Theme Creation Tutorial

Ciwan wrote:



Has Theme 00  been tested for V 2.4 yet?

Yep, although it is not on the Demo Site yet, but yes Theme 00 does work with nopCommerce v2.40.

NC Themes is undergoing huge changes at the moment, and the changes will be up online in about a month or so.

Ciwan wrote:

Sounds Great.

Are you able to share with us the changes you're referring to?

Also is there any restrictions or anything else that one should know before purchasing your theme?

No there are no restrictions, not if you purchase now at least.

But in the future, there would be a link back in the footer. The changes I mentioned have no connection to Theme #00. They are more about NC Themes and its evolution.

You'll see in a couple of months. :)

Have bought the Theme and it is Great !
Support is also Excellent
Highly Recommended.

Thanks Ciwan
&
ncthemes.com

Thanks for the kind words.

Let me know if I can be of any further help. :)

I think nopCommerce is a great product. What stands in its way of being truly excellent is the lack of support and flexibility of themes and skins.

If the development team were to turn their attention to this AND CHARGE FOR IT, you would attract tons more followers. We need to differentiate our sites by branding them in diverse and original ways. At present, nopCommerce is a brilliant backend, but our visitors need to be impressed.

Thanks
Luke

snoedle wrote:
I couldn't agree more.  I've spent hours crawling the web for general purpose themes.  Most of them are just copies of the nopCommerce default theme with colors or a few styles changed.   The sad fact is that there are less than 10 themes that are worth considering -- and less than 5 vendors producing descent themes.

The reasons for this are apparent.

1) nopCommerce was not designed to promote easy theme creation.  Themes are not easy to customize and they are even harder to build from scratch.

2) The move to MVC has complicated matters considerably.

3) There are no true step by step users guides for building themes from scratch.

However, most of us continue to love nopCommerce for its solid technical underpinnings and its feature set.  So what should we do?  We want to build nopCommerce sites but also want them to look great.  We don't want them to look like the default nopCommerce theme at all, or some programming 101 web design project.

So I've concluded that the only way to approach this conundrum is as follows.

1) Forget about the default nopCommerce theme completely.  Resist the temptation to copy the nopCommerce default theme and start from there -- you will just get something that looks very much like the original.

2) Learn to build themes the hard way, from scratch.  Start with a good looking website design in HTML.  Then build your Hello World theme to match.  This is most likely the biggest hurdle, as it requires getting very hands on with MVC and related technologies, and will involve a fair amount of stumbling around in the dark.  The beauty of this is that, you may, for example, only initially have a page that lists your nopCommerce categories, but you know how it was built and can subsequently build on that.

There are precious few web resources on the topic.  Here are a couple of the better ones I've found.
- http://www.nop-templates.com/blog/12/how-to-create-nopcommerce-themes
- https://www.nopcommerce.com/docs/72/designers-guide.aspx

Unfortunately the two previous links assume you are starting with a copy of another theme.  So, I present this link, which is a bit older, however they outline the "hello world" -- starting from scratch -- approach.
- http://blogs.planetcloud.co.uk/mygreatdiscovery/post/nopCommerce-e28093-how-we-do-themes.aspx
So, I'm off to create my nopCommerce 2.65 "Hello World" theme -- from scratch.   I know it won't be pretty, but it will be mine.  Wish me luck!