Book Image

Magento 1.4 Themes Design

By : Richard Carter
Book Image

Magento 1.4 Themes Design

By: Richard Carter

Overview of this book

<p>Magento is a popular open source e-commerce project. Whilst it comes with a number of default themes to change the look and feel of your store, many people, both new to Magento and old hands, struggle with even the more basic aspects of customizing Magento themes. When you read this book you'll learn how to change the basics of your Magento theme, create a new custom theme and much more.</p> <p>The book is a step-by-step guide to theming Magento, aimed at readers with little technical expertise. The first chapters introduce Magento 1.4 and Magento themes, covering Magento theme hierarchy and the key components of a Magento theme: templates, skins, layout, and locales. Later chapters delve into changing the basics of your Magento store, including methods for changing the logo of your store, adding a custom favicon (favorites icon) and integrating Twitter and Facebook into your store. More advanced topics include customizing Magento templates and XML layout files to alter a theme to your own needs and creating a custom print stylesheet.</p> <p>In short, the book provides guides to common aspects of theming and customizing Magento 1.4 and equally useful step-by-step walkthroughs of integrating more unusual items in to your Magento store.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Magento 1.4 Themes Design
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Theme hierarchy in Magento: the fallback pattern


Magento has rules in place to tell it which files have precedence to be displayed if there are multiple themes active on a store.

Theme hierarchy exists in Magento to ensure that, if a file (for example, a stylesheet or a template) does not exist in a customized theme, Magento will still be able to find the file in the base theme. This is known as the fallback theme.

The base theme

Magento theme hierarchies worked differently in Magento 1.3: there was no base theme in Magento, which meant it was easy to forget to add a required file to your store's default Magento theme, potentially meaning that your store could break when viewed by visitors.

Note

The addition of the base theme in Magento 1.4 onwards should negate this problem, so long as you build your theme correctly, creating only files you have changed to customize your new theme, and not duplicating an existing theme, as these were the common practices in Magento 1.3.

An example of theme hierarchy...