Magento Theme Development Hierarchy

Magento being a flexible and powerful open source ecommerce platform is widely used all over the globe. You can outsource magento development with any efficient and quality service provider. You may find the term "theme" very familiar as most of you must have experienced various web applications via its themes. This article may be very useful for both the users as well as magento developers. Let us understand its base and see what's the Magento theme hierarchy that makes the base or you may call it default theme a true cross-package option in the process.

The main role of base package in magento web development is to provide hooks to the entire core functionality of magento. So it is needed to care utmost care while this stage. You can opt to outsource magento development from experienced and talented magento developers who can work magic with themes for your website. The base theme just changes the core functionality of the design and gives sufficient support for the same which results into clean and safe codebase along with better upgrade path for the themes. While talking of the base please make it clear that it isn't the full theme but lacks most of the skin file including images, CSS, etc. You can say it as a repository for creating functionality for magneto which is founded at the frontend. While Magento web development if you require making customizations then you need not edit base package. Instead the custom themes can be created or developed inside their own design package directories as per your requirements. Those files that require changes can be copied from the base to the custom package and then edited there or set of local files can be created to hold your modes.

Outsource magento development as per your needs so that the developer will develop the theme suitable to your needs. Magento uses fall-back logic while rendering themes but now this has been expanded. Let's see how it works. If the custom theme calls for a CSS file but the application is not able to find it then it will continue working down the hierarchy of themes till it is able to find the file it was searching for. Fall backs means method of building design and the application needs a possible source for retrieving or loading the required files. The fall back mechanism if used effectively then it allows to add, edit and manage only the files that are needed to be changed as custom theme while all the functionality is provided by the custom package or base package. By introducing the base package 3 times less coding can be maintained. For example, you can implement default/blank themes by just changing the CSS and get their entire template and layout files from the base package. By doing so this will also result into custom themes to be more upgrade proof and further maintain less code too. So of the core functionality can be made available by the base package and can be overridden selectively by a custom package. Some of the things might interest you like its benefits:

Maximum power of customization

Opportunity to create multiple themes

Minimize debugging time

Uninterrupted work-flow

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