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Guides on how to mod or create skins


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Im looking for current how to guides, or resources on how to modify or create new skins.

Ive been trying to play with the sample cc5 skins, but am not making much headway. All of the resources Ive found discussing this is outdated and geared to cc3.

Can someone point me to a few good resources on this topic?

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Guest hennaboy

I am approx 90% through changing my skin from v4 to v5. Time taken is only a few hours.

Easiest way for myself was to choose a v5 skin which matched my v4 skin in layout and width.

Upload all the images from my v4 skin to the directory of a v5 skin.

Open in a text editor your layout.css from your v4 skin. Open common.css from a v5 skin.

You can then start to alter the css.

If your upgrading I would highly recommend you do this to a test store. Its very easy to set this up. Copy all v4 files to a new directory. Go to phpmyadmin in your hosting control panel and select your v4 database. Choose Operations from the menu. Copy your database to a new database name. Assign a user to the database in your control panel. Dont forget to change the details in global.inc.php to your NEW database/user and trial licence for v5 BEFORE you run through the upgrade!

I inspect the elements in google chrome (right click inspect element) which gives you the v5 css class. Search for this in the common.css and then change to your v4 css.

Buttons are different in v5 as they are using a background image and then css text over the top. You will find these in the templates directory.

You should find it pretty easy to change to your images/colours from here.

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It looks that you are very familiar with css code, just a quick question for you, do you know if it is possible just add a facebook iframe to the right side bar of the store home page?

css is just too difficult for me, I have no idea where I can add the code in.

Thanks in advance.

I am approx 90% through changing my skin from v4 to v5. Time taken is only a few hours.

Easiest way for myself was to choose a v5 skin which matched my v4 skin in layout and width.

Upload all the images from my v4 skin to the directory of a v5 skin.

Open in a text editor your layout.css from your v4 skin. Open common.css from a v5 skin.

You can then start to alter the css.

If your upgrading I would highly recommend you do this to a test store. Its very easy to set this up. Copy all v4 files to a new directory. Go to phpmyadmin in your hosting control panel and select your v4 database. Choose Operations from the menu. Copy your database to a new database name. Assign a user to the database in your control panel. Dont forget to change the details in global.inc.php to your NEW database/user and trial licence for v5 BEFORE you run through the upgrade!

I inspect the elements in google chrome (right click inspect element) which gives you the v5 css class. Search for this in the common.css and then change to your v4 css.

Buttons are different in v5 as they are using a background image and then css text over the top. You will find these in the templates directory.

You should find it pretty easy to change to your images/colours from here.

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Guest hennaboy

A facebook iframe. Well explain more what you need there as there is the plugin already included in cc5 for likes and comments for facebook.

If you require more than that then im sure it would be possible by expanding the facebook plugin.

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I am basically looking to add this box to the right side of the page under popular products:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fplatform&amp;width=292&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;show_faces=true&amp;border_color&amp;stream=true&amp;header=true&amp;height=427" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:292px; height:427px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>

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  • 2 weeks later...
Guest notbot

There are currently no v5 resources as it was only released on the 22nd (3 working days ago). However there are mods and skins starting to appear in the third-party forum.

What is a release without documentation? This is not an acceptable answer for a commercial product.

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Guest hennaboy

Its quite normal for a release to have docs on how to use the software and then for developer docs to follow.

There is a help link on all the admin pages which opens a modal window with the relevant info. Or you can also open the cc5 wiki site in a new browser tab and see all the info available.

That is actually more info than some of the closest rival ecommerce suites available.

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Guest grumpydave

Its quite normal for a release to have docs on how to use the software and then for developer docs to follow.

There is a help link on all the admin pages which opens a modal window with the relevant info. Or you can also open the cc5 wiki site in a new browser tab and see all the info available.

That is actually more info than some of the closest rival ecommerce suites available.

Hi hennaboy, where can I discover said CC5 wiki site?

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Guest grumpydave

Click the help link in your store admin or http://helpdocs.info/Main_Page

Thanks for the link. Absolutely no information at all of the new template system or modifying the look of CC5 though......Been looking at the files in my trial install, would I be right in assuming that smarty is now being used? Funny that the CC5 blurb on the CC site doesn't seem to mention the use of smarty anywhere.

I have not had any experience of using smarty before and it looks very daunting and complicated compared to the templates and placeholders used in CC4. The smarty website is not much help at all and is obviously geared at instructing existing programmers rather than teaching people with little or no knowledge of PHP how to use it.

There is already a great resource available at cubecartforums for designing sites with CC4 but unfortunately nothing like this yet for CC5. I am interested in producing a bespoke site for myself rather than tweaking an existing skin and I have had success with CC4 doing this in the past.

