Magento

Hi, i’m a complete newbie with magento and was wondering if it’s possible to use the default demo store theme as my theme?

As a designer whose coding abilities only stretch to CSS, i’m fairly confident i can skin the existing theme to suit my needs, so basically i wanted to know if its as straight forward as i think. i’m asking because i found this in some of the page files:

I’d obviously like to avoid further nasty surprises like this so if anyone can advise me the best way to go about this i’d be very grateful.

(i’d try to create my own theme but i’m afraid my head might explode with all the blocks/layout/xml stuff )

thanks

That message will be the only ‘surprise’. Although if you’re serious about your ecommerce business, probably you want to invest in skinning your very own design

The quickest way to skin the default theme (only using CSS) is as follows:

1. Copy /magento/skin/frontend/default/default folder to /magento/skin/frontend/default/newtheme

2. Go into your admin and turn off caching.

3. Go into your admin and tell Magento to use your theme.

This is done under System -> Configuration -> Design (I think!? Doing it from memory at the moment).

4. Get firefox with the firebug extension so you can see which CSS controls which parts of the page.

5. Begin editing. The three files you will mostly be editing are boxes.css, reset.css and menu.css in /magento/skin/frontend/default/newtheme.

Bear in mind that by only editing the CSS you can’t change the position of blocks on the page, only their styling.

Hope that helps.

I would not consider this a sustainable approach. Unless you are creating a new interface, you do not need to copy the default theme. All you need is to create your newtheme folder and insert the updated files in the approate folder structure as magento only needs updated file and falls back to the default theme for the files it can’t find in your newtheme folder. This is at least my understanding of the design guide.