New to Opencart - Why is building a page so complicated ??

I am a coder. ASP MSSQL B and so on.

I have used Wordpress and found it decent particularly Visual Composer in setting up pages.

For the life of me I just cannot work out how to build/design a page as one would in Wordpress - drag and drop.

Are there any plugins / extensions that pretty much do what Visual Composer does for Wordpress (drag and drop), or could some kind soul direct me to something that explains how exactly I build dynamically build additional pages for Opencart.

cheers

What kind of page are you trying to create?

Unlike Wordpress and other content management systems (including other shopping carts), OpenCart actually uses a proper MVC framework. To be precise, it uses an MVC+L framework (the "L" is for language).

The "Model" provides the interaction with the database, the "Language" contains any static language strings, the "Controller" brings all the data retrieved from the database and language files together and presents it to the "Viewer" or template file (the html output).

So, to create a single page in OC, you need at least three files, the Controller, the Language file (containing any static text for the page) and the template file (View). If you need to extract any information from the database, you will also need the Model.

Wordpress (and others) put all of this into a single file - a very inefficient means of doing things in my opinion.

i2Paq wrote:What kind of page are you trying to create?

Thanks for the reply i2Paq. At this stage it is just a static page that contains a couple of tables which contains various sizes and measurement conversions.

I was wanting this to appear in the top menu, much like an About page might and when shown would look like a normal page (header and footer etc) but with the main section showing the tables.

I tried Catalog > Information and creating a new item there but I guess that is an Information block that sits don in the Footer area.

I also tried System > Design > Layouts and tried to create a new layout. Here it is asking me to add in Modules but all I see really is a list of PAV modules, nothing much here seems to help me achieve what I am after.

thanks

fido-x wrote:Unlike Wordpress and other content management systems (including other shopping carts), OpenCart actually uses a proper MVC framework. To be precise, it uses an MVC+L framework (the "L" is for language).

The "Model" provides the interaction with the database, the "Language" contains any static language strings, the "Controller" brings all the data retrieved from the database and language files together and presents it to the "Viewer" or template file (the html output).

So, to create a single page in OC, you need at least three files, the Controller, the Language file (containing any static text for the page) and the template file (View). If you need to extract any information from the database, you will also need the Model.

Wordpress (and others) put all of this into a single file - a very inefficient means of doing things in my opinion.

Likewise thanks for the feedback fido-x that was very helpful in better understanding how this all hangs together. I will need that when I move to the next stage of displaying information.

cheers

fido-x wrote: Wordpress (and others) put all of this into a single file - a very inefficient means of doing things in my opinion.

Don't get me start with Wordpress...

I had to install a plugin to fix the plugin that activate the plugin so to have Smilies on a blog....

Wordpress is great, if you are a person extremely challenged in computers...

Krammig wrote:I tried Catalog > Information and creating a new item there but I guess that is an Information block that sits don in the Footer area.

That would work. It doesn't create an information "block" in the footer. If added to the footer it will appear as a link to the page that you create in "Catalog->Information".

Burt65 wrote:

fido-x wrote: Wordpress (and others) put all of this into a single file - a very inefficient means of doing things in my opinion.

Don't get me start with Wordpress...

I had to install a plugin to fix the plugin that activate the plugin so to have Smilies on a blog....

Wordpress is great, if you are a person extremely challenged in computers...

Yep I am with you on that

fido-x wrote:

Krammig wrote:I tried Catalog > Information and creating a new item there but I guess that is an Information block that sits don in the Footer area.

That would work. It doesn't create an information "block" in the footer. If added to the footer it will appear as a link to the page that you create in "Catalog->Information".

Thanks for the help and feedback on that fido-x

fido-x wrote:If you need to extract any information from the database, you will also need the Model.

That analogy used to be true but no longer is. Since the integration of the PDO extension into Opencart, the Model is no longer a priority point to extract any information from the database. The PDO library can be used as stand-alone.

straightlight wrote:

fido-x wrote:If you need to extract any information from the database, you will also need the Model.

That analogy used to be true but no longer is. Since the integration of the PDO extension into Opencart, the Model is no longer a priority point to extract any information from the database. The PDO library can be used as stand-alone.

Thank you for that feedback straightlight. cheers.