Starting point or advice for custom skins Options

[giantseed]

I'm new to CubeCart and I've been looking all day for a starting point for creating a custom skin. It needs to match the rest of the site (www.aquaponics.com) and for the life of me I'm not getting anywhere. I got the custom skin set up and I can get it loaded, but when I open a file such as main.php in that new skin I can't get any changes to work. For example, I need to call in some include files, and I can't get it to process the lines of code as PHP, it either ignores them or just displays the line of code on the page. Is there a manual/guide or anything that anyone can point me to for directions on what to do and where to look to get a skin set up?

Thanks!

Chris

PS - the Cubecart site is going set up at www.aquaponics.com/cubecart

[Brian Smither]

We all agree that a tremendous amount of work can be done if we could get Devellion's developer's notes. It would save a lot of reverse engineering.

What I have already done is to take the complete Mauris skin and stripped out all the HTML. What's left is just the Smarty code. In analyzing the Smarty code, I can plainly see what each {$smarty_variable} and {smarty_instruction} is doing and/or showing. Now that I have that, slipping on the new skin should be straighforward.

I have made considerable progress at getting CC3's Killer skin adapted to CC5.

I see that you are taking the approach of modifying a copy of an existing skin and tweaking it. I tried that approach and had painted myself into corners way too many times.

I also see that you are trying to get Smarty to pass PHP codeblocks to the PHP parser. Sorry, that doesn't work as simply as that. To do something like this, we will need to create a Smarty plug-in, or include the scripts in the 'controller' - methods found in the various classes that populate the Smarty templates. I will surmise a decision was made as to what to call the skin template files - specifically the filename suffix. I don't know what went into the decision to use .php, but the filename suffix is irrelevant. The actual PHP statement to bring into play a template file is: $Smarty->display("name_of_template"). It matters not at all to Smarty that there appears to be a template naming convention.

I will be happy to work with you in getting your main site's skin fitted around the Smarty display logic.

Send me a PM if you are wanting to spend some quality time together.

[giantseed]

I'll be sending you a message shortly. Thanks so much! You've already cleared up a bunch of my questions.

[Cart Cubed]

I am currently working on some documentation on how to upgrade skins to V5 system, its taking longer than expected but hope to get it done and added soon to the documentation project the same as our V3 to V4 skin upgrade docs