Boost the speed of your Magento

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Magento @ 30th JUN 2008

One of the drawbacks of Magento is currently its speed if default configuration is used. There are certain ways of making it run faster. The best one is to enable GZip compression by changing .htaccess file a little. You just need to uncomment part of the code. In my case, the speed increase was exactly 235%.

Making and breaking the grid with “960 grid system”

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Tools @ 27th JUN 2008

There are millions of distinct designs on the web horizon. They all have more or less the styles on their own, like: 3D, cartoon, clean, dark, futuristic, geometric, grunge, minimalistic, retro, corporate, urban, vector, and many more. If we put out design diversity, most of them share the similar structure. They have header, menu, content area, sidebar or sidebars, footer, some secondary space and many more.

If you are one of those who developed HTML/CSS for every web from scratch, try to consider 960 Grid System and their demo page.

The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem.

Well, I just see it will work for me perfectly and will save me much time in the future.

Designer’s Guide to Magento PDF download

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Magento @ 6th JUN 2008

After many developed CRE Loaded’s online stores and watching Magento development progress for quite some time, I decided it was time to use Magento with my next client. My starting point for development was official Designer’s guide. I’m the type of guy who likes to have documents nice&clean, so I tried to print it but print was a mess. That’s when I decided to create PDF of the official documentation for easy print. This is probably the best starting tutorial for creating a fresh new Magento template.

Download Designer’s Guide to Magento PDF

I plan to write a short related tutorials in the days of 1st Magento development project, so I invite you to subscribe to RSS if you wish to be posted.

FancyBox - Fancy image zooming tool

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Tools @ 4th JUN 2008

There are many Lightbox clones this days. Some are fancier, some are lighter, some use jQuery, some do not. In this wast set of options, I found one I think I will prefer from today: FancyBox - fancy image zooming tool

It is based on jQuery and is a cool alternative to existing solutions. Here are some features:

• Automatically scales large images to fit in window
• Adds a nice drop shadow under the zoomed item
• Groups related items and adds navigation through them (uses preloading)
• Can display images, inline and iframed content
• Customizable through settings and CSS

Other Lightbox alternatives I found are:

• Lightview
• prettyPhoto
• Slimbox
• Highslide
• LightWindow
• Thickbox
• and many more; full comparison can be found at The Lightbox Clones Matrix