Hi all,
I'm new to Magento world. I've been working in web development for a single company for quite a while now and we have decided to move towards selling online (as opposed to just showcasing and quoting on our products) with Magento.
I don't know how typical my use case is. We are quite a small, family-run business and I have been looking after the websites (we have more than one) and other general IT duties. There are several aspects to our business but the one we are initially looking to move onto Magento is our personalised Workwear and equipment section. If this proves successful then we will look at adopting Magento for other areas of the business as well.
I would describe myself as proficient in HTML, CSS (and SASS, but learning LESS now as well..!), PHP, MySql and Javascript but with little experience using a complex infrastructure like Magento. As such, just learning how Magento works under the hood is quite a challenge.
We are looking to use a lightly customised version of the Luma theme initially. Creating a new theme and css that extends the Luma theme is straightforward enough but one request I've had will require changing the layout of the product page slightly. I've gone through the Dev Docs and, although each part seems to make sense, I've not had the 'a-ha!' moment when it clicks how everything quite fits together. So, that's what I'm working on now and will probably have to post a couple of questions in the forums to clarify a few things.
Also, I have been looking at the sample data is displayed and have a couple of questions about how that is handled. For example the top level categories show static blocks instead of products but rather than selecting the cms block in the content settings for the relevant category, widgets are used that select the cms block and the category for it to appear on. Is this standard practice? Is it so that it is easier to apply a cms block to multiple categories in one go (despite there being one per category in this case)?
Essentially what I was going to do was create cms blocks for top level categories, add them via the 'Add cms block' dropdown on the relevant category page and then create an extra css file which would be linked to by editing the default_head_blocks.xml file.
Is there anything obviously wrong with that approach?
I'll ask other questions in the relevant parts of the forum as and when I get onto them.
Thanks for your time,
James
