to specify where the box should be placed within the grid. Have a look at the following example diagram:

It’s a 3 column design but with a little extra pizzazz in the middle column. I’ve also lettered each section by their source order. Now, let’s look at what that code would look like with matrix layouts:

#a { position: matrix(1,2, 1,4); }
#b { position: matrix(2,2); }
#c { position: matrix(2,3); }
#d { position: matrix(2,4); }
#e { position: matrix(1,1, 2,1); }
#f { position: matrix(1,5, 2,5); }

I think this be a kick-ass CSS feature and I would love to use in my layouts. This will bring so much fun to CSS work and I’m sure that others would love it, but there is long way till it’s really implemented. Also will be good to have the Matrix Layout implemented in a CSS framework.

You can read the full blog post here or the Matrix Layout concept here.

After joining the “Say-No-To-Ie-6-And-Upgrade-Your-Browser” campaign a new miracle has come …

The old IEPNGFix script fixes the support for alpha transparency in IE 5.5 / 6.0 is now update to a new version, that has the ability to use CSS1 compatible background position and repeat.

To make it work properly you have to set the background to repeat, and the PNG will stretch to fill the element, and if you set to ‘no-repeat’, the PNG will display once (untiled) pixel-for-pixel.

Download the script

Recently I’ve got an iPhone (thanks Darren!) and I was searching for applications and stuff to customize it. I was looking for an easy way to manage my blog. Thanks to “7 Tools For Blogging On Your Phone” I found a great plugin “iPhone / Mobile Admin” that has a mobile friendly interface and allows you to enter posts directly to your blog, to manage posts and moderate comments. It is made mainly for the iPhone & iPod Touch, but it will work in most other mobile browser.

It helps a lot, you don’t have to pinch to zoom in/out.

Most common WordPress admin features are supported:

• Dashboard sections: Incoming Links, Comments, Posts, Blog Stats
• Writing and editing posts (including auto-save)
• Tagging support in 2.3
• Comment Moderation
• Manage Posts page
• Manage Profile page
• Ability to toggle back and forth to the normal admin view.
• Support for plugins that include fields on the post page
• Compatibility with existing library of admin plugins

I recommend it for anyone who wants to post from a mobile device.

The previous week when I was stumble upon and I found a great example how you can create a nice form button with round corners using the BUTTON element. Of course I think it can be improved giving more value.

The tutorial starts by comparing the INPUT type=”submit” element and BUTTON element. The most interesting difference is that the BUTTON element may have content. So, the goal is to create and style a nice web 2.0 button that can be resizeable so there is no need for later interventions. The button element will be treat as container and we will add some markup.

You can see in the demo that I used the button in different combinations, that I know that is good for integration & usability.

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