Designing a Site to Build on Open Cart - Suggestions?

Hello!

Open Cart newbie here.

We are about to design a website to use with Open Cart, and are going to base it off of what you can do with Open Cart.

Does anyone have suggestions about what to do or not do, or keep in mind when designing a website that is going to be based around Open Cart? I'm still a little unsteady on altering the thing, so any help or suggestions for the design process would be very helpful.

Thank you!

Do you mean a cms type solution?

If so search the forum as people have done things like cut out the side modules on the home page and there is an addon contribution for adding more to the front page / home page similar to the welcome area.

Phil.

I think you need to see if Opencart fulfills your specific business cases to see if it's right for you.
eg. You need to get your list of must haves and see if the current version has that functionality you need.

From a general perspective though, Opencart makes it easy to hit the ground running, because the design has been separated from the functionality. You can update the look & feel without having to worry about changing the working functions of the website.

I've done a few mods to Opencart and I've only been playing with it for about 2 months (I think... time flies), so if you know a bit of PHP or even if you only know HTML, you can pretty much modify Opencart a fair bit to meet your need. If you do know PHP, I would definitely read the sticky post about the structure of Opencart - because it will immediately give you insight into where everything is. You can view that here http://www.opencart.com/forum/viewtopic ... 9e3d0bb5fe

And the forums are always open... so if you need something you can always come here & ask for help.

Phil - A CMS type solution is not what I need at the moment, just how to customize our Open Cart to look as close to what our designer comes up with as possible. But thanks! I'll search around for how to remove modules, as I likely will need to do that.

Readyman - Thanks! This is a lot of great information and a good place to start from. I will check out that sticky post as well. I'm hoping we can do something like a dedicated section for the Open Cart pages, and keep the other pages (non-store) normal, but we will see.

If you are simply looking to alter the design then look at the view/template folder.

Phpuk - Thanks. I currently have copied the default and am planning on experimenting with this.

One thing to remember (repost from what readyman said in another thread:

If you move anything from one view to another view you will also need to move the variables from the CORRESPONDING controller file. eg. Variables from catalog\controller\module\information.php go to the information view and will need to be moved to the catalog\controller\common\header.php file if you want them to appear in the header.tpl file.

That will stop the "Undefined variable $foo in catalog/template/bar" errors.

WCNZ - Thanks. That's a good one to know.

I start programming this project next week probably, so I'll be getting deep into it all before long, and I'm sure that one would have vexed me.