Introduction to creating custom themes with OpenCart

In this series, I will explain how to build a custom theme using the popular open source e-commerce framework OpenCart. In the first part, I will explain the basic structure of an OpenCart theme.

Before continuing, I assume that you already have a working OpenCart installation on your local workstation. If this is not the case, check the OpenCart online documentation and set it up (as doing so is beyond the scope of this tutorial). Once you have a working OpenCart installed, you're ready to get started!

Quickly understand the OpenCart structure

OpenCart is built using the MVC design pattern, allowing separation of concerns between data and presentation. As a theme developer, you don’t have to constantly worry about tweaking the files that contain your application logic and template code.

OpenCart provides a very clean directory structure in terms of framework organization. All files related to the backend interface are placed in the admin directory. The files for processing the front-end interface are placed in the catalog directory. But what we're really interested in is the catalog catalog, because eventually we'll end up with a custom front-end theme at the end of this tutorial series.

OpenCart design pattern: MVC-L

Model View Controller (MVC) is a very popular design pattern in the field of software development. OpenCart just adds another element to it: Language, which is why we call it MVC-L.

In our case, the view section is where we put all of our theme-related code. In this quick overview of the catalog structure, we'll see how OpenCart works its magic.

Element Overview

1. Controller. It is responsible for handling application logic.
2. language. It is useful for isolating language-specific information for multilingual websites.
3. Model. It is responsible for getting data from the backend database.
4. Check. This is where we spend most of our time! It is responsible for rendering the front-end layout.

Familiar with the presentation layer

The default OpenCart theme is located in the view directory. This is what we'll explore in this section. Going deeper still, there are two directories: javascript and theme.

Now, we assume that all required JavaScript files are placed in the javascript directory. Sometimes there are exceptions, in which case we can also place stylesheets and related image files in this directory. For example, OpenCart provides the colorbox library, which includes more than just JavaScript.

What we are really interested in is the theme directory. Looking further, there is a directory called default, which is the only built-in theme provided by OpenCart. Don't be overwhelmed by the deeper thematic structure, as we'll explore it in more detail soon. Now, see what the structure of the theme looks like.

Default theme structure

1. image. As you may have guessed, all image files related to the theme are located here.
2. Style Sheet. Skin-related code (probably a stylesheet) will go here.
3. template. As the name suggests, you can find all front-end template files here. All template files are organized in a modular manner to keep things tidy.

For example, if you take a quick look at the account directory under the templates, you'll see that most of the files are related to the user screens on the frontend. We will discuss this in more detail in the next article.

Template World

As I mentioned before, OpenCart provides a great way to organize your template files. In this article, I will try to explain what is inside the template directory. Before proceeding, it is worth noting that although OpenCart comes with a bunch of built-in modules that provide the functionality required for a basic shopping cart, you can also develop your own modules as per your custom requirements.

With that said, let’s take a closer look at template classification.

Template classification

1. General. Template files for common elements of different pages are placed in this directory. Examples include header, footer, and sidebar related templates. If you plan to use the template file on different pages, you should also place the template file here so that it is easier to maintain in the long run. Of course, it's not mandatory, but it's a good thing to do things the way they're supposed to be done.
mistake.
2. Currently, this is just the error template.
information.
3. Here you can find templates related to contact pages, sitemap pages and static information pages.
Module.
4. This is an important directory in terms of the types of templates it holds. As I said before in OpenCart we can create our own custom modules to suit our custom requirements, so here you can place the template files related to your custom modules.
In addition to the template structure explained above, there are other template directories containing page-specific template files. As far as OpenCart is concerned, we can say that they are

Route

specific template files. For example, when you visit the My Account page on the frontend, you should find the template associated with it under

catalog/view/theme/default/template/account

. Later in this series, we'll learn how to find a specific template file by looking at the url path of that page. Summary

This concludes the first part of this series. You should be familiar with OpenCart's basic theme structure.

In the next part, we will learn how to Open shopping cart. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to leave your Comment!

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