The temptation of course is to look elsewhere for a shopping cart, particularly if I need to learn smarty or another template system anyhow and the competition already has very extensive documentation on how to get me to where I want to be (high quality documentation that is provided by the cart by the way and not just produced by its community). I would like to stay with CC if possible for a number of reasons and if anyone could outline how the new template system works for me I would be very grateful indeed!

Cheers,

Dave.

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Guest grumpydave

There are currently no v5 resources as it was only released on the 22nd (3 working days ago). However there are mods and skins starting to appear in the third-party forum.

What is a release without documentation? This is not an acceptable answer for a commercial product.

I agree.

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Guest hennaboy

Really? so you would rather spend probably the same amount of time modifying and reading through the documentation of another cart than learn how to use the smarty template system?

Try this

http://www.phpeveryday.com/articles/Smarty-Template-Engine-Tutorial-P849.html

Years ago when I first came across smarty I couldnt really get anywhere with it. However when you do actually practise a bit with it then you will see why so many software vendors choose it.

Its secure, Its flexible and pretty easy to work with.

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There are currently no v5 resources as it was only released on the 22nd (3 working days ago). However there are mods and skins starting to appear in the third-party forum.

What is a release without documentation? This is not an acceptable answer for a commercial product.

I have to agree. There should, at least, be a guide on how to do some basic customizing. A list of the files that can be edited? I can't get my logos to show up and I can't get any help with it. I even submitted a ticket that I had to pay for and I still don't have any help. Seems like a simple thing but without documentation I'm on my own out here.

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Guest KatGirl

I have to agree. There should, at least, be a guide on how to do some basic customizing. A list of the files that can be edited? I can't get my logos to show up and I can't get any help with it. I even submitted a ticket that I had to pay for and I still don't have any help. Seems like a simple thing but without documentation I'm on my own out here.

What seems to be the problem with this? Maybe I can help?

When I used the upload logo section within Admin, my logo didn't appear. Instead the default logo from the skin I was using was still showing. I figured out that was because of the caching system in place. So I disabled Caching in my admin >> General Settings to bug track the logo. I also uploaded default.gif of my logo, even though I was using logo.png as my uploaded version.

I hard refresh the homepage and my logo showed.

Can you try this and let us know how you go?

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  • 3 weeks later...
Guest jamble

There are currently no v5 resources as it was only released on the 22nd (3 working days ago). However there are mods and skins starting to appear in the third-party forum.

What is a release without documentation? This is not an acceptable answer for a commercial product.

I agree.

Me too, I've been scratching around all morning looking for information and guides for CC5 and there's still very little.

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  • 4 weeks later...
Guest BubbaSully

There are currently no v5 resources as it was only released on the 22nd (3 working days ago). However there are mods and skins starting to appear in the third-party forum.

What is a release without documentation? This is not an acceptable answer for a commercial product.

I agree.

The WIKI site is still just showing basic definition information with no developer assistance!!! Does anyone know of other sites offering helpful information for a CC v5?

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The WIKI site is still just showing basic definition information with no developer assistance!!! Does anyone know of other sites offering helpful information for a CC v5?

There is currently no CubeCart 5 specific documentation, although most of the PHP classes are documented. If you're interested in designing themes, you'll want to read through the SMARTY documentation: http://www.smarty.net/docs/en/

The SMARTY website has a nice section for template designers: http://www.smarty.net/docs/en/smarty.for.designers.tpl

Other than the basic SMARTY syntax, themes are simply plain old HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

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  • 2 months later...

I find this interesting.

An individual or a team of developers have spent most probably a huge amount of time, effort and maybe money on developing this commercial product.

How much extra time would it have taken them to just put a few pages together outlining the archetecture or structure of themes in cubecart version 5. What each files basically is responsible for. Compared to the time put into developing it.

Something doesn't make logical sense.

Why would they not do this. Spend all them hours developing the new version but spend probably 1hour to create a basic document like that. Is there some alterior motive at play? Maybe there is maybe there isn't but something doesn't seem to add up.

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How much extra time would it have taken them to just put a few pages together outlining the archetecture or structure of themes in cubecart version 5.

I have to agree with you. I'm not happy about CC5 at all. I've spent way too much time trying to figure out the construction of the pages so I can customize my store. No documentation STILL! I keep checking every few weeks hoping for some help with templates or maybe even someone else who has developed some new templates and nothing. Not even the cubecart.org has anyone working on any. Every sight that used to carry templates and extras for CC still don't have anything for CC5. One sight says they will update with something "as soon as there is a stable copy".

I'm getting disgusted with it. I've been using every version since 2004 and now they have a version that I can't customize. It's no longer a good program for someone like me. Which is really upsetting considering how much money I have in licenses. I'm looking for something else now.

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It is a shame because the admin area looks fantastic. What I may do once I figure it out is put together a pdf and do their job for them. Anyone in the cubecart community that feels like contributing please do

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