Complete Customization and Theming

I finally have a project that I can use nopCommerce on and would like to get your opinion on a couple things:

1.  The design is completely different from the out of the box nopCommerce skins.  For instance I don't necessarily need all the widget stuff (from root), etc however I do need to build some custom things that aren't out of the box.  For instance, I'm thinking about just using a category and products to display a rotator on the home page.  With regards to that last point, I can easily modify the CatalogController to pull the correct products (to be used for their images and descriptions) however I'm unsure if I should modify the CatalogController or should I create all my own custom controllers (seems easier than building plugins) ?  Do you have any thoughts on making these customizations?

2.  I pulled out a lot of stuff from the root layout because I really don't need it.  Are there any known issues with this?

I'm just looking for anyone's thoughts before I get too far down the rabit hole.  I have a development background (mvc included) just want to make sure I don't break the upgrade path/etc..

Thanks in advance!

pictoric wrote:

I would recommend you put your code under source control even if it is a local Mercurial repository (no server needed). This way if you do happen to break something you can easy get back to a working state.

Try and avoid modifying previously existing classes if you intend to take an update in the future (unless they are partials then you can create your own file to extend the class). I've added a link on the different ways to modify nopCommerce. Building a plugin isn't much harder than adding a controller, but not every change is appropriate to be made a plugin.

Your #2 question is too vague to give you a helpful response. Depending on the features and code you removed you could be just fine, but you could also introduce rendering issues. If you remove all the widget components then you cannot use some of the plugins that have shipped with nopCommerce. If you remove certain partials or action calls then you will not be using all the features of nopCommerce, but this might be what you want. Once you've made your changes if the website runs and does not produce client side or server side errors then everything was fine.


http://blog.csharpwebdeveloper.com/2011/09/27/cheat-sheet-for-effectively-extending-nopcommerce/

I always put everything in source control (we use mercurial as well).

Thanks, that is exactly what I was looking for.

Appreciate the response and link.