Book Image

PrestaShop 1.3 Theming - Beginner's Guide

By : Hayati Hashim
Book Image

PrestaShop 1.3 Theming - Beginner's Guide

By: Hayati Hashim

Overview of this book

Themes in PrestaShop are unique and powerful tools to brand your store for a particular corporate image. Using custom themes you can control the look and functionality of your web store, thereby making your site extremely flexible. Although it might sound like an easy task to build a theme, it is quite challenging to create a custom theme that fits your business needs. This book's prime focus is guiding the readers without much technical know-how, thus enabling them to create a new theme that fulfills the needs of their PrestaShop store. By understanding practical ways to develop your theme for PrestaShop speedily, you can invest more time on developing attractive and unique raw materials. It will simplify the challenging task of creating a unique, new PrestaShop theme through easy-to-follow, practical steps. This book shows how to develop professional themes for your PrestaShop store using some simple steps. The book starts by exploring the various ways of changing the looks (including modules) of your PrestaShop store. It shows you how certain back office administration adjustments can affect the appearance and theme of your store. It then takes you through understanding the code modification of a default theme that results in a new look for your existing theme. The book also covers understanding the PrestaShop architecture and essential syntaxes that control the look of a PrestaShop store. You will also learn about the files that hold the key to themes. By the end of this book, you will have grasped the knowledge to make advanced changes by tweaking the right CSS and module files in order to achieve highly specific outcomes.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
PrestaShop 1.3 ThemingBeginner’s Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
4
Adjusting Style Sheets
Index

Getting familiar with PrestaShop


The reason why it is important that you have those basics clear is that it will make it much easier to understand what can be done to modify the theme. However, if you knew everything, you wouldn't need a beginner's book. We do not expect you to be at an intermediate or an advanced level; this beginner's book will show you step by step how to modify the default theme and develop a new theme for your online shop.

For a start, let's look at the default theme named "PrestaShop" that comes in the PrestaShop software pack.

The PrestaShop sample sites

Let's have a look at a few example of sites that have been developed using PrestaShop. There are many nicely built sites, which are drawn out of using just the default themes. Some use more additional third party modules, which helped make a more unique look, for example, using a top menu bar, moving boxes on the featured block, and so on.

Let's have a look at a few sites we have chosen as examples:

  • http://www.Homology.comUsing "carousels" for products and footer links, the designer has also managed to make a unique look.

  • http://www.peugeotsport-store.com/—An example of a minimalistic approach in changing the default theme but the end result is good. Here, the designer maintained the three columns of the default template and played around keeping a limited color on the blocks and integrated a flash file at the home page center column.

  • http://www.dakoyo.fr—This site is also using the three column layout, just like the default theme. There is a use of flash slide in the home page center column, and the image gallery viewer does make a lot of difference, even if most of the basic structure is retained.

  • http://www.lookforlook.com—By changing the home page logo picture with a flash slide show, a "carousel" on featured products, and using a top menu bar, a footer, and so on, the theme looks very different from the default theme.

You can view more of these on the PrestaShop website in the live showcases section.