First of all, if education is valuable or not is a stupid question. All education is valuable in one way or another—you learn. If you learn easier, quicker or more enjoyable than you would by working, however, is more interesting. I believe the question is far too subjective for us to answer. Only you can tell if going for an education in web development is worth your time.

The options

If you do decide that being a student suits you, what are the options for web design and development? While I do not plan to pursue an education myself, there’s a couple of schools I would consider if I did. Since I have not been looking for one, I’m not aware of any good English or American schools that offer education in this area. The ones I’m thinking about are both Swedish.

The one I’m most enthusiastic about is Berghs School of Communication. The web is a medium for communication and Berghs offer a few really interesting programs which prepares students for real-life work. They also connect students with well-known Swedish businesses which can give them a kick in the right direction.

Both Interactive Communication, Marketing/strategic communication, Project Management and Art Direction all look like very interesting studies. Since they are one year programs, they would not be a huge interruption to my work.

Hyper Island would be my second choice—their website is in English in case you’d like to have a look. From what I’ve heard, they are very digital/interactive and offer programs such as Interactive Art Director, Application Designer, and E-commerce Manager. I believe both developers and designers could benefit greatly from spending some time at this institution.

Asking why

But we need to ask ourselves how we really enjoy learning. Personally, I’m more of a learning-by-doing kind of developer. The reason why I started my own business is that I want to pursue work that challenges me daily—work that I constantly learn from. A lot of people prefer this way of learning but there’s also many who really feel that the support of an institution like Hyper Island or Berghs is invaluable.

While I can’t say for sure, it seems as if these private institutions are very up-to-date with the industry and the students are very happy with the education they receive. It shouldn’t be very difficult to adapt each semester after the changes in technology and methodology, should it?

There are bad apples in the basket as well, of course. Some beginner web design courses teach methods of development and design that are far outdated or just plain bad practice. When I was studying business and marketing in Santa Monica, I selected a course on web design as part of my general education. After the first lesson I confidently dropped out, as the room was filled with people who obviously had no intention of ever becoming professionals—the teacher being one of them.

Many, if not most, courses (often at “regular” institutions) are ridiculous. They teach for months something that can be learned from online material in a week or less if you are an ambitious and somewhat technical person. But as shown here, there are schools that provide excellent education even for experienced web professionals.

We need to remember that it’s not only about the technical aspects. Most of us could learn a lot from courses in project management, interactive/marketing communication or even traditional business and marketing courses. These are perhaps more subtle areas which are harder to “see” but which are highly relevant and valuable for anyone dealing with interactivity and the web.

Conslusion

From what I feel right now, I won’t be pursuing an education any time soon. However, the possibility is there and I believe we should all at least consider the option before disposing of the idea completely. Just because you’re doing web design, a subject which is relatively new and fast-paced, doesn’t mean education is worthless.

So far I haven’t mentioned what others are so often discussing; is it beneficial to your resume and portfolio to be backed up by these educations. I will not discuss this since the question can be answered by applying a little bit of common sense. Of course it is a good thing to have education in your CV—some people will shred it immediately if you don’t. But work experience is also very valuable.

Stop making important decisions based on what “looks best”. Think about what you right now want to do, and what would be most useful for you. In the end, what matters most is the work you do. Great clients and dream jobs are the result of hard work, passion, will-power and most of all, repeatedly achieving fantastic results. The choice between doing that by applying knowledge from education or from previous work is entirely up to you.

Moving the folders

If you don’t want to move the entire Magento folder to its cozy new home, make sure to move the media, app/etc and your theme folders. Remember, there is both a skin folder and a design folder for your theme and you most definitely need them both.

MySQL database dump

Make a database dump of the old database and import it to the new location. In the core_config_data table, change the values of web/secure/base_url and web/unsecure/base_url to reflect any changes in the domain. If you’re moving Magento into a subdirectory, also change the RewriteBase in the root folder .htaccess file.

The settings in your app/etc/local.xml file should be changed to let Magento connect to your new database.

Updating the paths

Clear the var/cache folder when moving the site to make sure no cache is left from the old one. Remove or rename the downloader/pearlib/pear.ini file to make sure the Magento Connect downloader upgrades the path it uses. Forget this and you’ll be scratching your head the next time you’re installing an extension.

The right permissions

Simply make the app/etc, var and media folders writeable by the server.

Updating Magento

Why not update Magento to the latest version while you are still poking around? You can use the Magento Connect downloader or if you prefer (or can’t access the site via a browser yet) you can run the following commands on your server:

./pear mage-setup .
./pear install magento-core/Mage_All_Latest

That should also do any required updates on the database. If you ever import a Magento 1.3 database to a Magento 1.4 installation, run the commands again to make sure the structure is correct.

Potential problem: Some images are not showing

You have transferred all the images to the new location and cleared the cache but only some of them show up when browsing the catalog on the front-end. This can occur when Magento can’t allocate enough RAM when loading the images. Increase the memory_limit in php.ini and restart the Apache service.

Potential problem: Products are missing

If some products are missing or the site seems different from the old one, reindex the catalog.

Potential problem: Prices always display excluding taxes

This can occur when upgrading to Magento 1.4. You’ve set the configuration to include taxes in all the prices but they still display without taxes on the front-end. What you need to do is to set the Origin on the Shipping Options page in the site configuration.

More resources

What I’ve mentioned here is only the bare basics of moving Magento to a new server. Once you hit a problem, that’s when things become a lot more interesting. While Google is your best friend, below is a list of a few of the resources I’ve personally found helpful.

Moving Magento To Another Server
I Actually Am Getting Orders Now on 1.4
Magento 1.4 Install Errors
Moving Magento […] (potential problems)
Issues With Moving Magento
Moving Magento Site From Development To Live

Since I was hired only to integrate the site with Drupal, I decided to challenge myself not to touch a single line of the provided CSS. This is fairly easy at least until you start outputting a lot of different views. A few extra layers don’t compromise the styling and positioning of elements but when Drupal starts to add a whole bunch of them, the CSS breaks.

That’s what happens when you separate front-end development from CMS integration. Just modifying the CSS a bit would be the simple solution but it would also lead to having to frequently boot up a couple of virtual machines for testing in Internet Explorer 6 to 8. It seemed more interesting to just strip away the (in this case) unnecessary div tags that Drupal and Views by default spits out.

Turns out this was even simpler than changing the CSS. All that needs to be done is to add some template files. Once you figure out which template files are needed to strip away the overdose of markup, it’s a very straight-forward task. I decided to throw in quite a few of them to be on the safe side:

views-view.tpl.php

<?php if ($rows): ?>
  <?php print $rows; ?>
<?php elseif ($empty): ?>
  <?php print $empty; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

views-view-unformatted.tpl.php
views-view-nodes.tpl.php

<?php foreach ($rows as $id => $row): ?>
  <?php echo $row; ?>
<?php endforeach; ?>

You get the point. After this, it’s just a matter of creating the node templates that will be used to output the content types you’re dealing with. For example, node-news.tpl.php could display the node, outputting whatever node variable or CCK field you have at your disposal. It’s all very simple.

I thought I’d write about this since there’s not a lot of information out there about it. Maybe because it’s common and easy, I don’t know. I for one used to have the habit of iterating through the nodes in a view manually, directly in the view’s template file using node_load() to get the data I needed. It sure sounds fun but having more template files that are loaded would of course be way more convenient in the end.

Conclusion—Drupal creates piles of markup you don’t want. Get rid of it and clean up your code, please.