Expertz

The first step will be duplicating the default theme folder structure so that we can always turn back the changes if we damage anything. Magento’s default template structure is shown below, and there are two folders we must duplicate. Duplicating means creating a new folder with the same contents as the source folder. The simplest method is copying the folder from the original theme or duplicating it with an SSH or similar client.

Base folder structure:

Lets name the new template as new_theme. Then the new folder structure should look like this:

New folder structure:

Of course we don’t need to duplicate the whole structure. If the required file is not found in the new_theme directory it will be taken from the default theme’s directory.

How to Design Maganto.

After duplicating the folders we need to switch the theme from the administration area.

Step 1. Go to System > Configuration > Design via the top navigation bar Step 2. Under “Themes” and in the “Default” text field, type: new_theme Step 3. Press the “Save config” button in the upper right corner

Any external stylesheet files (css) or javascript/ajax libraries (js) that we want to include in our new project must be also copied to the proper folders.

Stylesheets Copy the files to /skin/frontend/default/new_theme/css/ folder Don’t forget to include any new css files in the styles.css file. We can do this by appending the following line as specified:

After

Javascript / AJAX libraries Create a new folder under /js/ named custom_js and copy your files to it. If you are using javascript libraries then this is also a good place to put the library files.

With the use of XML we can change almost every aspect of our new_template. For example we can set an alternate column layout for particular pages, change META information, page encoding, block types used on each page etc. There are two XML files you will be modifying in order to manage these tasks, and the two files are as follows (this info is outdated):

The new place of config.xml is:

The main file used to control values for META tags and other miscelaneous details is config.xml which is located in the /app/design/frontend/new_template/default/etc/ folder.

Below is a short description of every META tag and possible values:

This is the name of our ecommerce site. This text will appear in the browser’s title bar or the browser tab for the site. This text is also highly important for search engine keyword optimization.

This is default page header encoding so we should leave this as is.

UTF8 is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode. It is able to represent any character in the Unicode standard, yet the initial encoding of byte codes and character assignments for UTF-8 is backwards compatible with the ASCII table. For these reasons, it is steadily becoming the preferred encoding for e-mail, web pages, and other places where characters are stored or streamed.

Of course we can change it to any other encoding (ex. ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-2) but there is no need as long as we’re saving our files with proper UTF8 encoding.

More information about UTF8 is in the Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

The description tag controls the description meta tag and allows us to enter a short description about our site. It’s often a way to get a nice description of your page to show up in the search results if your page does rank highly in a search engine. Your best bet is to write a succinct sentence or two that uses the keyword phrases that sum up the page content.

The keywords tag controls the keyword meta tag and is the place to put the most important words that refer to the site content. Best practices suggest to enter no more than 500 characters in no more than 20 words for best results.

The robots tag controls the robots meta directive and is a simple mechanism to indicate to visiting web bots and search engine spiders if a page should be indexed, or links on the page should be followed. The content of the Robots meta tag contains directives separated by commas. The currently defined directives are index, noindex, follow and nofollow. The two index directives specify if an indexing robot should index the page or not. The two follow directives specify if a robot is to follow links on the page or not. The defaults are index and follow. The values all and none set all directives on or off: all=index,follow and none=noindex,nofollow We can simply override Magento’s default directive by placing one of the four following lines here, however it’s not recommended. The options are:

• index,follow
• noindex,follow
• index,nofollow
• noindex,nofollow

The file config.xml also contains two additional tags, not connected with any meta tags but used as a default settings for every page in our shop.

The logo_src tag sets up a reference to the logo file we wish to use on our site. The image logo.gif is located in the folder /skin/frontend/new_template/default/images/ so if we want to change it we must copy a new logo file to that folder. We can also create a new folder inside the images folder (ex. new_images) and put all our new files used by new template into it and change this tag appropriately. The easiest way to customize the logo it to simply overwrite the default logo.gif file with a new logo.gif file.

The logo_alt tag defines the alt attribute for our logo image and is mostly used by screen readers or browsers with images disabled. If one of our customers uses a screen reader or has images disabled he will see the alt text instead of image.

Using xml instead of other methods (JSON, .ini files, include / require functions) allows us to change many aspects on our page without manually changing the .phtml files. This chapter refers to our default theme so after changing the theme (as we have done above) the paths will also change.

Your core Layout is defined by page.xml which is located in /app/design/frontend/your_package/your_theme/layout/page.xml

There are two large tasks layout carries out.

First it defines the visual layout for your store. By default Magento uses a 3-column layout, so it defines use of 3columns.phtml (Located in your template/page/ folder):

If you wanted to change your store a 2-column layout, for instance, you would change the line above to reflect the .phtml you’d like to use (in this case, 2columns-left.phtml or 2columns-right.phtml).

More information about the action tag and associated methods is located in section d of this chapter.

Secondly it creates “block containers” filled with application data for output to your .phtml template files. First, if take a look at your standard 3column.phtml file you’ll see it calls the method (function) getChildHtml() a number of times:

(excerpt from 3columns.phtml - Starting at line 56):