I’ve finally released my first Magento website, and it proves to be a  real SEO winner (100% increase in visits after 2 weeks). RuedeSiam is a furniture importer based in Brittany. Now you know why I bothered comparing commercial and opensource Flash based zoomers : Rue de Siam’s website site features an implementation of image  a flash based zoom within a prototype lightbox gallery  (check out this one) . Interesting too is the specific template for the “At your home” showcase category that uses products with  specific layout. Magento is really great for customising layouts, I suppose that’s partly a big feature of Zend Framework expressed at its best. One technique I used a lot is the css based text over image transparency effect that I detailed a while ago for Wordpress on this blog. Works fine with Magento images categories except that the background image really has to be adjusted perfectly so I used phpthumbs instead of Magento’s resizing helpers that seemed to complicated to understand at first.   I’ve also covered  various development challenges that I shared on this blog during the development :

• products special display on home page,
• display new product icon on product list
• how to display products from other categories on the product view page

And a few tips :

• Display custom attributes on product page
• Magento static blocks display

One advice : once you’re running a Magento production web site, be careful with upgrades. The Sales extension did not work with 1.3.0 on my development server and I’m sticking to 1.2.x for the moment.

Remember Wikipedia’s table of content, that creates anchors and links automatically from page titles : we’ve enjoyed the feature on MODX CMS, an old but still efficient opensource content management system for PHP / Mysql. Two plugins are available for this software, free of course :  The Automatic Page TOC Generator plugin and the  Automatic TOC and Navbar work the same way, via a simple process that parses H1 .. H6 tags, takes HTML within, builds the table of content, and  inserts the generated table of contents anywhere in your template. Many options are available that can specify explicitly the area to be indexed or put a navbar before the heading to get bazck up to the top of the page. The result can be as shown above on the ausoleilbreton.com web site (work in progress).

Showcase your site on webmasterbulletin

If you’re in the business of creating stunning websites powered by efficient opensource or commercial CMS, let the world know : submit your work for review at webmasterbulletin showcase !!

Today’s showcase : 4 seasons

4 Seasons Entertainment & Events has been bringing life to many major events in Dubai, U.A.E for over a decade. 4 Seasons delivers results, time and again. We pride ourselves to be one of the few agencies that renders 360 solutions for any type of event. All our resources are in-house, giving us the flexibility to support any event from small internal meetings to large conference and awards dinners or product launches with efficiency and precision.

Link : 4 Seasons Entertainment

WordPress allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with many outstanding features. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users, who have created a large and diverse collection of plug-ins.

The book starts by looking at the important features that make a successful business blog: adding value to products and services, providing proper customer service and support, driving traffic to a website, and so on. It then shows how to implement these features in WordPress.

This book will teach users to deal with using WordPress and third-party tools to manage and optimize their blog, focusing on the business aspects of blogging. Bloggers will learn to mange the content including images and videos, which will make their blog more appealing. They will also learn how to market and measure the success of their blog using Google web applications and other popular tools.

Anyone interested in running or starting a business blog using WordPress will find this book useful. The book is out now and is available from Packt. For more information, please visit http://www.packtpub.com/wordpress-for-business-bloggers/book

Oxford hotel in Timisoara have built a perfect single page site that mimics multiple page navigation with the use of a mootols fx slide effect that’s becoming more popular than ever : just build divs contained in a single HTML page and a light user interface replaces the usual multi page navigation that can discourages users. via Smashing Magazine.

The Foozoo design studio blog does not display images on its front page : black and white is the color of sobriety. Inside pages will feature, obviously, images, plus a nice soft blue font that highlights margins and  Based on the very simple Hemingway-19 theme for wordpress, Foozoo adds a few very interesting plugins. Most interesting is the WP-cumulus plugin that transforms the original tag cloud to a real Flash based sphere with mouse 3D effect.

Used by many news portals, the technique above is a great example of how to optimize layout of breaking news. We have gone the simple way with the image above, using a combination of Photoshop layers over a background image. The way it is implemented for Wordpress platform by Derek Punsalan illustrates the power of wordpress custom fields, and also the limits of this input system. We would like to have image custom input fields, such as file browser or color selector. The popular custom field GUI plugin handles select, checkboxes and radio buttons but would require extensions to handle more advanced input types. There is hack on Wordpress forums for that plugin  that handles Wysiwyg fields, but I would not expect it to be maintained over future versions of Wordpress. The “More Fields” Plugin is a bit more flexible and is worth having a look at too.