The power of Magento is great but it requires long days of learning and suffering to get through relative simple features, such as the now common front page slide banner. I had a quick look at magento free templates on google and was conquered by Magento ’s classic theme, the kind of  stuff that’s really given free of charge when I would have paid for it. It actually comes with an interesting development of Magento’s block systems, and demonstrates how to add a custom block between navigation and content : the prototype glider that scrolls images is defined a cms static block, which is then called in the home page CMS  custom xml definition, with a reference to the slider block that’s positionned in phtml files and declared in the xml layouts as a core/text_list type . Impressive stuff : that’s pure  magento design and illustrates how versatile the system is.

Links : 25 free templates for Magento

After the Mega Drop down menu comes the sroll drop down menu, a solution for long choices display dilemna : Make menu scroll up and down as you mouse through it. http://css-tricks.com/examples/LongDropdowns//

A quick code snippet that uses a Zend form (in the case below, with subforms) to generate a SQL table create statement. Useful for scaffolding : create your form with Zend Form Elements then the SQL table automatically.

One decisive sign that some contributors can make a change is the sincere thankyou they openly receive from community members: silverstripe’s UncleCheese certainly deserves the thankyou’s he’s getting from Silvesrtripe users that obviously benefit from the amazing Data Object Manager  modules , that also include the  innovative image gallery manager from which I kept the idea of my own jquery drag and drop image manager. UncleCheese’s latest innovation is the nested object manager, which deals with 1 to n relation ships in one of the most user friendly ways, as Silverstripe likes it :

Magento, in earlier versions, does not seem to handle log cleaning very well. A lot of configuration options are vailable under the configuration  / Advanced / System menu, that seem to have an impact on the cron.php process. But trying to remove logs this way is a complicated task that involves full log counting (select count on mage_log_visitor) and the result is not always there, don’t know why. A full truncate on log tables seems more appropriate, as described on the knowledge base, to use with caution obviously : Magento Maintenance Script was posted a few days ago but I tried it and it’s pretty efficient. Let us know how it performed on your install, on mine it works well. Go ahead after you’ve performed the appropriate backups !