Learning Magento Theme Development: Create visually stunning and responsive themes to customize the appearance of your Magento store

In Magento Community Edition 1.8, Magento provides the following four themes:

Magento's default theme is perhaps, unsurprisingly, the theme that is enabled by default when you first install Magento, encompassing a clear header area with a search field and drop-down navigation for categories to be listed, a content area with sidebar(s), and a footer, as shown in the following screenshot:

The default theme's product page layout retains the header and footer styling of the home page layout, but the central content area is adapted to present the product information to customers, as shown in the following screenshot:

As you can see in the preceding screenshot, the product page provides a product image with the name, a brief description, and the price of the specific product towards the top of the page. Then, a more detailed description is provided in the next block.

The category page layout

One of the next key views for your Magento store is the category page layout, which presents all the products grouped within a particular product category, as shown in the following screenshot:

The list mode layout

Magento presents products in two ways: in a grid (as shown in the preceding screenshot) and as a list, which you can select by clicking on the List option in the product grid, as shown in the following screenshot:

In the list mode, products within the selected category are displayed one above the other, as shown in the following screenshot:

Checkout

Finally, Magento's famous one-page checkout provides a well-structured checkout process for your customers, as shown in the following screenshot, maintaining the default theme's overall character:

Next, you will see the additional Magento themes that come with Magento Community Edition 1.8 to cater to different needs for both customers and developers.

The blank theme, as its name suggests, provides a very minimal approach to a Magento theme to allow a custom Magento theme to be built upon it, maintaining a layout that is similar to Magento's default theme but stripping the visual styles, as shown in the following screenshot:

The iPhone theme provides a more mobile-friendly theme for your Magento store, which can be switched on and off for specified devices. This view of the home page with the iPhone theme shows you how content is streamlined and slimmed down to help present the most relevant information to your customers on devices with limited screen space available, as shown in the following screenshot:

Finally, the modern theme provides a full-fledged Magento theme that can be used as an alternative to the default theme, with a more contemporary look, as shown in the following screenshot:

These themes show you just the surface of the potential customizations you can make to your Magento store, and this book will guide you through some of the common changes made to Magento stores as well as some less common alterations you can make to improve your Magento theme.

Magento has the following four levels of scope that help define the level in your Magento store(s) at which settings are applied:

The most common use of multiple stores in Magento is to build separate stores with their own inventories. For example, you could have one store, veryverycoolt-shirts.com, to sell t-shirts, and another, veryverycoolcaps.com, to sell baseball caps through the same installation of Magento. The following diagram illustrates the structure of how this would be created using Magento websites, stores, and store views:

You can chose whether the stores share the customer data or whether each store has its own customer data, requiring customers to register separately if they want to order from both the t-shirt store and cap store.

You can make use of multiple store views in Magento to customize how a store is presented; this is typically used to present the same store in multiple languages. In the following diagram, both stores have a French and English version, created at the Magento store view level:

Magento allows the following two types of themes:

A parent theme is useful when you want to create a highly customized Magento theme from the standard themes that Magento has installed. Child themes are of use when you only want to make fairly minor amendments to your theme.

Skins encompass the files that you would associate with a website's design: the CSS, images, and JavaScript your theme requires in order to display your store.

In Magento, skin files are located in the /skin/frontend/ directory. Magento's base skin files are stored in the /skin/frontend/base/default directory of your Magento installation, while theme files, which you would typically edit for custom themes that you create, would be included in the /skin/frontend/name-of-your-package/name-of-your-theme/ directory.

In the examples used in this book, you will be building a theme in the default package, so your skin directory will look like this: /skin/frontend/default/name-of-your-theme/.

Magento uses XML layout files in its themes to inform Magento about which blocks are displayed where in the page and in what order, for example, the MY CART and COMPARE PRODUCTS widgets that use Magento's default theme, as shown in the following screenshot:

The Magento layout can also be used to add and remove CSS and JavaScript files as well as other elements from the <head> element of your Magento theme and alter the order and location of the links.

Magento's base layout files are stored in the /app/design/frontend/base/default/layout directory of your Magento installation, while your custom theme's layout files can be found in the /app/design/frontend/name-of-your-package/name-of-your-theme/layout directory.

In the examples used in this book, you will be building a theme in the default package, so your application directory will look like this: /app/design/frontend/default/name-of-your-theme/.

Magento's template files (which use the .phtml file extension to indicate a mixture of PHP and HTML) provide your Magento theme with a way to generate the HTML for your store's pages using the data and content stored within Magento.

Magento's base template files are stored in the /app/design/frontend/base/default/template directory of your Magento installation, while your custom theme's layout files would be found in the /app/design/frontend/default/name-of-your-theme/template directory.

Finally, Magento's locale files help you customize the text in the interface elements of your Magento store, such as the text used as links in the userbar for your store, as shown in the following screenshot:

A Magento locale file can also be used to provide a translation of your store's elements to French, or even just American English to British English. In the preceding example, a locale file might change the My Cart link to My Basket, for instance.

The content of pages and products of your store can be translated by creating new products and pages in your new store's language within the store view for that particular language.

Magento locale files are stored in the /app/design/frontend/base/default/locale directory, with locale files specific to your theme being stored in the /app/design/frontend/name-of-your-package/name-of-your-theme/locale directory. Translations are stored in a translate.csv file; for example, /app/design/frontend/default/name-of-your-theme/locale/en_GB/translate.csv contains the translations for British English for that particular theme.

In Magento theming, a package typically encapsulates a default theme that contains all of the skin, template, layout, and locale files Magento needs to render the website. It might also contain another non-default theme that customizes the look and feel of the website on top of the base theme, as illustrated in the following diagram:

Assigning a package at the website level means that all the stores under that store level inherit that package. This would simply apply the theme to all of the stores assigned to that particular website in Magento. So, by assigning a theme at the website level in the following diagram, the Cap store and the T-shirt store would inherit the same theme, unless it was specifically overwritten at the individual store view level: