Magento theme customization

Magento is a powerful ecommerce platform that helps in the easy and rapid development of completely customized and user-friendly online shopping portals. While it has got magnificent features to support developer’s needs for faster, efficient and easier web development process, it also has capabilities to attract users by offering them with convenient browsing, product selection and buying options. One can always customize their Magento based online business or ecommerce website with attractive front end themes by opting for Magento theme customization.

 

Custom Magento theme development is a process where the expert Magento developers can create a custom theme to make your ecommerce portal attractive in terms of appearance and design. They can either modify your existing theme or can create a Magento theme from scratch so that your online business website looks attractive and draws the attention of maximum number of users or customers. For the beginners, who do not have any experience of professional Magento theme development, should initially start with development of simple themes in order to get an idea of the basics in the process. If you are a beginner and want to develop a theme using Magento, then you will require superb insight of tool to proceed with it. You will require several files to accomplish your task of Magento theme customization. Hence, in short there are certain things which as a beginner you should be aware of, for the custom theme development process and they are as follows.

 

The Hierarchy

In order to start with Magento theme development, one has to understand the hierarchy structure of Magento and the place in this hierarchy where exactly the theme to be developed will fit. In Magento, a hierarchy to say starts with a directory. Directories are the containers in which packages and themes are found. There are mainly two directories or folders by default – app and skin. While app contains files defining the page templates, the skin directory contains files that control the appearance of the website like CSS, JavaScript and images.

 

Themes & Packages

For Magento theme development, one has to understand about concept of themes and packages. A package contains a collection of themes. Any Magento website can have one or more packages in it. However, base and default are the basic packages found in Magento website structure. Base package makes Magento’s core files available to the front end. However, as a warning to a beginner, editing should not be performed in the base package. Similar is the case with default package as well. The theme folder is placed inside one of these packages and consists of all the files essential for online store development. Similar to files, there is no limitation even for the number of themes a package can have and be used by the developer in the Magento theme customization or development process.

 

Layout & Template Files

There are yet two other essential things to focus – layout folder containing the XML files that are important in front end development and the template files that are combination of PHP and HTML data important for theme development.

 

Fallback Logic

Knowing about fallback logic is essential for every beginner because this is the thing that will help them maintain and edit the files required in theme development. For theme maintenance and upgradation, this is important feature, a beginner should understand.

All the above things are crucial for a beginner to learn before going for Magento theme customization or development. By ensuring these, a beginner will easily understand the development process to create awesome and fully fledged themes for Magento websites.

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