Magento newbie's adventures continue. Now that the basic steps are taken, he tries to create different types of products, struggles with static blocks, and installs extensions to simplify admin's life and modify checkout.
Episode 5: Product Trudge
Most of the time I followed the algorithm described in Episode 4 – created simple products, in order to stock my mock-up sandbox store. It is a googol of clicks in Magento, my right hand had a tough workout. I also diversified the category structure adding some more categories to «Suspension». That is an intuitive process.
Just click on the category you need, then on «Add subcategory» and follow the standard category creation tips. The only issue, if it is such, is the fact that all products that you assign to child categories are seen on the parent category page in a jumble. Although when you mouse over the parent category tab you see a nice drop-down of subcategories which you can navigate separately.
In order to punch myself out of the trance-like state caused by simple product creation I made a Grouped Product and here it is:
The thing I stumbled on was the tab “Associated Products” at the bottom of the tab list:
They have to be added if there is to be a grouped product. After you click on the tab “yes” must be replaced with “any”.
That will show the product list from which you add simple products to associated product. If you don't want the associated products to appear on frontend set their visibility to “not visible individually”, that was another thing I had to spar with for a couple of minutes.
Episode 6: A War On Static Blocks
Static blocks can give an online store a touch of uniqueness, make it visually appealing. On the screen shot there is a question sandwiched between the two misplaced pictures. “What is your favorite Magento feature? As a fetus in HTML, PHP, and other kinds of web design magic spells I can tell for sure now what is NOT my favorite: it is CMS drop-down with all its guru-level content dedicated to static blocks and page layout management. It is not guru on the surface, but just dare scratch it! More than two static blocks on one page? Go-a-learn-a-coding, kid. Or maybe the way to position them where you want is deeply hidden in the darkest corners of GUI menus. The whole day was occupied with trying to tame the Static Blocks. The bright side is that now I can even understand some words of code like “a href” or “img src”, but it will take some more time to do these blocks properly.
Episode 7: Static Blocks Cracked
Far from the Ideal Solution, i.e. page content management via blazing lines of pure fluent code, I still managed to subdue the rebel static blocks. I used CMS Widgets for that purpose. They allow to put more than one static block on one page via GUI and specify their place and order of appearance in the page layout so that the blocks you add don't caper all over the page like mad fleas. Nevertheless I faced some issues in the process, most notably with the image insertion procedure. The standard, Magento Manual recommended way is this:
In the window that opens:
It will take you to:
As the insert file button plainly refused to work, I had to drag-and-drop the picture icon into the Insert/edit window URL bar. That worked but not quite. What I got was just a lousy thumbnail in the WYWIWYG field instead of a high resolution image that I had uploaded. To fix this I hid the WYSIWYG and worked on the problem through this window:
I wouldn't say that WYSIWYG is really user-friendly, but somehow I managed it. Once the static blocks I needed were created I went to «Widgets» in CMS dropdown.
Adding a new one was surprisingly intuitive and smooth. The only tiny glitch was at the last step when I was red-prompted to specify the block after clicking «Save» -- no such opportunity during the process. The button «Layout Update» does the trick of specifying the page and neatly positioning the static block on it. I just chose what I needed.
Now my homepage looks much more orderly:
Episode 8: Bundles and Logos
Creating a bundle product takes really long. I made an emergency kit that consisted of nine simple products:
The process is quite intuitive. However, I would not recommend a Magento beginners to start their platform conquest with a complex product. Once you've created a dozen simple products and configured a grouped product some “intuition” naturally forms. Although the smoothness of the product creation was marred by my inability to add simple products images to the bundle product page, which to my mind is a serious drawback. Customers can see only prices within product selections, but when a price isn't associated with an image it is not easy to make a choice. I couldn't find the answer either in the manual or online.
Maybe this can be fixed with code but in a complex way.
One of the day's achievements was the change of the logo. In “System” → “Configuration” → “General/Design” there is “Logo image Src” box where the logo image is specified.
