What this book covers
Chapter 1, Setting Up the Local Environment, guides readers through the process of setting up their local environment on macOS, Windows, or Linux. This chapter covers the key steps required to install and configure your system to run the Adobe Commerce (AC) application on Docker-based environments
Chapter 2, Installing the Magento/Adobe Commerce Application, shows how to apply the knowledge from the previous chapter to successfully install Adobe Commerce or its open source alternative, Magento Open Source, as a prerequisite for the frontend development course in subsequent chapters.
Chapter 3, Introduction to Adobe Commerce Theming, provides valuable insights and practical tips for creating custom themes that meet business demands. Readers will learn what types of themes Adobe Commerce can work with, what’s available on the market, and how to start creating their own custom theme based on a theme that’s shipped with the base Magento installation.
Chapter 4, The Layout System, explores the Magento 2 layout system in detail and covers the basic concepts behind it [in short, layout eXtensible Markup Language (XML)], including its structure and the role of the layout files. We will examine the various types of blocks and containers that make up the layout system, and how they can be used to build custom pages.
Chapter 5, Working with Templates, shows how to provide the HTML content for page elements and gain a final understanding of the page rendering process, the server-side part, and templates.
Chapter 6, Styling an Adobe Commerce Theme, furthers the learnings from Chapter 3 regarding the CSS compilation process by using Grunt. It covers key topics of CSS and LESS files.
Chapter 7, Customizing Emails, teaches how to customize emails sent by the platform since they’re an essential part of a custom theme. It also reiterates why using Warden (Docker manager) for our local environment was a great choice.
Chapter 8, Introduction to JavaScript Libraries and Frameworks, introduces readers to JavaScript in Adobe Commerce. They will learn what libraries and frameworks are used and where to look for existing JavaScript files.
Chapter 9, RequireJS and jQuery, explores the most important JavaScript library used by Adobe Commerce – RequireJS. Readers will learn about its features, how to create RequireJS-powered scripts, and finally how to utilize the power of jQuery in those scripts.
Chapter 10, Knockout.JS and UI Components, delves into advanced JavaScript topics – UI Components and Private content, both of them powered by the Knockout.js framework. Readers will get to know how to create UI Components from scratch and how to use them in .phtml
templates they already learned to create in previous chapters.
Chapter 11, Commonly Used Libraries Bundled with Adobe Commerce, presents a list of commonly used JS libraries bundled with Adobe Commerce / Magento. Every library will have a brief explanation of what it does and how to use it.
Chapter 12, Storefront-Related Configuration in the Admin Panel, guides readers through all configuration options available in the Admin Panel that is relevant to Adobe Commerce / Magento frontend developers for them to know that there are frontend-related things that can be changed without having to create customizations in their theme directories.
Chapter 13, Working with Magento CMS, teaches how to work with the Content Management System available in Adobe Commerce. Readers will understand how to create new pages and fill them with content. They will also learn what are blocks, how to utilize them on pages, and how to work with the Page Builder editor to create content.
Chapter 14, Frontend Optimization Techniques, covers the basic techniques about how to perform frontend optimization. Readers will learn what to do and what to avoid to speed up the frontend.
Chapter 15, Common Tools That Help with Local Development, explores third-party tools that are commonly used by the Adobe Commerce community to help with local development.