the outlet of Ryan Hyslop,
creative frontend developer

Any frontend developer who’s taken a passive interest or a curious look into Magento theming will remember the moment when they recoiled and thought; “Honestly, wtf”.

It’s in our nature as developers to dive into things, at least initially. If something catches our interest we want to see straight away how it works, so rather than reading around a subject, perhaps doing a tutorial first, we rip off the mask and see the god awful monster staring back at us. We scream, it screams and we all run away, and for some people thats enough Magento for them.

There’s no denying the theming engine in Magento takes patience to learn and can be frustrating in places, notably due to a lack of documentation and the blind ineffectively leading the blind.

This post wont teach you how to theme in magento but will detail some general concepts and tips to do some common things that should ease your pain.
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One of the biggest challenges once a developer has a grasp of new language is how to implement it effectively and sensibly.

A lot of established languages have design patterns to draw upon, blueprints of code that experienced developers over time have curated as ‘best practice’. These patterns or approaches give newer developers a reference point to see how developing in a certain manner will be more effective.

CSS has always lacked this, as by its very nature it is very flexible and the types of sites it can be applied to vary enormously, never the less browser implementation of more advanced CSS modules has exploded over the past 2 years and our stylesheets are growing as are the complexity of the websites we are building. We. Need. Order!

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