I am having a big trouble finding a way to edit and change the content of the Omega Kickstart 7.x-3.4 (default theme) for eCommerce sites.
Firstly i made a sub theme of Omega Kickstart 7.x-3.4 (default theme) by using this link https://drupal.org/node/2057387 but I came to the point which i dont know how to make changes to the site and not speaking only regarding css but making my own new divs and content within.
If anyone knows how to accomplish this it would make my life easier.
Thanks a lot !!!!!!! Love Angelos
The Commerce Kickstart Theme is based off the Omega Base Theme, so a healthy knowledge of Omega will allow you to manipulate the presentation of your website.
To edit the regions and zones of your site, you can edit the YOURTHEME.info file as per the tutorial or in the original Omega Documentation. The Zones and regions determine where you may place your blocks and content etc in the theme settings itself.
To configure the behaviour of the website, edit the regions (column width etc) on your sub-theme settings on your admin as such:
yoursite.com/admin/appearance/settings/THEME_NAME
Scott Tolinski of LevelUp Tuts did a tutorial on how to edit this which can be quite helpful:
http://leveluptuts.com/tutorials/drupal-tutorials/58-drupal-theming-omega-101-4-omega-settings
Finally, to tweak the CSS of your site, you will need to understand how the CSS is managed. All CSS should be located in your \sites\YOUR_THEME\drupal-7.XX\sites\all\themes\THEME\css folder.
By default Commerce Kickstart like all Omega themes will contain a global.css, theme-alpha-default.css theme-alpha-narrow.css, theme-alpha-normal.css, theme-alpha-wide.cssfiles. Global is the primary CSS you'll be operating in, just be sure you tweak the CSS in a mobile first manner. Anner media query specfic styling should be handled in the appropriate style sheet.
Now, since you are using Kickstart there will be a lot of pre-configured CSS; some of which may become useless or unused if you tweak the regions and zones too much but hopefully once you understand Omega better you will be able to make tweaks to the aesthetic as appropriate. I highly recommend Level Up tuts video tutorials as a basic, and try to read the Omega Documentation to understand how to handle the theme appropriately.
Related
I have been trying to develop my first WordPress theme. When I added a theme "primer" and started customizing it, it appears as an image.
The primer theme appearing as shown not as it is shown in demo
Can you give a little more detail. Normally themes are generally blank and often never look like the picture. Its up to you to use the themes composer, purchase a composer if your theme does not have one, or hand codde the site only using the theme for an overall look. For instance my theme I use a mix. I installed it and got a blank theme. I then used the composer to add elements and build out the page. Some themes even offer templates which is likely what you saw when you bought the theme. Your theme should have some sort of templates for free or premium templates for purchase you can add on top of your theme to get a prebuilt layout. I would highly enocourage watching a few youtube videos over themes and customizations and using envato.com to our advantage. Wordpress is a beast most people dont realize. Its not a change words and done. There are multiple other sites for that. I just finished my first one and its a bear. It take patience creativity and a basic understanding of Wordpress to operate, and some coding experience would greatly benefit to.
I have been asked to create an eCommerce website for a client on a strict budget. I figured using WordPress would be my best bet in this case. I am new to both WordPress and developing an eCommerce/online store. I intended on designing and developing my own bespoke theme for the client, however their limited budget does not accommodate the fee I quoted for designing and developing a bespoke theme. Therefore, I thought that a free theme would be the most suitable option in working within the constraints of the budget.
My questions regarding using the free theme are:
What are the limitations to using a free pre-made theme in terms of its styling, look and layout (structure)? For example, could I easily move the logo or other elements and graphics to elsewhere on the same page if I wanted or I am stuck with having those items wherever they are originally placed? In other words, what flexibility do I get in changing the design?
How 'unique' could I expect it to look with some customization?
What are the limitations on features and functionality?
Would I get more design flexibility with a premium theme instead?
There are pretty much no limitations.
You can make a child theme out of the free theme, then you can customise the css and php files which make up that theme, as much as you like. That will allow you to do everything you mention in point 1. See http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes for details.
Wordpress provides a simple web interface that allows you to view and edit the files, or you can just edit them using your favourite code editor.
The idea with a child theme is that any file which you customize overrides the file in the original theme. This means if there are updates to that theme in the future, you can safely download them without wiping out the customisations you've made.
I would recommend you start with something like the twitter bootstrap theme for wordpress, which gives you a neutral design and quite a lot of useful javascript functions. That will help you with point 2 - ensuring uniqueness, as you don't start with something that already has a distinctive look and feel.
re: point 3 - that's the great thing with wordpress. Just add plugins and widgets (or even develop your own). There really are no limits.
