Benefits and Best Practices for Upgrading to Magento Enterprise Edition 1.13

In this webinar, the Magento team will cover:

• Key features of 1.13 that drive business results
• Advantages of upgrading
• Upgrade process best practices


Date: May 29, 2013 I 9:00 am (PDT)

Presenters:

Udi Shamay, Department Head, Expert Consulting Group
Baruch Toledano, Director, Product Management





---

Read the full article at: SenchaCon 2013: Live Like a Rock Star

Related Posts:

• 10 Vintage Photoshop Tutorials
• 10 Must Have Free Retro Fonts
• 10 Websites with Vintage Inspired Designs
• 20 Beautiful FREE Ribbon Elements For Your Website
• 10 Free Navigation Menu Icon Sets

Read the full article at: CSS content and attr

Related Posts:

• 10 Free PSD Forms Files
• Top 10 WordPress Form Plugins
• Top 20 Free PSD UI Kits for Designers
• Top 20+ Free PSD Buttons
• 10 Awesome jQuery Tutorials

Making your website ready for Retina display doesn’t have to be a hassle. Whether you are building a new website or upgrading an existing one, this guide is designed to help you get the job done smoothly.

Make it Retina First

The easiest and most time-saving way to add Retina support is to create one image that is optimized for Retina devices, and serve it to non-Retina devices as well.

By now, every modern browser uses bicubic resampling and does a great job with downsampling images. Here’s a comparison of downsampling in Photoshop vs. Google Chrome, using an image from our Growth Engineering 101 website.

There are two ways to let the browser downsample images for you: img tags or CSS background images.

You can have img tags serve the Retina-optimized image, and set the width and height attributes to half of the resolution of the actual image (e.g. 400×300 if the image dimensions are 800×600).

<img src="http://www.example.com/Retina-image-800x600-2x.png" width="400" height="300">

If you use images as CSS backgrounds, you may use the CSS3 background-size property to downsample the image for non-Retina devices.

<div class="photo"></div>

.photo {
    background-image: url(Retina-image-800x600-2x.png);
    background-size: 400px 300px;
    background-repeat: no-repeat;
    display: block;
    width: 400px;
    height: 300px;
}

In both cases, be sure to use even numbers in both dimensions to prevent displacement of pixels when the image is being downsampled by the browser.

When Downsampling is Not Good Enough

Usually, browser downsampling should work quite well. That said, there are some situations where downsampling in the browser might make images blurry.

Here we have a bunch of 32px social icons.

And here is how they will appear, when downsampled to 16px by Photoshop’s as well as Google Chrome’s bicubic filter. It seems that we get better results from Photoshop in this case.

To get the best results for our users, we can create two versions of the same image: one for Retina devices, and another one that has been downsampled by Photoshop for non-Retina devices.

Now, you can use CSS media queries to serve Retina or non-Retina images, dependent upon the pixel density of the device.

/* CSS for devices with normal screens */
.icons {
    background-image: url(icon-sprite.png);
    background-repeat: no-repeat;
}

/* CSS for high-resolution devices */
@media only screen and (-Webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5),
only screen and (-moz-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5),
only screen and (-o-min-device-pixel-ratio: 3/2),
only screen and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5) {
    .icons {
        background-image: url(icon-sprite-2x.png);
        background-size: 200px 100px;
        background-repeat: no-repeat;
    }
}

If you use a background color for small icons, on the other hand, downsampling by the browser works rather well. Here is the same downsampling example with a white background.

Polishing Your Downsampled Images

If you’re still not satisfied with the results from Photoshop’s downsampling, you can go the extra mile and hand-optimize the non-Retina version to get super crisp results.

Below are some examples of images from the Blossom product website that I hand-optimized for those who are still on non-Retina devices.

Borders and Strokes

Here’s an example of downsampling issues with hairlines, where I re-draw the lines of the downsampled image.

View the Retina Version of this Image on Dribbble.

Text

Next, we come to an example of downsampling issues with text. In this case, I manually re-wrote the text “Feature Pipeline” to make the result as crisp as possible.

Retina Version

When details, crisp fonts, and clean hairlines are important, you might want to go the extra mile.

Try to Avoid Images

The main disadvantages of rasterized images are their considerable file size and that they don’t scale well to different sizes without affecting the image quality. Great alternatives to rasterized graphics are CSS, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), and Icon Fonts.