The location of my logo file was public_html/skin/frontend/default/car_store/images/logo.png. I downloaded it to my computer and used it as a template for the new logo.
The old logo:
The New logo:
Another thing that went almost smoothly was making a more car-relevant customer poll on the frontend. The only little glitch was that I had to retype zeros in the vote count boxes because otherwise the new poll wouldn't save, prompting to specify the vote numbers.
My overall conclusion is that the method of product management inherent to Magento has to be radically overhauled. It takes ages to create items for the frontend even in this mock-up situation. I dread to think of the plight of large online store admins who have to set up thousands of products. They have to be ambidextrous to switch mice from hand to hand lest they should develop a crippling muscle ailment.
A large part of Magento can be realistically explored only in live environment. Things like testing the effectiveness of your promotions or setting up PayPal seem to be not quite verifiable in the sandbox. What can be checked though is the effect of extensions on some basic features of Magento, which will hopefully be the final step of my Magento micro-Odyssey.
Episode 9: My Extended Magento
To touch, feel and taste the difference between some aspects of bare and extended Magento I chose three small but life-brightening modules by AITOC: One-Page Checkout Booster, E-mail Templates Manager and Enhanced Order Filter. The installation of the chosen modules was not what I expected. As I downloaded my packages from AITOC store, I first thought that I would have to strike this hard rock:
To me it looked very much like the old school Linux style installation limbo. As a degraded Ubuntu user I dread such things, though I am progressively learning to cast spells in the terminal. The reality though turned out to be much less severe. I easily installed all the three modules just following the instructions provided by PDF installation manuals enclosed in the module package folders. You basically just upload the archives, unpack them to Magento root folder, set proper permissions as specified in the manual, and then take a couple more steps in the Admin panel, again – as clearly specified in the manual. That's it.
The default checkout in Magento is notorious for its bulkiness. It takes six steps on six separate pages to reach the coveted “Place Order” button.
The rationale behind such a solution might have been quite noble – slow life, peaceful contemplation, but real customers tend to be in a hurry these days. This fact was taken into account by AITOC Magento developers when they wrought their variant of checkout.
In the drop-down menu above you have a choice of one-page checkout layouts, or you can even disable it in favor of the default one. For demonstration purposes I chose “Move Checkout to Cart”:
Looks much more observable, doesn't it?
The next one was E-mail Templates Manager. A great extension when it comes to optimizing customer communication efforts gathering all Magento e-mail templates under one tab and allowing easy access and ediding.
The extension also prevents your e-mail from being discarded as spam and the templates are editable.
The last extension I installed was Enhanced Order Filter. In my mock-up store it is of not much use but for those who own real e-tail operations with thousands of items in stock it is the small thing that kills the Devil.
The bare Magento “Orders” page under “Sales” tab looks like this:
It may be not quite easy to search for particular orders by Order number or customer name.
This is where a tiny touch means much:
Here we have just two more columns: Products and SKU, but it makes the search much more human-friendly.
Conclusion:
So, in spite of its grandeur as a platform, Magento can be made even more user friendly. My acquaintance with Magento has been a fascinating trip on the territories little known. It will take much more time to get to know Magento really well because it is an intersection of huge and dynamic fields of knowledge. Magento is where IT, Marketing and Business Management converge in their full might and glory. Kudos to Magento developers though. Apart from the setup of my host at the very beginning I didn't have to ask for any help from my AITOC colleagues. That means that the creation of a Magento store is quite manageable for a non-tech person, which is really cool taken into account the complexity of the platform. It doesn't imply though that I wouldn't cry for help if I were to set up a real store with all its inevitable real life particularities. I didn't set up all types of products possible in Magento, neither did I set up PayPal and mess with shipment and discount rules and many more. Magento is vast. Can't scoop it in one go.
Please don't hesitate to share your Magento novice and not so novice experiences in comments below.
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