OpenCart Community

WordPress has a cool feature. It's called child themes http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes

Essentially, when people download/buy themes, they want to make certain changes to make their site unique. However, any customizations are always in the danger of being wiped out with updates. That's where child themes come in. Insead of editing the theme files, one can make create a child theme. Mostly this means creating a css file with styling that should override the theme's default styling. The customization made in this way via child themes carry over to the next versions after theme updates.

A similar concept is utilized for this vQmod, which has been created with the very simple purpose of creating the ability to customize the default theme with CSS such that such customizations carry over to the next versions after update.

You will need some knowledge of CSS http://www.w3schools.com/css/
And you'll find Firefox plugin Firebug handy https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firebug/

Tested on 1.5.2.1, 1.5.3 and 1.5.3.1

Module download page: http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... on_id=6241

Also, you'll find that many extensions in the OpenCart extension repository are written for the Default theme.

If, instead of writing a custom theme from scratch, you use @tik Simple Child Theme to customize the Default theme to look the way you want it to look, then most, if not all, of these extensions for Default theme will easily apply to your child theme, without requiring any customization or tweaking.

Hi There,

Great module and thanks for the contribution.

I followed the instructions and uploaded to the root of the store, i can see the child theme folder next to my default theme, however any changes I'm applying to the child theme css not taking effect, also used !important as i thought i will need maybe to force the original css. I also did a second upload and changed permissions but still i cant see any changes taking effect..

Any ideas what could be the problem here? is there any way to set/link the child theme manually ? I'm just not familiar with open cart and not sure where should i link it, in wordpress usually i use the header where about here?

will appreciate any help in this matter..

Cheers..
A.

Do you have vQmod installed?

As the documentation says

Requirements
============
1. This is a vQmod for Opencart. Hence you need Opencart (tested on 1.5.2.1, 1.5.3 and 1.5.3.1) and vQmod (tested on 2.1.6) preinstalled. Opencart is available at http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... d/download and vQmod is available at http://code.google.com/p/vqmod/downloads/list

Hey,

Alright now i see, sorry I'm not familiar with vQmod and thank you for bringing this into my attention, i will proceed with the installation, and hopefully make the child theme work this time..

Thanks a million for your help ;-)
A.

Great extension. Thank you very much. It works very well for me when editing css files, but when I edit template files, I do not see any changes. Does this extension only support stylesheet changes?

c0nn0r wrote:Does this extension only support stylesheet changes?

Basically, Yes.

The idea is that you can create vqmods with any template changes that you want. However, vqmod does not offer a way to modify css files (vqmod can only modify tpl or php). So this extension essentially provides a way to make Default theme look way different.