If you have any chance to build the graphical elements for your website in CSS, go for it. It can be used to add gradients, borders, rounded corners, shadows, arrows, rotate elements and much more.

Here are a few examples of interaction elements in Blossom that are implemented in CSS. The subtle gradient is powered by CSS gradients, and the custom font in use on this button is Kievit, served via Typekit. No images.

In the following screenshot, the only two images used are the user avatar and the blue stamp. Everything else – the circled question mark, the dark grey arrow next to it, the popover, its shadow and the arrow on top of it – is pure HTML and CSS.

Here, you can see how projects in Blossom appear. It’s a screenshot of a project’s website used as cover on a stack of paper sheets. The paper sheets are implemented with divs that are rotated using CSS.

Also, the circled arrow in the right-hand side of the screenshot below is pure CSS.

Tools

Here are some awesome tools that will help save time when creating effects with CSS.

• CSS Generator: Cross browser CSS3 syntax by @RandyJensen.
• CSS Arrows: CSS for tooltip arrows by @ShojBerg.
• Generating CSS for Sprites: Sprite Cow helps you get the background-position, width and height of sprites within a spritesheet as a nice bit of copyable css. It’s built by TheTeam, and is a real time saver – definitely worth a try.

The primary advantage to SVG is that, unlike rasterized graphics, they scale reasonably well to various sizes. If you’re working with simple shapes, they typically are smaller than PNGs. Often, they are used for things like charts.

Icon Fonts are frequently used as a replacement for image sprites. Similar to SVG, they can be scaled up infinitely without any loss of quality and are usually smaller in size, when compared to image sprites. On top of that, you can use CSS to change their size, color and even add effects, such as shadows.

Both SVG and Icon Fonts are well supported by modern browsers.

Retina-Ready Favicons

Favicons are really important for users who need an easy way to remember which website belongs to which browser tab. A Retina-ready Favicon will not only be easier to identify, but it will also stand out among a crowd of pixelated Favicons that haven’t yet been optimized.

To make your Favicon Retina-ready, I highly recommend X-Icon Editor. You can either upload a single image and let the editor resize it for different dimensions, or you can upload separate images optimized for each size to get the best results.

How to Make Existing Images Retina-Ready

If you want to upgrade a website with existing images, a bit more work is required, as you’ll need to re-create all images to make them Retina-ready, but this doesn’t have to waste too much time.

First, attempt to identify images that you can avoid by using alternatives like CSS, SVG and Image Fonts, as noted previously. Buttons, Icons and other common UI widgets usually can be replaced with modern solutions that don’t require any images.

In case you actually need to re-create rasterized images, you’ll of course want to return to the source files. As you might assume, simply resizing your rasterized bitmap images to be twice as big doesn’t get the job done, because all of the details and borders will become pixelated.

No need to despair – image compositions which mostly contain vectors (i.e. in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator) are quite easy to scale up. That said, don’t forget to verify if your Photoshop effects in the blending options, such as strokes, shadows and bevels, still appear as you intended.

In general, making Photoshop compositions directly out of vectors (shapes) and Photoshop’s Smart Objects will save you a great deal of time in the future.

How to Optimize the File Size of Images

Last, but not least, optimizing the file size of all images in an application or website could effectively save up to 90% of image loading times. When it comes to Retina images, the file size reduction gets even more important, as they have a higher pixel density that will increase their respective file sizes.

In Photoshop, you can optimize the image file size, via the “Save for Web” feature. On top of that, there is an excellent free tool, called ImageAlpha, which can reduce the size of your images even more with just a minor loss of quality.

Unlike Photoshop, ImageApha can convert 24-bit alpha channel PNGs to 8-bit PNGs with alpha channel support. The icing on the cake is that these optimized images are cross-browser compatible and even work for IE6!

You can play around with different settings in ImageAlpha to get the right trade-off between quality and file size. In the case below, we can reduce the file size by nearly 80%.

When you’re finished setting your desired compression levels, ImageAlpha’s save dialog also offers to “Optimize with ImageOptim” – another great and free tool.

ImageOptim automatically picks the best compression options for your image and removes unnecessary meta information and color profiles. In the case of our stamp file, ImageOptim was able to reduce the file size by another 34%.

After we updated all assets at Blossom.io for high resolution displays and used ImageAlpha and ImageOptim to optimize the file size, we actually ended up saving a few kilobytes in comparison to the assets we had before.

