Making a page in Magento packed full of your lovely SEO keyword driven content is easy, really easy. But what happens when you want to get that content somewhere that isn’t one of those pages? That’s when everything falls apart…

Let’s get this straight from the get go- Magento is not a content management system and at this point it’s not really trying to be one… well, maybe just a little. It’s got pages, templates and static blocks which can be embedded within each other. Confused? I’d suggest taking a look at the Design Terminologies page. With these 3 main tools and some imagination you can do quite a bit in terms of ensuring that content on a site is editable via the cms.

Unfortunately other than a brief front-end overview, Magento’s developer documentation is non-existent. Luckily there’s a pretty good community of developers willing to share what they’ve learned. Throughout my adventures with Magento I’ve kept a running list of different ways you can grab content from somewhere else, here’s some of the most commonly used ones.

Embed a Static Block Within a Page

So you’ve got a static block of content that you want to put inside of a page, cool. Just drop this snippet in the page’s content textarea and the static block with and id of "foo-block" will magically appear.

  {{block type="cms/block" block_id="foo-block"}}

Get a Static Block’s Content From Within a Template File

This does the same thing as above except instead of being used in a page, it’s used in a template file.

 $this->getLayout()->createBlock('cms/block')->setBlockId('foo-block')->toHtml();

Inserting a Template file Inside of a Page’s Content

You’ll notice the curly braces, that means it’s a CMS tag like our first example. Just two things have changed, The type of block is different and in the template attribute you specify the path relative to your templates folder.

 {{block type="core/template" template="path-to-template.phtml"}} 

Templates in Templates

You’re in a template file and you want to include another template file in it, chances are you should probably be using Magento’s block layout system for this rather than manually including it the template. Regardless of best practices, here’s how it’s done.

 $this->getLayout()->createBlock('Mage_Adminhtml_Block_Template', 'block-name')->setData('template', 'path-to-your-file.phtml')->toHtml();

Here is a great resource that dives deeper into various CMS syntax tags Magento CMS syntax – part1

Yesterday, to the the glee of gamers worldwide (except for PC gamers), Modern Warfare 2 was released. I don’t have a lot to say about this [ed: blatant lie] but I thought I’d write a quick blog about it prior to my excitement of the game dwindling into just another thing.

Zach and I anticipating the game

First, this was the first time I used Amazon to purchase a game. I really appreciate the release-date delivery they have going on. I got home and voila! My game was sitting in front of my door (night vision goggles included, I was one of those people who couldn’t resist another, likely ineffective gadget).

Now, I know what you’re thinking: You’re thinking that because I bought the $150 version of the game that I will give nothing but praises, proclaiming rainbows shoot out of the game’s dirtiest areas, but I do have my gripes.

The Good

Where to begin really? I guess the first thing you notice is that the graphics are a lot better. Texture maps, the environment modeling, particle effects and general world interaction are all fantastic. Player models are far more refined and detailed beyond previous Call of Duty iterations.

MW2 took a great cue from World of Warcraft on the Achievements region. Everything is unlockable and then those unlocks have unlocks 10 miles deep. Oh… and there’s 22 pages of titles you can unlock for yourself (equating to quite a few hundred). I think it’ll help remove the sense of cookie-cutter class mixes that Modern Warfare had. Bonus!

The gameplay is fanatical. I won’t get into the great things of multiplayer like all of the cool stuff you can do because well… I don’t want to ruin it and because I don’t want to take forever writing this. However, being a Counter-Strike fan, I’ve always been a fan of firefights and a slight arcade-ish feel. Perhaps not in the sense of actual gameplay, but in the delivery of information. The point system in MW2 encourages and rewards you for kill combos, long distance shots, killing multiple people from a grenade, etc. Then they bombard you with flashy messages for hours if you did something really cool or terribly bad.

Outside of multiplayer, which is obviously where you start despite the game telling you not to, Co-Op is ridiculous. It rivals or maybe even surpasses the fun experienced in multiplayer and they get pretty difficult to boot: ah, satisfaction! The single-player, for what little I did dabble, was pretty awesome but the intro cinematics were lame. I was hoping for something interesting to happen but nothing came of it.

The Bad

Right from the good into the bad, they have an arcade-ish feel that flashes stuff in front of your screen in a sometimes dramatically obnoxious fashion. There is a constant flow of extraneous information on the screen. I could deal with less, but it usually doesn’t bother me.

The game interface is weak. I like the simplicity and I’m equally grateful they spent more time developing the actual game than the out-of-game experience, but it is pretty bland. The start screen feels like what I imagine Playskool video game wireframe concepts would look like. For a little visual, this is slightly reminescent of the start screen without the cute panda bear and bright colors:

MW2 UI: Stolen from Playskool

Moving right along, the time in between games is absurd. Maybe they initially made it long and will patch is once people are acclimated to all the cool new features. But unfortunately, it’s borderline long enough to have me fall out of the immersion and wonder what I’m doing with my life sitting in front of  a TV playing video games: Not well played, Infinity Ward.

In single player and co-op (doesn’t appear to be a problem in multiplayer), shrubberies are impenetrable fortresses for your foes to sit behind. Even using a 50 caliber sniper rifle cannot break through the bullet-proof leaves and twigs. Unfathomably frustrating considering how I can blow the hell out of everything else. Outside of that, however, I found it difficult finding any annoying bugs: kudos QA!

The Conclusion

Get it.

Are you at work and the boss won’t let you leave? Send a few memos of how you’re unsatisfied with the level of excitement in the company and quit–then go buy the game.

At school and your oppressive teachers won’t let you leave the classroom to go to the bathroom? Flip over the desk, do some kinda battle roar and jump out the window, quickly proceeding to your local GameStop.

PC gamer and crying for days about the terrible things Infinity Ward did to you [which I agree is super weak]? Suck it up like I did, buy an Xbox 360 and play with us where the roads are paved in gold, the sun is always shining and uhh… come to terms with controls inferior to keyboard / mouse like I did.

All too dramatic solutions for you? I don’t want boring people playing the game but you can still stand in line to buy the game after you’re done doing whatever uninteresting thing you are doing.

Oh, and… add me on 360. My gamertag is "Pievendor".

It’s not uncommon for us to pass around web designer / studio web sites at PRPL. Someone tweets out a blog post, sends in a job application, we see something on a CSS gallery–however these sites reach our computers the result can typically end the same way: we start playing [for a lack of a better on-the-spot name] the 10-second game.

What’s the 10-second game? Someone finds a continuity error on the page and we challenge each other to find the design flaw, programming error or UI anti-pattern in 10 seconds or less upon page load. What happens if we find it? We laugh, high-five, and the process usually will snowball into tearing apart a website. What happens if we don’t find it? We train ourselves to look for these things in the future.

This competition doesn’t always go forward, however, there are sites out there that blow us away. Inevitably for me personally, they get bookmarked and become a role model; a standard rule for how a project should be considered "done". It simply blows my mind that companies, designers and even programmers can write off aesthetic problems as acceptable or, perhaps worse, not even notice them.

Sure, this is partially a rant of, "Don’t call yourself a designer if you don’t take pride in your work," but also an introspection of myself. Are we too critical of our peers, or are they simply lazy or uncaring? Perhaps it’s a difference in company culture, or a rushed job that reflects poorly across the entire brand? There are excuses miles deep for any small issue, but it’s like sand in my eyes–I just can’t see past the problems and it discredits my entire experience.

The take away? I’m not going to explicitly name one, just voicing my thoughts.