Table of contents
PrestaShop's theme system is based on a template engine, called Smarty (http://www.smarty.net/), which allows web-designers and developers to easily build their own theme, with little technical knowledge.
All web-designers and developers should use the following developer browser extensions:
They provide a lot of useful tools, among which DOM explorer, CSS editors, network inspector, etc., and are a huge help when debugging HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and even Ajax requests. |
PrestaShop is based on a 3-tier architecture:
/classes
folder./themes
folder.See Wikpedia for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitier_architecture#Three-tier_architecture
This is the same principle as the Model–View–Controller (MVC) architecture, only in a simpler and more accessible way.
Learn more about MVC on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller
Our developer team chose not to use a PHP framework, such as Zend Framework, Symfony or CakePHP, so as to allow for better readability, and thus faster editing.
This also makes for better performances, since the software is only made of the lines of code it requires, and does not contain a bunch of supplemental generic libraries.
A 3-tier architecture has many advantages:
/themes
folder without having to understand or even read a single line of PHP code.A model represents the application's behavior: data processing, database interaction, etc.
It describes or contains the data that have been processed by the application. It manages this data and guarantees its integrity.
A view is the interface with which the user interacts.
Its first role is to display the data that is been provided by the model. Its second role is to handle all the actions from the user (mouse click, element selection, buttons, etc.), and send these events to the controller.
The View does not do any processing; it only displays the result of the processing performed by the model, and interacts with the user.
The Controller manages synchronization events between the Model and the View, and updates both as needed. It receives all the user events and triggers the actions to perform.
If an action needs data to be changed, the Controller will "ask" the Model to change the data, and in turn the Model will notify the View that the data has been changed, so that the View can update itself.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of best practices that you should follow when creating a theme:
.css
file..php
file at the root of PrestaShop); use the existing methods from the PrestaShop classes, or create new methods for these classes.A PrestaShop theme is a set of files which you can edit in order to change the look of your online shop.
Here are a few important tidbits:
/themes
root folder..tpl
), image files (.gif
, .jpg
, .png
), one or more CSS files (.css
), and sometimes even JavaScript files (.js
).preview.jpg
image file in its folder, enabling the shop-owner to see what the theme looks like directly from the back-office, and select the theme appropriately.As a theme developer, there are mostly 5 PrestaShop folders you must be aware of:
/modules
: this is where all the modules are located. A module has templates files, can also redefine theme parts./themes
: this is where all the themes are located. The default 1.5 theme is in the /default
folder (in 1.4, it was /prestashop
)./mails
: this is where all the e-mail templates are located. E-mail templates should ideally reflect the style and design of the main theme. Each sub-folder contains language-specific templates/img
: this is where all the store's images are located. Theme-specific images are stored in the theme's own /img
folder./pdf
: this is where all the document models are located.Here is an overview of the file structure of a PrestaShop theme (here, the default one):
/css
folder contains all CSS files./img
folder contains all images./js
folder contains all the JavaScript files./lang
folder contains the theme's translations. Its access rights should be set at CHMOD 666 (for instance), so that the back-office translation tool can read and write into it.preview.jpg
file.The |