Magento

Well, as we see here the thing is to get it flexible. You can CHOOSE to have Smarty/Flexy/Magento’s own templating probably in the future. I personally also would choose control over easy. But thing is that you just simply can’t make everyone happy, so the main thing is to give choices. And that’s what I think Magento’s doing at the moment.

i would prefer a wordpress like template system rather than smarty.
and to be honest: it’s not that hard to learn.

Smarty and Wordpress both have their faults.  I’d rather option c) (which I don’t know what it is).

It would be a template system like Expression Engine has .  Incidentally, this forum is a module and it’s driven by Expression Engine.  Their templating system is wonderful.

EDIT:  Oops !  Silly me.  I read this thread backwards.  My suggestions were already addressed at the top of this thread.

I agree a lot with what everyone is saying, with every new ecommerce and cms solution there is a learning curve, that is what keeps a big portion of sites using them with essentially the same look, just a change of a color here, a logo there. 

My biggest gripe with most ecommerce packages is the need for 200+ selectors/ids/classes/tags/etc, this makes templates a nightmare for a large portion of designers.  If it were me writing a solution from scratch, I’d have a base set of page components (masthead, navigation, content) then drill down with style as needed, but keep it to where you don’t need:

html body #container #content .page .element.subElement a
(yes, poking a bit of fun, but in good fun)

Instead:

#content a

Would get the job done.  In all actuality though, it’s almost necessary for all of these css bits from a programmatic standpoint, as an ecommerce solution has so many sections.  With this project moving forward I’m fully confident that the wonderful team over at Varien will get us the documentation that we need, and get the template system polished a bit better.

Keep up the great work!

i agree with the general consensus here, develop your own system.. smarty just ain’t smart enough.

I’m interested in doing some Template work for Magento but can I have some comfirmation that the current system will be more or less the one that is going to be used in the future?
I can understand some changes but I would hate to start making template packages that do not work in 6 Months or 1 Year.

I can confirm that the structure will change a bit in upcoming versions. We hope to have a ‘final’ implementation as soon as possible.

Thamks for quick reply Roy, I’m glad I checked!

Like Wordpress would be cool, I hate Smarty. 

I agree that MCV separation is enough, but the couple hours I spent pouring over the CSS for the default template led me to believe it needs help.  Documentation would go a long way towards helping understand the hundreds of different classes generated by Magento, but I think reorganizing the order of the declarations could better highlight relationships between them.

@Octopus - we are working on the documentation right now and it should be made available soon.

thanks

yoav

RoyRubin - 25 September 2007 06:26 AM

I can confirm that the structure will change a bit in upcoming versions. We hope to have a ‘final’ implementation as soon as possible.

Are you at the “final implementation” stage yet where our dev work on design won’t be thrown away down the road?

kappaluppa - 21 June 2008 05:44 PM

RoyRubin - 25 September 2007 06:26 AM

I can confirm that the structure will change a bit in upcoming versions. We hope to have a ‘final’ implementation as soon as possible.

Are you at the “final implementation” stage yet where our dev work on design won’t be thrown away down the road?

I’m pretty sure it was more or less finalized when the production version was released March 31st - anyone feel free to correct me.

Raine - 03 September 2007 05:30 AM

So i was prepared for Magento cause it was *the new way* of ecommerce well it maybe is,
but you forgot one thing. Templates

I am a designer not a coder (altho i can write php)

But i was hoping for a EASY way of making customization to the site themes and doing my own style (hoping Magento was flexible enough)

But today i downloaded the svn release and looked at the templates.

<?if ($this->getGalleryImages() && $this->getGalleryImages()->getSize()):?>
            <div class="more-views">
                <h4><?=__('More Views')?></h4>
                        <li><?=__('Buy')?> <?=$_price['price_qty']?> <?=__('for')?> <strong><?=$_price['formated_price']?></strong></li>

Tell me how would i make sense of this :/ (i could cause i recognize the php tags // but that is not the issue)
A startup designer must work on the design not on the code.

This template system may be easy for some people (maybe a lot) but for some… man..it’s a whole learning curve (just like wordpress templates)

Maybe you guys will address this in future version of Magento (i hope so) cause the only thing all the other ecommerce packages lack is a Proper Way of Templating (customization)

A example of a very nice way of doing templates (not advertising here, just explaining what i mean):
Take a look at ExpressionEngine they have a beautifully/easy way of doing templates, that makes much more sense (to me and a lot of other people). See here and here

Well all the other things of Magento rocks.

If it was easy, it would be far too restrictive, you need to understand how stuff works.

One line that sticks out there a lot, is your believe that the designer shouldnt know code? that makes absolute no sense what so ever, your designers SHOULD know CSS through and through to begin with, add to that they should know the limitations and issues with the systems they are designing for to avoid potentially wrong designs being signed off by your client to not acturally be possible.

Your coders and designers should have knowledge of both sides of the coin in which they are dealing with.