Building Magento Themes

I've got a freelance task, which is building Magento themes.

Magento is totally a stranger to me. After searching for the information only I found out, it's actually an open source ecommerce platform, where you can download and customize for your own online store.

Actually, there is a demand of Magento designers and developers. The designers will design the store interface and create a PSD (Photoshop Data) file, and the developers will convert it to a web page theme (with HTML, CSS, and PHP). I'm supposed to play the developer role.

I was given a sample work to learn, and I realized that it's much more complicated than I expected. There are many things that require me to learn, such as setting up Magento platform for testing, converting PSD to HTML/CSS, building Magento themes, etc.

I have finally found two ways to set up Magento platform for testing:
1. Get a free Magento hosting at MagentoPolis.
2. Install Magento on WAMP, so that I can run Apache, MySQL and PHP in my Windows XP. (But I've problem setting this up now)
Updated: Found the solution on this: I just needed to turn off my IIS service. ^_^

I've read some tutorials about converting PSD to HTML/CSS, and now I'm going to start learning how to build a Magento theme. Then, I'll work on the sample PSD file given by the client.

I'll continue to share more information about Magento with you. Do share with me if you have any experiences with Magento too. ^_^

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Updated on 09 Mar 2011:
I have given up the Magento theme building task, as it's not as easy as I thought. I still have a lot more to learn in order to work on the task. Hence, I'd better concentrate on website development where I am more familiar and more interested in.

Payment for my first freelance project

I've just received a full payment for my first freelance project, which is a simple face recognition program.

I'm very happy to complete the program, and also finally received the full payment. Though it took me quite some time to get the payment and it's not a big amount of money, I didn't spend much time in the program, so I think it's still quite worth my time doing this. Also, it's a totally new technology to me -- Face Recognition.

I'll share some information about this face recognition technology with you all when I am free. ^_^

Install IIS without Windows Installation CD

I just found out that we can actually install the Internet Information Services (IIS) without using the Windows Installation CD, as the required files are already located in our local computer.

1. Go to Control Panel.
2. Click on Add or Remove Programs.
3. Select Add/Remove Windows Components.
4. Select the Internet Information Services (IIS) option.

5. Click on Next button to start installing IIS.
6. You will be prompted to insert the Windows XP Professional CD-ROM.
7. Click on OK button to select the location for the file needed.
8. Browse to C:\WINDOWS\I386 and select the file ADMXPROX.DL_.

9. Click on Open button and then OK button. The installation process will then start.

Copy Text to Clipboard in VB6

I thought it will be quite difficult to copy text to Clipboard in VB6, after I found this out. There is actually a built-in class called Clipboard which lets us easily copy and paste text.

Copy Text to Clipboard:

Private Sub CopyTextToClipboard(ByVal TextToCopy As String)

Clipboard.Clear

Clipboard.SetText TextToCopy

End Sub

Paste Text from Clipboard:

Private Function PasteTextFromClipboard() As String

PasteTextFromClipboard = Clipboard.GetText

End Function

It's just that easy! ^_^