CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phphtmlcssmagentoe-commerce
waffl
waffl

Reputation: 5521

Magento - Beginner Concepts - Theme structure

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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?

  3. Is it only possible to have 1 column, 2 column, 3 column etc. layouts?

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

Answers (2)

Ovidiu
Ovidiu

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

Intro to Layouts

There are many others resources outhere ofcourse.

Upvotes: 0

Anton S
Anton S

Reputation: 12750

I suggest you to read all things in http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base before you go further

  1. homepage content can be anything you want and you can reference it to be anything with layout file descriptors
  2. MVC concept tells that it is taken from catalog/product_new block and from whatever is set to it's template. In current case catalog/product/new.phtml is used and you can edit this
  3. you can have a completely custom setup and not restricted to anything that default contains. However it is wise to use defaults as almost all extensions depend on defaults more or less.

Upvotes: 2

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