The Designer's Guide to Magento has been prepared for you to learn and expand your knowledge of the structural, conceptual workings and methods of designing for Magento—It will basically teach you what you need to know to begin building a store of your own with Magento.

The documentation is largely sectioned into the following chapters and can be skipped through back and forth in order to quickly access only the information you need most. However, because each chapter acts as a prelude to the next, we advise you to follow along with the documentation in the order it was written:

1. Magento Design Terminologies
2. Working with Magento Themes
3. Building Your Theme
4. Intro to Layouts

The Designer's Guide to Magento can be found at www.magentocommerce.com/design_guide

You’re right, the right column is in fact missing page.xml. This exercise will be updated to reflect the correct setp. Thank you for pointing this out!

I want to ask a question about the first excercise on this guide:
It says:
“# Now open page.xml and search for ‘as="right"’.
# When you find ‘as="right"’, you’ve correctly located the structural block for the right column. You will also see that that structural block also has ‘name="right”’ assigned to it. Now you know that its content blocks would refer to this block by <reference name="right">."
...
I did not finde any “right” at page.xml!! I am driving crazy with designing :(

Thank you for help

Magento takes care of applying layout updates on category and product view pages. The layout updates can be defined in your layout files under your theme, they should be enclosed in <CATEGORY_999>...</CATEGORY_999> or < PRODUCT_999>...</PRODUCT_999> handles, where 999 has to be replaced with the category or product id accordingly.

Category and product layout updates can also be added when editing a product or category in the admin, you just have to put xml into the corresponding fields.

Please let us know if it helps.

Thank you,
Michael.

The documentation describes how custom designs can be applied to the category or even product level. Im having some difficulty in finding how its applied in the documentation.

Any pointers?

@Brady - We’ll add a printable friendly stylesheet.

Seasons greetings to the Magento/Varien team.

Thanks!

Error de lectura XML: la instrucción de proceso XML no se encuentra al comienzo de una entidad externa
Ubicación: http://feeds.feedburner.com/magento
Número de línea 2, columna 1:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
^

I’ve been dying to see this documentation and develop an ordered understanding of the template system.

There goes my holidays.