Save Time, Read This Book

If you want to learn more about how to get your apps and websites ready for Retina displays, I highly recommend “Retinafy your web sites & apps”, by Thomas Fuchs. It’s a straight-forward step by step guide that saved me a lot of time and nerves.

Awesome Retina-Ready Sites on the Web

http://kickoffapp.com/

http://www.layervault.com

http://www.apple.com

http://www.panic.com

Thanks for reading! Any questions?

Magento welcomes WebShopApps as the newest Platinum Industry Partner. Established in 2008 and a Gold Industry Partner since 2011, WebShopApps has been a consistent, innovative leader in the development of eCommerce shipping solutions, with their products in use on a large number of sites worldwide. Because of their success in the Magento community, they have been hand selected to join as a Platinum Industry Partner.

“We’re truly honored to be a Platinum partner of Magento’s and feel this speaks to our years of dedicated work within the Magento community,” says WebShopApps owner Karen Baker. “But it’s also a direct reflection of the support and loyalty we’ve received from the many thousands of merchants who have utilized our products over the years. Our sincere thanks and appreciation goes out to each and every one of them.”

WebShopApps has marketed over 40 advanced shipping extensions to date, and they show no signs of slowing down in 2013. At this year's Magento Imagine eCommerce Conference, WebShopApps announced a partnership with the logistics company Cerasis on a new freight shipping extension, and also demonstrated an all-in-one, cloud-based shipping interface called ShipperHQ.

Visit WebShopApps at www.WebShopApps.com

Or learn more about ShipperHQ at http://www.ShipperHQ.com

Like most content management systems, PyroCMS uses front-end themes. Though PyroCMS themes are built a bit differently than what you might be used to from other systems, they’re still quite easy to create. They’re so easy, in fact, that very little PHP experience is required to assemble them!

The Folder Structure

PyroCMS themes consist of HTML, images, CSS, and JavaScript, arranged into the following supported folders:

• css
• img
• js
• views
• views/layouts
• views/partials
• views/modules

While these folders will no doubt look familiar to you, the "views" folder makes the most sense within the context of MVC. When building a theme for PyroCMS, you are really building the views (including assets) of a MVC patterned application. These views consist of a master layout file and multiple partial files (i.e. a header.html or footer.html) that shares presentation logic between different layouts. We’ll discuss this more shortly.

Getting Started

To get started building your first PyroCMS theme, create the supported folder structure in one of the two places that themes may reside within an instance of PyroCMS:

addons/shared_addons/themes (for themes available to all sites)

Or:

addons/[site-name]/themes (for themes available to only one specific site)

Once you have the base theme folder containing the supported folder structure created, the first file that you'll want to add to your theme is theme.php.

addons/shared_addons/themes/[my-theme-name]/theme.php

This theme.php file contains all essential details for your theme, including its name, author, version, etc. In a way, this file is similar to the comment block found at the top of a WordPress theme's style.css file. Here’s a basic example of a theme.php file for your PyroCMS theme:

<?php defined('BASEPATH') OR exit('No direct script access allowed');

class Theme_Foo extends Theme
{
    public $name = 'Foo';
    public $author = 'Zac Vineyard';
    public $author_website = 'http://zacvineyard.com';
    public $website = 'http://example.com/themes/foo';
    public $description = 'The antithesis theme to your Bar theme.';
    public $version = '1.0';
}

 /* End of file theme.php */

Please take note that this file extends a PyroCMS class, called Theme. Also, because you are declaring a PHP class in this file, you'll need to make sure that the name of the folder containing your theme is used in the class declaration. So, if the folder housing your theme is called, "foo," the class created in your theme.php should be named, Theme_Foo (instead of Theme_Custom, as shown in the example within PyroCMS' documentation).

Once you have created your theme.php file, you can login to your PyroCMS control panel and view your theme listed in the Themes module.

Layouts

All layouts files for a PyroCMS theme exist in one of two locations:

addons/[site-ref]/themes/[my-theme-name]/views/layouts/

Or:

addons/shared_addons/themes/[my-theme-name]/views/layouts/

Every theme should have a layout file, named "default.html" in one of the locations listed above. Additional layout files are optional; I'll show you how to add more layout files in a moment. First, it’s important to review the contents of a layout file.

