Reputation: 5521
I am a beginner with Magento trying to build a simple custom theme and while I have done a fair bit of research I am really in need of some simple clarifications because I think that the learning curve is rather steep but worth it once some basic concepts are understood. My design goals are very basic: All products listed on the homepage with different image sizes, floating left.
What I've done is downloaded the 'Modern' theme as a base to work with and renamed it:
app/design/frontend/default/mytheme
skin/frontend/default/mytheme
I've done some basic tweaking to the phtml files in
app/design/frontend/default/mytheme/template/
However, I have a number of questions:
Where exactly is the template for the homepage? Is it only customizable using the CMS>Pages control in the backend under Design>Page Layout? This confuses me because I am used to developing in wordpress and creating a custom php file for the index/homepage. I really think this separation of html/xml is really the hard thing for me to grasp.
If i can only customize the homepage using the backend, I see the block: <block type="catalog/product_new" name="home.catalog.product.new" alias="product_new" template="catalog/product/new.phtml" after="cms_page">
. Navigating to mytheme directory, I don't see anything referring to this. Where are these things located? Am I supposed to copy any file missing from mytheme from the base?
An endless thanks to anyone who can steer me in the right direction. I really think it is just a matter of understanding very important fundamentals of how Magento themes are structured. At the moment I am already finding it so frustrating having my finder window open 7 folders deep and having to move around constantly. How I miss the simplicity of Wordpress' single folder themes.
Thank you!!
Upvotes: 0
Views: 969
Reputation: 2931
A very big part of magento design is layouts. whether you choose to use a local.xml or change files from layouts folder you must have an ideea on how they work.
Here is a link for start
There are many others resources outhere ofcourse.
Upvotes: 0
Reputation: 12750
I suggest you to read all things in http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base before you go further
Upvotes: 2