Themes Suggestion

When creating themes its very hard to work with just the theme folder without manipulating other files.

For example if I want to show 4 columns of categories on the homepage I have to go and edit HomePageCategories.ascx and alter the repeat columns to 4.    Can we get these kind of controls added to the Skin file?? This goes for other pages as well like categories.

Thanks for suggestion

Same goes for the search result display.  I have all other pages display in grids by changing the display option in admin. But when I want to display in grid for the search results, I would have to modify the search.ascx control.

skiltz,

an easier solution i did was to add a setting in the Display tab of the Global Settings

to set the number of columns for :
homepagecategories
homepage products
recently added products
... and so on.

then load the setting in hte code of each control to set the repeatcolumns of the grid ...

it worked fine for me.

Doesn't this still require you to alter the .ascx pages?

not necessarely unless your content area changes size from page to page... which is unlikely if you use the same masterpage across the site.

however you have to pay attention to your productitem size and verify all pages display nicely.

What I am trying to do is build a theme I can provide to the community.  This means I package up the app_themes folder and distribute it.  I don't want to make ANY changes to the core of Nop as this will require packing these files as well.  It would be a lot easier if these control were in the skin file :)

i see where you're going.

i had the same thoughts but i decided to take it a bit further and provide a way to even include a set of masterpages and layouts along with the theme and user controls.

i was able to throw a quick solution to change masterpages from the admin area and it is working pretty fine.
what i am exploring now is for a way to package the asp.net theme, masterpages and eventually new usercontrols in a separate assembly so it can be referenced and used in the site.

it would simplify a lot the creation of full blown themes...

so far i had no luck with that and am still exploring for a correct way of implementing it.

i am also looking at the same way VS handles project templates which is basically reading all the items from a zip file.

there is a way to serve aspx and masterpages from a zip file using a special provider. (i'll send the file if sample if needed)

it's maybe a good way to package themes and layouts...

simply thinking loud and all over the place for now :)

I don't want to package anything other than the themes folder because people may have made chnages to masterpages etc which would then be overwritten.

You can package productstemplates and categorytemplates in a different assembley's already becuase of the plugable archiecture, hopefully master pages might also work the same in the future.

My personal view is that we should move away from App_Themes at some point and use a different structure for skins.

I've been doing a lot of work with mojoPortal lately and really like how they manage skins. Each skin folder also contains the master pages. These all inherit from the same code behind so the only thing you need to change is the layout. This suits nopCommerce quite well since most UI components exist as individual user controls so you can include whatever you want on your master page.

This concept could be extended for templates too so that the templates are always loaded from the currently selected skin's directory.