Wordpress and Magento Development

Nov11

Digging into Wordpress: Book Released

The much-anticipated book about the ins and outs of Wordpress is finally here. Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr released Digging into Wordpress today. Currently, the PDF version is available for immediate download for $27.

I suggest you pick up this book if you’re new to Wordpress or if you’ve been using it for a while. Chris is great at explaining how web-related concepts work at CSS Tricks. He joins Jeff Star in this project, and the professionalism in the product is stunning.

Oct16

Magento: Beginner’s Guide (Book Review)

I have been humbled by the good people at Packt Publishing. For some reason they think I’m an authority, so they decided to let me review one of their new books, Magento: Beginner’s Guide, written by William Rice.

If you’re not familiar, Magento is a fresh and promising ecommerce solution. A leading feature of the software is the core is 100% open source. Of course there are many plugins, themes and other customization features which range in price from the altruistic ‘free’ to the enterprising ‘thousands of dollars’. But in the end, if you’re looking for a robust ecommerce solution and aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty, look no further than Magento Commerce.

This is a hefty book, weighing in at 300 pages. I’ve read the official Magento User Guide, and although it is informative, I feel that it is somewhat dry. I’m eager to flip through the ebook they sent me to see if there are any ‘between the lines’ tips and tricks to liven up a Magento project I’m working on.

Jan28

FireScope: The SitePoint Reference Tool for Firebug

SitePoint has released FireScope, a browser plugin for Firefox that puts an HTML and CSS reference only a click away.

After installation, just do the typical ‘inspect element’ action and you’ll see the new ‘Reference’ tab. Click the tab and you’ll see information about the element you chose plus any attributes that are defined for that element. You’ll see information about the element, what browsers support it, and a ‘more’ link to the reference section on SitePoint’s website.

I have always respected SitePoint for being a leader in almost everything related to web development. They have published books on a wide variety of internet technologies and continually push out new content. I’m sure this new plugin will help spread their knowledge to more web developers.