Meanbee Config Powered CSS Magento Extension

The aim of this extension is to provide magento frontend developers with a performant way of modifying page styles that are dependent on settings in admin.

E.g. background images on a product page (with retina versions) that can be uploaded in admin. Avoid inline style blocks and instead be able to output a CSS file.

Requirements

The user stories that this extension should achieve and maintain are as follows.

• As a store owner, I wish to be able to upload images in admin that change the site design.
• As a developer, I wish to providing retina images to website visitors and maintaining a performant system, i.e. minimise inline styles and HTTP requests.

Technical Requirements

• Add a CSS file to head block
  • CSS file must not exist in repository.
• Trigger CSS File Regeneration
  • The CSS file should be generated on clicking of "Publish" button in cache management.
• Generates CSS File
  • CSS file should be in a directory which can be written to be the web.
    • While there was a preference for media, we have chosen skin to maintain compatibility with CSS merging.
  • CSS file will be plain CSS and will have no interaction with frontend build tools.
  • CSS file will be generated with a custom block and template.
    • Each theme can then have it’s own template file if required.
    • This does mean the CSS would need regenerating if theme was changed on the store.
  • The template will use getStoreConfig calls (supported by block function)
• There should be a different CSS file for each store to accommodate changing values on different store views.

Development Setup

This extension provides a modman file for further development. Modman is an easy way to install magento extensions via symlink.

modman init
modman clone [email protected]:meanbee/magento-configuration-powered-css.git

Components

The observer Meanbee_ConfigPoweredCss_Model_Observer_AddCss adds the CSS file to the head block (or another block as specified in system configuration.

Meanbee_ConfigPoweredCss_Model_Css is responsible for writing to file. The content of which comes from Meanbee_ConfigPoweredCss_Block_Css and associated template meanbee/configpoweredcss/css.phtml.

Command Line Support

Configpowered Css can also be regenerated from the command line, using the php script found in the shell directory, Meanbee_Configpoweredcss_Regenerate . This will perform the same action as pressing the button in the admin area. The script will output whether it has regenerated successfully or not, and supply the exception if it ran into one.

An example of running the script is:

php shell/meanbee/configpoweredcss/regenerate.php
Config powered css has been regenerated successfully.