The default skins are not very well written at all. They work fine, however if you look at the code behind it you’ll see how terrible it is. They use tables here and then randomly use css in the next field.
With that said, they make it very easy to write your own templates. I’ve seen numberou sites that have written their own templates and the code looks awesome.
So i guess its up to you. If you are looking for something that you can just opent he css file and change the looks, look else where. If you are willing to spend a bit of time to write a custom template, then this is the cart for you.
I’ve heard a lot of talk about the deficiencies in the design of CS-Cart and quite frankly my experience has been very different with re-designing and customization. Once you know your way around the system, it is fairly simple to do anything you want with the design. A good graphics program such as Photoshop and a text editor such as notepad are the only tools you will need.
If you’re not familiar with a program like this, it seems really difficult to customize at first as the template system is what I believe is referred to as “object oriented” … i.e. every element has it’s own template or series of templates. It’s hard to get your head around as a beginning customizer, and can be very time consuming as you learn what lives in what file. However ,it does offer a lot of flexibility and once you learn the system (and a little smarty, and a little php)it is relatively easy to make pretty significant changes.
The templates w/ 1.3.5 are much better than those that preceeded as they used to be far more riddled with small nested tables which created a lot of unnecessary work. I understand the ‘basic’ skin is much cleaner than most of the others but I started from one of the ‘default’ skins so I couldn’t guarantee that.
I’m personally not one who trusts totally CSS driven templates yet, seen too many problems w/ cross-browser consistency, “jumpy” page loads and jumbled pages from either broken css or incomplete / incorrect rendering of pages. Simple layout tables fix most of those problems easily, but everyone has a different opinion on what is “right” concerning the table/css debate.
CS is very customizable, but the learning curve is pretty steep if you’re new to this. Personally I think it could be easier, but I didn’t get far w/ cubecart before moving here because of a number of “standard” features.
i agree with roban - with a little bit of effort you can go along way - yes the default skins have some quirks here and there - and if you are not in need of css version, then the other skins beside the basic verison work great - in the manual there is one section (1.3.5 version) that tells the basic tpl file controlling that block of code, any one who can read, should be able to open the correct file and modify a row or col here and there - depending on how heavily you want to customize it…
There will be people who have trouble changing the logo file in the skin, and other who will change each and every template file…
my opinon is that within an hour or two, you should be very proficient using it and updating your design.
if you want to get really fancy, you can definately take a skin, and change from tables to divs if you really want - but until all browsers show css the same, could be all in vain.