Glad to hear you’ll be popping over to the support forums. See you over there.

Cheers,
Matty.

Also, thanks for bringing to my attention this really good point. I feel a certain amount of responsibility to give back to a community that gives so freely (for the most part). I will definitely try and help out a few folks at the support forum as a result of this.

Yeah man, the Codex is a great starting point for theme and plugin developers alike. The code sections aren’t necessarily the kind of resource that Wordpress users who don’t code can really get into and find solutions in though. Often, the solution is required as soon as possible and the user doesn’t have the time to a) learn the code and b) find the solution in that code. As great a resource as it is, as you said, pasting the link isn’t always the solution.

P.S Nice to see my RSS feed is working.

I know what you mean mate, tons of questions and so very few answers, regardless of the level of difficulty and it’s most often the easy questions where someone has simply dropped a link to the codex, which is really annoying!

I try to help out where I can and think after this post I’ll do so more often, because I like to ask questions there too.

I usually start as I would when building a website for any other CMS, which is by building the static XHTML/CSS first. From there, I setup my code within either a custom interface (with a copy of the default theme in it) or in the default interface and I begin slowly migrating my code over to Magento. From there, because I have the default theme in place, all templates and layout XML files can be easily found from the default theme. From there, I slowly customise any templates for any modules that require specific customisation. Once I’m done with that, I copy and paste the unmodified templates and layout XML files from the default theme into my custom theme.

At this point it’s probably a good idea that I mention that its a very good idea to keep a note of all files you modify in the template and layout folders… so you don’t overwrite your customisations by accident.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,
Matt.

Do you start with the blank, default or from scratch when developing a new site?

Patiently waiting for part 04

Are there any areas in particular which you would like me to discuss in Part 04?

Kind regards,
Matty.

I don’t think using ‘init‘ or ‘admin-init‘ makes much of a difference. It means it’ll either run on init only when in the admin area or on init in general. Either way, init happens and the function doesn’t seem very intensive. Using ‘admin-init‘ could possibly increase front-end performance though, as the function would not be running on the front-end. Not sure if the performance difference would be noticeable though.

It looks, to me, like it’s a case of 6 of 1 or half a dozen of the other. Using either method, the function will run at the init stage.

Thanks for the link and quote. I find the Wordpress codex to be a useful resource which I use regularly.

Cheers,
Matt.