Modifying the default theme  - Page 3

Firstly, when is comes to building your own theme you will find its a good idea to think about what you will need to achieve, who your audience will be, what they will want to do and therefore what information should be on the site and why, before you start the design. Also think about which modules you will want to use and where you plan to place these modules within your proposed design and why. Good research and preparation and resisting the temptation to jump straight in at the deep end will pay you dividends in the long run.

Now, turning to this exercise, our new shop will be based on a thriving bookstore (not very exciting to some people I know, but it will more than serve our purposes). I have created a pretty basic design as the basis for our new Prestashop bookstore and also given some thought to what modules will be placed where on the home page. Just remember that the goal is simply to take you through the process from how a design becomes a finished Prestashop theme. This is not a design lesson and we are not trying to win any designs awards. Indeed, we are likely to stick with gray boxes for most our book cover images in the graphic below as this will serve our purposes.

Our Prestashop home page design

Now that we have our design agreed, we will start work on incorporating this into the "Mytheme" theme directory we have created. We will work from the outside in (with the approach we are taking here) and use much of the existing HTML and CSS rules already built into Prestashop. However, like many designers, I would have preferred to scrap most of the html information in the tpl files and then re-write these with more efficient HTML tags and CSS rules which would bring a lot more order and make most of the CSS re-suable so new module developes for example, do not need to re-create new ID's, and classes every time which would be a lot more efficient.)

Not only are we going to style the tpl files for our theme- including the modules tpl files we will be using- we will also be creating new hooks so you can see first hand exactly how to do this. Later, we will also delve into both Smarty and JQuery as we'll be making some changes here to meet our specific needs for our bookshop

Until next time…

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Last updated: 28th March 2009