Hi,
Can someone supply some (sane) links on where to get started with this smarty template stuff as well as the CScart API that the default skin relies upon?
Note I’m not particularly happy with using smarty at all…especially when I look at the generated HTML of a cscart shop and see a lot of noise. I want to start from the ground up in what gets presented to the customer.
I am completely unimpressed with articles such as “Examples of Design Changes” which just add bloat-ware to bloat-ware. I want my template to use 1 css file and to use html5 standards.
I’m very very conversant with html,css and php…but since cscart is all about smarty…then I must learn it too. 
In short, I’m not interested in just ‘changing a few colors’. I want a complete reworking of the final HTML and css.
Finally, after I do all this work…I’ll obviously need to be able to upgrade (v3.0 is around the corner). The sole purpose of smarty is to allow this…yes? Would I expect to have any problems with my template needing to be thrown out & start again?
PS: I don’t particularly care for the ‘Block design’ stuff. A bespoke template has no need for it.
Smarty (as used in cs-cart) doesn't add any bloat. It is simply used to pass variables and to provide “control” such as loops and conditional statements. The HTML is not embedded in Smarty,
Hello, cmroanirgo!
If you change the standard skin completely, the changes will not be transferred to version 3.0 after the upgrade since the template structure is different in it.
If you use only hooks will the Template upgrade to 3.0?
Its my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong ppl) that hooks will not be overwritten because they are addon files. So if you update your CS-Cart to v3.0 then all the non hook files should update.
Long story short: You may need to perform slight re-edits to your hook files (AND possibly - not sure though - re-add the {hook name=“”}{/hook} to the upgraded files if you created your own customs).
If the same hooks are used in V3 (who knows) and the hook mechanism has not changed from V2 to V3 (who knows) then the hooked templates located in the addons will not be updated.
However, this has nothing to do with whether they work or not (from a layout and data perspective). The data structures could have changed, the css could have (did) changed and the general page layout has definitely changed. Hence using old hooked changes to fit into the new grid layout scheme will probably mean that any template changes you have made will NOT be portable to V3. This is a supposition on my part. I have no intention of even looking at V3 until it appears to be a stable release.
That's why they made a V3 and didn't just do a 2.3.x release tree because a LOT of stuff from V2 will be incompatible.
They “should” address this when they do an upgrade from V2.2.4 to V3.something. Note that in V2, the upgrade from 1.35 didn't show up until 2.0.8 (that's 8 releases after the first final release).
So if you're on V2.x you are probably going to stay there a while if you can't move your store by simply exporting products, orders and customer and then loading up a new V3 and importing your data.
[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1329523278' post='131518']So if you're on V2.x you are probably going to stay there a while if you can't move your store by simply exporting products, orders and customer and then loading up a new V3 and importing your data.
[/quote]
Thanks all for your comments, however I am just about to buy the current version (2.2.4) and am not happy with the html being generated (not to mention a browser quirk with banners on chrome - see my post in the general section). So, obviously, buying the “Last Release” of version 2 doesn't seem like such a wildly great idea, but all-in-all it might be better to start at a very buggy v3.0.0 and work from there…