Layout files in PyroCMS are built using HTML and a tag parser, referred to as the Lex Tag Parser. This is what a very basic PyroCMS layout file looks like:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>{{ template:title }}</title>
    {{ template:metadata }}
</head>
<body>
    <h1>{{ template:title }}</h1>
    {{ template:body }}
</body>
</html>

The special tags you see in this bit of HTML are Lex parser tags. If you've ever used Smarty templates in PHP, these may look somewhat familiar. The primary benefit to using Lex parser tags in your layout files is that you don't have to put PHP directly in your views (remember, we're using MVC), which gives you the best chance of creating PyroCMS themes that follow the don’t repeat yourself pattern.

The example that I've given above is simple, of course, but Lex parser tags are quite powerful. They can loop through data, work with attributes, and more. Learn more about the Lex Parser in the PyroCMS documentation.

A more complex PyroCMS layout file looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>{{ template:title }}</title>
    {{ template:metadata }}
    {{ theme:favicon file="favicon.png" }}
    {{ theme:css file="style.css" }}
    {{ theme:js file="site.js" }}
</head>
<body>
    <div class="header">
        <div class="logo">
            {{ theme:image file="logo.jpg" alt="Your Cool Logo" }}
        </div>
        <div class="nav">
            {{ navigation:links group="header" }}
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="content">
        <h1>{{ template:title }}</h1>
        {{ template:body }}
    </div>
</body>
</html>

You'll notice that this layout file, using Lex, includes assets, like CSS, JavaScript, and images. Using Lex tags and HTML allows PyroCMS developers to build layout files very quickly.

Partials

Partials in PyroCMS, which stands for partial layouts, allows you to break layouts into reusable parts or sections. These sections can then be loaded by different layout files. This keeps you from typing the same code (header, footer, etc.) into multiple layout files.

Depending on where you've placed your theme files, partials are created in one of two locations:

addons/[site-ref]/themes/[my-theme-name]/views/partials/

Or:

addons/shared_addons/themes/[my-theme-name]/views/partials/

Partials are loaded into layouts using this Lex tag:

{{ theme:partial name="partialname" }}

This Lex tag operates exactly like a PHP include statement – similar to one that you would find in WordPress or other themes. The code below is a simple example of a PyroCMS layout that takes advantage of partials.

{{ theme:partial name="header" }}

    <div class="content">
        <h1>{{ template:title }}</h1>
        {{ template:body }}
    </div>

{{ theme:partial name="footer" }}

The contents of the header.html partial and footer.html files are, of course, the HTML we'll need to reuse from the template in our previous code example above. One quick pointer: there is no limit to the number of partials that you can use in one layout. Additionally, partial files may contain any combination of valid HTML and Lex.

Multiple Layout Files

To add another layout to your instance of PyroCMS, create one more layout file in your theme's views/layouts/ directory. This file may receive any name, but it’s a good idea to name it as descriptively as possible – like about.html.

For added flexibility, you can make use of as many layout files as you'd like. When you edit or create a Page Type in your PyroCMS control panel (Control Panel→Pages→Page Types) and select your desired file from the dropdown, all the layouts in your theme's layout file will be available to use.

Mobile Layouts

PyroCMS is able to easily display separate layouts for mobile and desktops. To use this feature, move your layout files into a folder, called "web" within the views folder, so that your default layout will be located here:

[your-theme]/views/web/layouts/default.html

When a user accesses your site using a desktop browser, the primary layout files in this location will be used. If the user accesses your site using a mobile device browser, users will be supplied with the mobile layouts that you've created in this location:

[your-theme]/views/mobile/layouts/default.html

This feature works with multiple layout files.

Please take note of this warning found in the PyroCMS documentation: "PyroCMS does not consider the iPad a mobile device, so it will not load your mobile layouts if the user is accessing your site using an iPad." If, however, on your site, you'd like to make an iPad recognized as a mobile device, you can change the "user_agent.php" file within the config/ directory to make the iPad recognized a mobile device.

Finished!

Using this article as a guide, you can see how easy it is to create a theme in PyroCMS. The code examples provided are quite simple, so I encourage you to explore the PyroCMS documentation to become more experienced with layouts, mobile layouts, partials, and the Lex Parser in PyroCMS. Have fun!

Read the full article at: Mighty Deals: WordPress Shortcodes Plugin + 3 Premium WP Themes

Related Posts:

• 10+ Awesome jQuery and HTML5 Audio Players
• 10 Excellent WordPress Video Players
• 10 Great Premium Video Plugins for WordPress
• 10 Beautiful WordPress Music Themes
• 10 Cool Music Websites to Inspire You