The basic structure of magento themes is simple. It’s a combination of layout, locale, template or skins. Magento Themes Development is a blend of creativity and technology. You cannot truely create something exceptional without understanding the technology that goes behind it. A theme is what gives your store the look and feel you desire. In short it’s something that creates the visual experience of your online store.
Layout: Layouts are basically XML files. They contain the basic block structure of the page. They also contain the control META information and page encoding. This form the very basic building blocks of your website.
Templates: Templates are PHTML files. These files contain (X)HTML markups. They also contain PHP tags. All this together creates the logic for visual presentation of your web page.
Locale: These are files in text format used for translations whenever necessary.
Skins: These are java scripts that are block specific and image files that compliment your (X)HTML.
To develop magento themes with such a clear structure becomes very easy. Other than these basic structures, Magento comes with two approaches to create themes – a Default Theme and a Non – default theme. Lets check out what these two entities are for.
Default theme: this is the theme that loads as soon as you launch. It is the main theme of your interface. This is loaded to the front end. For your store design, you can either modify this theme, or create a non – default theme and load it along with the non default theme. It contains all the necessary templates, locales, skins etc and hence is lowest in the themes heirarchy.
Non – Default theme: A non – default theme is generally used for creating a temporary seasonal theme for promotions, for eg: chrismas theme, or a special offer theme etc. It can contain as many little theme files as you wish. You need not create a whole new default theme and load it for temporary promotions.
Well, that was some basic information about what exactly a theme incorporates. The basic structure is really simple. After understanding this, you can read about the coding for further learning. Once you get the basic idea right, working will be more fun and more easy. Magento Theme design and development can be better understood after understanding the basic structure of Magento Themes.
