Magento 1.4 Themes Design was written by Richard Carter and published by Packt Publishing. It was published in January of this year (2011). I read the eBook copy, so I have not yet been able to look at the paper copy, but if it is like every other book published by Packt, there’s not much to complain about.

This book is geared towards beginners looking to get their hands dirty with theming Magento, and understanding how it works. If you are only used to theming applications like WordPress or ZenCart, you will find Magento very difficult. Magento doesn’t just use template files. Magento is much more like a framework, and should be considered as such. They have implemented a powerful system of blocks, layout xml, and template files. The concept can be difficult to wrap your head around, and that’s where this book can really help you get started.

You’ll find the book very well organized, and the author does an amazing job explaining concepts without rambling on forever. There are many occasions where a link to a article (mostly wiki articles on Magento’s site) that better explains the concept in detail, which is nice as it doesn’t clog up the book, and allows you to choose to explore the concept further or not.

Tim Schulz has announced that later today we can expect roll out of the new Magento Connect design. The long anticipated features of a project code named “MagentoConnect 2.0″ will not be implemented today. The new design which we’ll be able to see today will be a starting point and a new layout that will one day have the MagentoConnect 2.0 features. Magento Connect now has a new logo and a new tagline.

Magento custom designed gallery plugin contains two modules.
You can guess, one is for displaying images on frontend and second one is for handling images and categories in backend.

I will not write too much about this modules because there are too much files and it will take too much time to describe.
Most of things used in this modules are already described by my working colleagues.

Backend module is based on interface for adding images of products in magento shop.
When you integrate it into your shop it will install two additional custom tables in database which will store data of your gallery (categories and images)

This blog post describes pros and cons of having a free Magento theme versus having a custom Magento design from a marketing perspective.

Free Magento Themes:

There are some pretty obvious advantages of using a free Magento theme:

• It’s free. – This one is a no-brainer, you don’t need to invest any money in it.
• It’s fast. – You don’t need to wait for it to be finished, you just download it and use it.
• It works. – Most of the free Magento themes work just fine with Magento out of the box.

However, truth be told, I believe the cons of having a free Magento theme give you enough reason to go for custom design: