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.

Many developers and store owners don’t like to use images as buttons simply because they do not wish their users to wait until the images load. Image buttons gives the flexibility to display images as per store’s requirement but these days lots and lots of stores are opting to create CSS image buttons rather than image buttons. With a very little tweak you can get rid of image buttons in your theme and switch to CSS buttons. If you are willing to change your image buttons to CSS powered buttons then follow the steps given below:

Take a nice background image which is blank and nothing written on it. We will use this background image to generate text over it. Basically, if you follow CSS buttons you don’t have to create separate images for each button. Download the background image given below for an example (you can create your own image background).

In your theme template you will find various instances where you have to change image button to CSS button. For an example we will take “Proceed to Checkout” button code app/design/frontend/default/Your_theme/template/checkout/onepage/link.phtml

By default you will see something like this (if you are using default theme)

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:

Its not difficult to install new magento themes,  but many of the people confused about setting default magento theme.

First – Let me explain, How to set any new theme as default theme.

e.g   The directory structure for magento templates and layout is  “app/design/frontend/” then there is package name “default” or “blank” or “anything you have as package ”

You can set this package from admin panel

System -> Configuration -> Design -> Package.

(In magento there is “default” so leave it as it is if your package is “default”)

Now in our product we provide theme for default package so you do not have to change package, you just have to set theme.