Need to work on a Theme

Hi All,

I need to create a new theme for the NC V 2.5. If I load the entire solution in Visual Studio, every time that I hit "ctrl + F5" to run the app and see changes, VS re-compiles everything and it makes the entire process to long.

I tried loading only Nop.Web to VS but it does not complile.

Also, any suggestion on creating a new theme will be highly appreciated.

Thanks.

Please read the NopCommerce Designer's Guide: https://www.nopcommerce.com/docs/72/designers-guide.aspx

I suggest you to mantain consistency with original theme. This allows you to upgrade release without spending hours in comparison with winmerge.
What tou have to is:

1) create a copy of a standard theme, in the manner suggested in the FAQs
2) reneme styles.css. as standard.css. You need also to remove the first line of the theme (.foo)
3) create a new custom.css
4) create a new styles.css as follows:

@import url("standard.css");
@import url("custom.css");
.foo{}

Now just edit the custom, adding only styles and properties modified.

Thank you all for your help.

I followed your advise and created a copy of a the current theme. I needed to change some partial views, so I created copies and moved them to the NewTheme Views folder. However, now visual studio (Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition) does not color-code the html/razor code of the newly-moved partial view and it makes it really difficult to work with.

Any Suggestion?

Hi Infinito62,

I agree! I do not want to spend countless hours upgrading to the next release. What would be your recommendation to perform the upgrade?

Thanks.

Hi Infinito62,

What is .foo{} exactly and why do I need it?

Thanks.

Hi,
what is .foo I really don't know! It's there so I left it there!

Anyway, I do prefer to keep things in place, if I have to customize something I touch as little as I can.
I prefer to upgrade as soon as possible from one relase to the next, just because nobody but the master engineer (say: Andrei) knows weeknesses and critical drawbacks of the code. Besides, new functionality and bugs fixes are normally more important than some customization that solve local needs. Maybe, in future, if NopCommerce will reach maturity and flexibility comparable e.g. to Wordpress or Drupal, it will be easier to deep fingers into Nutella. We must take into account that wp and Drupal have hundreds of developers involved, while NopCommerce is basically a creation of Andrei, the work he did in the last five years is absolutely outstanding.

Anyway, very much can be done working with widgets, css and views.
Regarding widgets, it is possible to include any components you like: 7Spikes have some proposals dedicated, while on the web you can find thousands of components suitable for all needs and pleasures.
The architecture of the presentation layer is easy and flexible. you can customize almost anything working with css: use my technique and winmerge to tell what's new from one reelease to the next, and you won't have headache for weeks whhen trying to upgrade releases.
Views allow you to customize layouts quite easily. They work in real strict conjunction wit css: i.e., if you need to show 6 featured products per line in home page, you need to edit the correct views and adjust css accordingly.

Plugins is a different matter. At the time being their architecture don't offer all the feautures really needed - and from one release to the next sometimes don't work and crash the system. Wp, drupal don't have this limitation - at least for saome releases. For instance, I'd like a plugin that manages birthday promotion automatically. I did it much easierr with SQLServer rather than trying to build a plugin inside NopCommerce.

I don't like to work very much with source code. It's too complex and not documented: so I edit views and css with Notepad+, and test in a development enviroment. What can't be done inside, I do outside. For instance, the invoice template is absolutely useless in Italy, so I use an external accounting software. NopComemrce have almost no reports: never mind, I use Access and create all queryes and reports I need.

I hope I have been of some help.

Hi Infinito62,

your help is much appreciated!

I am new to NopCommerce and I am finding my way through it little by little.

On the project that I am working on, I had a graphic designer design the front end of the site (this will become the theme of NopC). The structure he used (wrapper divs) is different than the default theme that comes with NopC, and as much as I would have preferred to touch only CSS and some views, I had to modify the _root.cshtml (of course I had copied it to the theme directory).

Is there anything you can tell me about this move? Have you ever had to do it? What happened on the next upgrade?

Thanks for all your help.

Take care,

If you move contgainer around and you keep track of changes within css, I think things work fine. Please mantain divs hierarchy.
I didn,t notice great differences in the view layer from one release to the other: it's always a good idea to check standard files with winmerge, because some differences may occur.
Send me the url of your site when you'll finish!