Magento Static Block
There’s more than one way to skin a hippo and adding CMS static blocks in Magento is no exception.
In case you’re unfamiliar with CMS static blocks, they are powerful little buggers in Magento’s admin that allows the site’s administrator to add and control chunks of HTML that can be displayed throughout the site. They’re perfect for seasonal banners, sale blocks, return policies, size charts and anything that would make sense to modularize to make maintaining your site easier.
But wait, aren’t there already ‘callouts’ in Magento? Well, if you’re talking about those annoying graphics of the dog and chalkboard that take editing multiple files to update then yes. Magento’s built-in callouts are a terrible way of handling regularly updated content.
Your Magento website should be as updatable as possible to keep you from getting phone calls every time a client wants to advertise a new sale. Which is exactly why we want to control these blocks from the admin. Keep in mind Magento’s upcoming release of 1.4 will be implementing a WYSIWIG editor so clients can handle their own changes instead of pestering you.
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Magento Beginner's Guide by Packt Publishing
Magento Ecommerce is a powerful, flexible open-source system that can produce great results right out of the box. At Pod1, we work exclusively with Magento to deliver custom ecommerce websites for high end fashion brands and more. Because I’ve seen an incredible amount of client success with Magento I’m quick to recommend it as an extremely capable e-commerce solution.
While Magento is a great tool, its learning curve is steep (relative to other platforms) and reliable, thorough documentation is often hard to come by.
Enter the good people at Packt Publishing. Their Magento books are invaluable tools of navigating a powerful but daunting platform. I’ve read Magento 1.3 Theme Design and it does a great job explaining how to customize Magento, so when Packt asked me to review Magento Beginner’s Guide I knew I’d have some great reading ahead of me.
Who This Book is For
Typically people asking me for e-commerce advice are small business owners or do-it-yourselfers who want an online presence that they can set up and manage themselves. I recommend Magento to them because of its scalability so as their business grows, their e-commerce presence can grow with it. However, everyone who has taken my advice and decided on Magento usually come running back to me after about an hour saying “Sooooo, how exactly do you do this?” Several painstaking hours later they are online and ready to dig in. I then get another call saying something along the lines of “How do I make the background green?” Keep Reading
Yesterday Varien announced Magento Enterprise Edition, which is a commercially-licensed e-commerce platform built on their free open source version. From Varien’s standpoint, I can understand their need to monetize their product, however I feel this is a big disappointment to the growing Magento development community. With over to 750,000 downloads in less than a year, Magento’s growth has been quick and has gained a ton of momentum from developers and critics. What better way to totally reverse that momentum by locking up the best features in a premium version and slapping a huge pricetag on it ($8,900 A YEAR?!).
From a developer’s standpoint, I was really looking forward to a lot of the features that were being hyped up by the team on the roadmap and/or forums (specifically the gift cards). Now that a lot of beneficial features will be locked up in an expensive premium version, I expect to see that excitement and momentum from the community fade. Keep Reading