OpenCart 1.4 Template Design Cookbook

04/09/2011 · No Responses

Templates in OpenCart provide a powerful way to make your site look exactly the way you want either using a single template for the entire site or a separate template for each site section. Although it sounds like an easy task to build and maintain templates, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and customize templates to meet your needs perfectly.

Get to grips with the basics of template design for OpenCart such as changing the logo and altering color schemes for your templates. Understand OpenCart concepts such as module chrome and template positions. Create custom error templates for your website. Style OpenCart’s search results and customize OpenCart’s breadcrumb trail. Customize the look and feel of your OpenCart website’s administration panel to match either your business or client identity. Use the jQuery JavaScript library to enhance your OpenCart template. Make use of a wide range of miscellaneous tips, tricks, and tasks to help get your OpenCart website one step closer to perfection. Create custom menus using multiple approaches and techniques.

First we will install OpenCart. Then we will get familiar with the ways to modify the store configuration. After that we will start styling our OpenCart store by resetting all the browser settings. We will create a banner image step by step. We will control the positioning of our OpenCart modules. We will see how we can use different jQuery plugins to display our products effectively. We will also cover several modern footer creation recipes in this book. Towards the end of the book we will use different eye-catching menus for our store so it really starts to take shape. Finally we will learn how to create an error page and a sitemap page for our store. Once our journey through the book is complete we will have created a modern store with OpenCart and have full control over our store template.

What you will learn from this book :

Displaying products in different sections with simple and effective recipes
Creating modern headers with advanced layout
Adorning the admin panel with our own style using CSS
Various recipes to create our own footer layout
Displaying the navigational menu in customizable ways
Adding dynamic contents to our store
Using GIMP to create images
Debugging our store for enhancement
Customizing error page and sitemaps

Approach
This hands-on guide cuts short the preamble and gets straight to the point with practical recipes instead of just theoretical learning. Each recipe is specifically tailored to fulfill your appetite for creating professional visually stunning templates and themes for your OpenCart store.

Who this book is written for
You may be the owner of an OpenCart web store or a designer working with OpenCart. If you want to customize OpenCart to unleash its enormous potential and elevate your store to the next level, this book is for you. You must have some experience with OpenCart and understand its basic features. You also need to know HTML and should be comfortable taking up some challenges in PHP and JavaScript programming.