Overview of Complex Products

Right out of the box, Magento provides several built-in product types that allow you to accommodate many of the most common products a merchant would sell without much customization.

If you’ve never sold products on the Web, the terminology and concepts may be a bit overwhelming despite its true simplicity.

This article attempts to breakdown the complex product type, one of the most customizable and widely used product types used in Magento stores, to give you a fundamental understanding of creating and managing products.

You can view the complete article on using products with Magento here

Building a custom theme for a Magento ecommerce site can be an incredibly frustrating task for beginners, but with a basic understanding of the template and layout system you can start skinning a site in no time. To build a basic theme in Magento, you will need to have a knowledge of three elements of the system – “skins,” “templates,” and “layouts.” These terms may seem interchangable, but you will learn that in Magento each plays a very specific role in how the application builds what is sent to the browser.

You can view the complete article here

When adding products to a Magento store, many times you will have different variants of one product each of which you wish to track inventory for. Magento provides a way to do this using configurable products. Setting up configurable products in Magento can be a frustrating task for beginners, since there are so many steps involved, so this tutorial breaks it down in the three basic steps:

1. Create the product attributes
2. Create an attribute set
3. Create the configurable product

See the full tutorial here

http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base

Creating a Configurable Product In Magento

There are a few steps involved:

1. Create the attributes that will be configurable by the user – for our example they will be Size and Color
2. Create the attribute set that will be assigned to the variant products – for our example, we’ll call it “T-shirt”
3. Create the individual variant products
4. Create the configurable product, and add the “T-shirt” attribute set

Read the full tutorial here:-

http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/tutorial-creating-a-configurable-product

Add the individual variants to this configurable product

Web designers are jumping from one trend onto the next. The utilization of icons in design work isn’t anything new. However with more designers offering free downloads we can see the increase in interfaces and navigation menus everywhere. Check out the set of 20 fresh icons below as we move into Autumn of 2011.

http://dzineblog.com/20-fresh-icon-sets-for-web-designers-in-fall-2011.html

Adding a leaf symbol in your logo design can represent different aspects about your business. A leaf symbol is used in a logo to represent life, greenery, purity and freshness.

http://naturelogos.blogspot.com/2011/10/30-inspired-leaf-logo-designs.html

A quick video tutorial on setting up different options for a product, in this example we have a t-shirt which we give four different colour options (or attributes)

http://youtu.be/DK6LIBBxepk

I ran into a bit of bother installing it on my usual hosting package with Fasthosts, but quickly set up a a test domain on another of my chosen (now becoming favourite) hosting providers – www.vidahost.com. More about hosting options another time.

My luck on the Magento community forums has felt a bit hit and miss, sometimes finding out the info I need, sometimes just simply finding other people asking similar questions but with no replies

So, as I build and test out my new Magento site, any decent tutorials I find I will be posting here. Today I will be looking into the best way of having products with options (such as colour) available as a stock controllable product. It appears easy to add options to a “simple” product, but you can not control stock that way (which I need to on the particular site I am working on).

The way to do it is to create a “configurable product” in Magento – so Im off now to find some decent tuts on the subject!