Hello my name is Steve Lam and this is my portfolio. I’m a freelance web designer based in Toronto, ON Canada. I love cats, playing music, valid css/xhtml and generally all things music and design related. My aim is to work with indie artists, musicians and small businesses in achieving frenetic designs while adhering to today’s web standards.

For those who are curious, as an open-source advocate my favourite content management system (cms) is Textpattern!

That’s it. Feel free to contact me for a quote, creative brief, whatever.

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Theming Magento Commerce

19 September 08

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been working with Magento Commerce. Thanks to the design guide, I’ve been gleefully playing around with the templating system and wrapping my head around structural blocks, content blocks, xml handles, reference names etc etc. I’m slowly getting over the “this is way too abstract!” idea and am starting to appreciate the flexibility offered by their system.

Despite the huge learning curve, there’s some pretty impressive templating work coming out of the woodwork.

Magento theme by NueBe Magento theme by lento.pl

I’ll be adding my own theming efforts soon. I had some huge installation issues months earlier when I first tried Magento but now it installs on my local test server as well as my online playground work just fine. Currently I’m just sifting through the templating engine and coding structure, fixing bugs here and there for the latest beta (0.8.16100). The lead developer hangs out on irc (freenode/#magento) quite often so it’s been pretty sweet to be able to give feedback directly and with quick response.

Speaking of which, the code within Magento is about six wazillion times cleaner than say, osCommerce, aka giant heap of outdated garbage and is without a doubt, one of the saddest representations of an open-source ‘community’ I have ever encountered. The fanboys and moderators on their forum are just beyond pathetic. But that’s a story for another day.

Anyway here are some resources to help those interested in theming Magento:


That should be more than enough to get people started.

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(related categories: e-commerce )

Comment

I am looking into new e-commerce solutions and saw your template for magento. Are you available to design a custom template for my website? Please call me on Monday or email back an answer. Thanks

Dave
808 779-7163

David Elliott // May 4, 04:17 PM · #

Very interesting, thank you for the post.

Altapills // May 14, 03:54 PM · #

i was wondering if you would be able to give me a rough quote for your services.

Neil Livingstone // May 20, 06:11 PM · #

Steve, Where did you find the theme examples above?

Stew

Stew // Jun 6, 09:16 AM · #

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