To answer point 4: Premium themes typically provide more sophistication in terms of design features and add-ins like scrollers, slideshows and shortcodes. Sometimes they also provide customised interfaces that allow limited customisation such as colour schemes and page layout, but essentially the wordpress interface for customisation is the same, whether you've paid for the theme or not.
I hope this is not too basic to be off-topic, but I am wondering to what extent it is possible to customize WordPress to fit an existing design. I have a design in mind and read somewhere (WordPress manuals?) that it is possible to only manage a small part of a website with WordPress and then slowly migrate the whole site to be WordPress-managed. If one would like to preserve a certain design, is this preferred to tweaking WordPress templates? That is to say, should I start from a website and slowly move into WordPress, or should I start from the WordPress template, and try to tweak it until I arrive at the design I want. Are there any examples of WordPress sites, which fall into light-weight (but image heavy) websites, which exhibit freedom from the WordPress mold? (Is this too vague?)
Generally speaking, I think it makes more sense to start with WordPress from the start if that is what you intend to use at the end. It will be much easier to transition your site into being fully WordPress-managed after you have some small piece of it in WordPress. This is because, while a lot of the design will fit easily into the HTML WordPress with only minor tweaks, WordPress theming is kind of a specific subcategory of its own, and there will be less of a barrier to moving if your start with CSS that is compatible with WordPress.
WordPress also makes it easy to override individual page nodes, so the static portions of your site can be part of WordPress in a very loose sense, and you'll have full control over the markup. It is less to start writing your markup knowing what you've already had to do to get your design to work with WordPress than to transition to WordPress later.
If you are new to WordPress theming, here are some links to get you started:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
http://themeshaper.com/2009/06/22/wordpress-themes-templates-tutorial/
Your approach depends on the technical capabilities of you to setup two sites that live next to each other.
In general, you'll have to modify Wordpretss theme to fit your design. I prefer something of a skeleton theme - http://themehybrid.com/themes Skeleton/Hybrid one. The thing about this approach is that you'll have to build your design from ground up and fit it into Wordpress way of doing things. Wordpress likes to output HTML with additional CSS styles and it's usually much easier to use those elements then to modify them to fit yours.
My personal choice, I'd start using WordPress right away, learn as much as I can about the CMS aspects, you have great tutorials at WP101 (dot) com then move to create or built your own templates. I'd suggest you first start with a simple template like Twenty Ten and modify it then perhaps you can use Responsive which is my favorite or many others. This 2 sites for example were built in WP
http://www.philiphousenyc.com/ and
http://www.danielhopwood.com/
Good Luck,
Mike
Thing I plan to do is to make many websites based on Drupal core.
All of these websites will be quite small, but there will be many of them (in matter of hundreds).
I'm working on this with one HTML / CSS coder, guy who should make themes for every website we make.
He doesn't know much of a PHP (enough for PHPTemplateEngine tho) therefor I what I want is to make as little interaction between me and him as possible. He shouldn't touch PHP part of themes, I shouldn't touch HTML part of themes.
My question is:
Can you tell me what structure of theme folder should I use, what's your opinion of Zen theme for beginning of Drupal theming and how can I make automatic JavaScript and CSS loading script for themes?
Also I'd greatly appreciate any tips concerning multi-site Drupal setup, best practices and so on.
Thanks in advance.
With regards to drupal theming you have a couple of options:
If all the themes will share 98% of the same code base and just have different classes etc to style it visually different (say a different heading colour), then you can get away with one drupal theme and use theme settings to alter the configuration of the theme on each site. This has the advantage of having to maintain only one code base. Zen can still be used as a base theme if you wish
Another option is one you have mentioned above, in which you have a base theme which declares all inherited code, and sub themes to which override specific parts of the base theme to create the necessary effects. I would suggest that this is the better option if your themes vary wildly from one site to another. There is a administrative burden with this option though, as say you have 100 sites, you could potentially have 100 sub-themes to maintain and provide fixes for.
I'm developing a web site for a further education college in the UK, using Drupal (6.19). The site won't contain a huge volume of content and the structure is fairly simple.
I understand HTML and I have an reasonable understanding of PHP, SQL and CSS. I've created a sub-theme based on Genesis, but I'm feeling a bit out of my depth.
In your opinion, based on my level of skill, is it best to create a theme from scratch, or should I continue to develop my Genesis sub-theme?
Thanks,
Mike
As a general rule it makes sense to build on top of a starter theme such as Zen, ninesixty, or genesis. Those themes provide considerable functionality that is not worth rewriting. I'm not that familiar with genesis, but the other two provide a CSS reset, skiplinks to navigation for accessibility, SEO-sensitive content ordering, inline edit controls, and much more. Also, as with any piece of Drupal, when problems are discovered and corrected, you can update the base of your subtheme and get the fixes for free. Unless you have specific requirements that can't be met by subtheming, I recommend using a base theme.