I appreciate that your themes are beautiful on the outside, but the choices of coding underneath can push even the more reserved person into a homicidal rage!
Ridiculous things like
- moving the product heading <h3> tags and other non-form context inside the <form> tags on the product page.
- renaming the buttons ONLY for the sake of renaming them
- changing the class names from simple things like "button", "price", "special"
to something ridiculous like "s_but_clear_tran_xyz", "s_price_format_plus", "s_price_extra_super" - moving the radio <label> tags to fully wrap the radio button unnecessarily
- Moving the dynamic addScript tags to the top of the <head> area, so that they load before the core jQuery scripts and end up being useless and broken.
- including the "payment" template folder in your theme (instant fail!)
- etc
I do understand that many of you may not find the existing html class/id/etc tags to be prevalent enough. And that is where we need to get some feedback going.
Let me first reference a website I mention quite often when referring to themes. CSS ZenGarden. For those who don't know.. this site is community driven example of how the same html code can be AMAZINGLY revamped and styled with major theme overhauls.. using nothing by css and images.
On the site, the right hand navigation shows a handful of possible changes to the same content, and if you click "View All Designs" you will see over 200 user submitted themes for this same content... proving the resourcefulness of css based theming without changing the html.
I would love to see OpenCart reach this level. And I think a lot of the themes made now are just making changes for the sake of making changes. First of all, I understand that there may not be enough class/id tags.. but that should be as simple as adding new ones. Renaming the existing ones is unnecessary and a recipe for failure.
It is also important to follow the basic Theme developing guidelines for opencart and understand the concept of the "cascading fallback system" that the themes use. Including the "payment" folder in your theme means that any future updates to those files in the default folder will be ignored because the copy in your theme is overriding them. Payment tpl files should always fallback to the default folder so that it always has the latest updates.
Then there are those that port their themes across multiple sites... Shoppica is on Drupal, OpenCart, Blogger, and while I can appreciate the themer doesn't want to have to make different versions of the code for each one separately... there has to be some sort of compromise.
So I'd like to hear some feedback from theme makers on
- What is missing from OpenCart's existing html that you'd like to see?
- What are some ideas to improve transparency across themes for mods and modules
- Why such drastic code changes that often result in the same "layout" as the default
I've tried the best I can to make many of my mods as transparent as possible to themes, using only a single reference tag like "#image", and yet even that simple tag is often removed from custom themes for no good reason. I spend at least 3 hours per day going through support emails that start with
Code: Select all
"I bought your mod, but it isn't working.. I am running Shoppica......"I just can't do it anymore, and I know many other code devs feel the same. Many have already sworn off support for Shoppica and other themes. So I think we need to work together and avoid a full developer boycott.
So any feedback is appreciated.
because it can be impossible to overwrite in CSS, instead give it a class with a margin/padding. A br should be for text line breaks only. The worst pages for this are checkout/cart/login forms. Last time I check the default theme has 300+ <br />
