Practical Action Publishing approached FLUID7 to redesign their Development Bookshop. It was an exciting opportunity to move them off of an ageing OSCommerce site and into a shiny new Magento instal. To really spice things up we wanted to connect their shop with their book management software, Booksonix. Creating a slick solution that pulls new and updated titles from Booksonix into Magento automatically, cutting out the need for the team to manage titles in both applications independently.

You can check out the new bookshop here: http://developmentbookshop.com/

Redesigning the Bookshop

The new design pulled in core styles that had been created for the recent group site redesign for Practical Action. Presenting enough similarities in the layout and navigation to enhance the group connections, whilst also creating a unique colour scheme and content elements that would let it stand out from the group and allow it to stand alongside its bookshop peers.

The Magento store offers Practical Action Publishing a firm ecommerce platform to promote and distribute their titles from. It includes specific listings for each of the publishers that they sell titles on behalf of, such as Oxfam. Not only can titles be viewed exclusively by Publisher but standard category listings can also be filtered by publisher allowing the visitor to navigate the site in a number of different ways, to find the titles of interest.

With the designs in place we turned our attention to the build. Anyone working with Magento knows it’s a real beast to wresstle, but once tamed yeilds exceptional results. After developing a number of Magento sites for our clients we’ve already overcome the hosting issues. Magento is very large and requires a hefty server to allow it to run quickly, so we’ve got a sweet server over at Amazon specifically tuned for our Magento sites. Yet the challenge of importing and managing data from Booksonix was to proove pretty tricky.

Importing data from Booksonix

Early on we discovered that booksonix didn’t have a live XML feed, instead they ftp an XML to your server on a nightly basis. So instead of being able to use a nice XML module already created for Magento imports, we had to write a custom importer that would pick up any un-imported xml files (and their associated jacket images) and push all that data into Magento.

Booksonix XML consists of a range of shortcodes to represent all the fields managed by their book management software. It took some time to determine what fields were relevant to the clients store-front requirements and with a little processing we were able to format the data and assign it to fields in our Magento site. Probably the hardest challenge was developing a way for the client to manage the store categories from within Booksonix. We were able to utilise the custom fields of Booksonix to allow the client to assign titles to categories. When the importer runs it will now create a new Magento category (if it doesn’t already exist) and assign all coresponding titles to it.

It took a little time to run the first few imports given the sheer volume of data (and image files) that had to be processed, but after a lot of tweaking our importer now runs daily, reading the files from Booksonix and importing anything that is new into Magento.

Managing the Magento Store

Whilst the importing of data into a Magento store dramatically enhances the efficiently of the site, there’s still a fair amount that needs to be handled manually within the Magento environment. Core Manageo features allow the client to select featured titles and title of the month, leaving bestsellers to be driven by sales. Practical Action Publishing are also responsible for Managing offers and processing sales, but the beatify of this solution is that now they can focus on selling the titles with reduced time managing the data behind the products.

This article doesn’t do the coding behind this solution any justice. We ourselves certainly underestimated the challenge of connecting Booksonix with Magento but we are extremely proud of our achievements (and grateful to the client for bearing with us as we worked through the issues). The benefit of managing data in one place (booksonix) and having other systems (Magento) use that data automatically is a model we try and replicate wherever possible, using technology to simplify the work of our clients (and ourselves).

Sometimes in the main content block of your theme, the design requires to have a complicated CMS page content layout that stray from using basic linear content (Adding blocks below whatever is under the main content block). You may want various blocks to be set anywhere you want EG the homepage..

This post shows a good clean way to use the layout XML and PPH in your layout files to position blocks of content exactly where you want inside your main content block.

One possible solution would be to add Magento’s block tag shortcode into the CMS page content editor:

{{block type="wjfeatured/wjfeatured" template="wjfeatured/accordian.phtml" limit="5" position_set="1"}}

You could then add as many CMS or other module blocks and arrange them in DIVs to get the desired layout. This isn’t bad as such.. actually its quite cool. But could get a little difficult to manage from a store editors point of view. If the store user doesn’t understand your HTML, but still wants to manage various content, the layout could break quite easily. Not to mention you don’t get to take full advantage of Magento’s Custom Design (being able to overwrite your XML over selected dates.. Great for seasonal promotions).

Here is how you would add a block under the content.

   /block>

That’s cool, but as I said before it will only appear linear, meaning only allows you to add blocks above or below the content block..
So what we’ll do is add a new custom block called something like ‘custom_content’ that will appear below the existing content block, and apply a new HTML template so we can do what we want to it..

You want to add a new custom block in page.xml that we will reference after in the Design tab on the Magneto CMS edit page screen.

Enter in page.xml (inside the block name=”root”):

Notice we have given the name of the new block “custom_content”.. We will now reference this block in the CMS Design screen, instead of the Content screen. Then set the template of the custom_content. In this case a homepage template file (home.phtml)

This will now inject your blocks into the layout file using the getChildHtml() method. Note the value of ‘name’ in the block element matches the value in the method..

  getChildHtml('featured') ?>

That’s it! Seems a bit complicated but once you’ve got your head around Magento’s layout XML it works quite smoothly.

Hope this helps anyone, feel free to comment for any help.