Starting VirtoCommerce Storefront Theme Development

Question

Trying to start from Timber but the solution won't load without a site on IIS Express existing. Further the contents of the downloaded zip file, while working, the solution does not come with a way to deploy to a new zip so I can create a new zip and deploy. There seem to be files in the zip that are not in the solution so I'm concerned I might not end up with same result just zipping up the files in the solution.

Trying to download the Skeleton but no links to actually download from the app store?

https://virtocommerce.com/skeleton-theme

Answer 1

Starting from the VirtoCommerce.Storefront project.

• Copy the contents of the App_Data/Themes/Default folder to a "theme" directory in a new directory.
• Create a git repo from the root that contains the "theme" folder.

• Add a GitVersion.yml file to control the versioning.

• Running in Azure using blob storage you can create a CI process to automatically upload your theme when changes are checked in.

• Lastly login to the platform, navigate to the site you uploaded to and activate the new theme. This allows you to fall back if needed.

Zip File

You could also zip the contents of your repo up as well.

The zip file should have a folder in it like "ThemeName-0.0.0", within that folder should be the assets, config, layout, locales, snippets, social and templates folders.

Upload that in the store of your choice and activate.

Answer 2

I'll suggest to use default storefont theme as base theme for customization and educations.

I'm providing some helpful information for helping you to better understand some technical moments related to working with the VC themes:

How theme resources resolving process works:

How to develop custom theme and what technology stack for this use:

• Local running pre-compiled platform with installed modules
• Local storefront fork (pre-compiled or from source code if you need to future customization)
• For case with single theme you might directly change default (global) theme which contains in storefront project App_Data/Themes/default or make separated GitHub repository which will contain only theme and static pages files (as we made for our main site virtocommerce.com theme) and link folder with theme to storefront App_Data/Themes/{store name}/Themes.
• Edit theme files in Visual studio code or any other preferred IDE, all changes will be immediately reflected to the local storefront, thanks to the cache invalidation based on theme folder file changes watcher.
• Deploy theme changes to staging or productions environment by using any of convenient CI processes. We are use Jenkins server and Azure Deployment.
• Change theme files from manager UI not recommended because you will lose history of changes. And you should use this way only for emergency fixes or for debugging purposes.