Advice To Designers and Developers of CS-Cart Skins

Developers Frontend
1

Hi all, I just wanted to give this advice to people are are designing or coding a CS-Cart skin.


  • Use hooks if possible (do not create hooks that did not originally exist)
  • If you have to do in-depth customization, understand Smarty and don’t be afraid to edit template files directly AS LONG as your skin is custom (e.g. don’t just code the basic and keep the skin name basic or base)
  • Keep a documentation of what you changed (maintain your changes in a repository [SVN,GIT])



    A CS-Cart skin is going to become broken no matter what if you upgrade. If you code it right and keep all your changes in original files and original hooks you won’t have that much to modify in order to adapt. Don’t be afraid to make your skin custom, adding cool stuff and new features; it will bring in more sales. Always try to stay in scope though if you can.



    I just thought I would write this for new skin designers, because once you get the flow of the skin system its actually not that hard at all.



    PS. Always keep the Smarty documentation on hand.
2

Opinion: creating a new hook in a template is preferred to adding code to the template.



Opinion2: There is no advantage to creating a new skin name. The upgrade will be applied against it just as well as a standard skin. So if you’ve used hooks it’s irrelevant what the skin name is, results are the same.



Good observations…