Thread

Hello!

I installed Expression Engine and Exp:resso store and I’ve been able to set up products with details, etc just fine.

However, Expression Engine installed a theme called “Agile Records,” and none of my store products are showing up. Also, I don’t want to use that theme for my store.

I uploaded the “store” theme folder into my themes/third _party directory, but I’m not sure how to make it the site theme. Is there a way to switch themese in the control panel?

Also, does anyone know of any third-party ecommerce themes that work with exp:resso?

Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks!

TT
Tom

I will start off by saying that ExpressionEngine (and Store) doesn’t really use themes in the sense that you would with other CMS (ie. WordPress) where you have a set of files that you can upload to a folder then switch how the frontend of the site looks by changing a toggle. The AgileRecords theme that comes with EE and that is able to be installed when installing EE contains not only the templates that you are seeing on the front-end of the site, but it also sets up channel, custom fields, categories and preloads content into the previously created channels. I would say that this “theme” is included for beginning developers so they can see a functioning site with data and templates to help them construct their own site designs. Having said that you will want to go to Design >> Templates >> Template Manager to edit the templates to meet the needs of your site (alternatively you can save the template as files and edit them as text files in your favorite editor). I have never used the Agile Records theme so I can not say with 100% certainty why your products are not showing up but my guess would be that you had to create a channel for products and as a result the default templates are not account for that new channel or its fields.

Now for the Store portion.
The theme folder (“store”) that you uploaded to /themes/third_party/ contains all the files for the stores Control Panel theme. It holds all of the CSS/JS/images that are used by the add-on in the CP. You will not be able to use that as a “theme” for displaying products on the frontend of the site. However during the install/setup process of Store you had the option to install a set of templates (I believed the template group is “store_example”) which will have basic styling. You could of course change the html/css to meet your needs but I always see it as more of working examples of how to use the template tags.

With how ExpressionEngine handles the display of your content or rather lack of assumptions about your content, in that it allows you as the designer/developer to create and display your content however you want, I doubt you will find any prebuilt ecommerce themes that you could just copy and paste into EE and they work with Store. So you will need to find/create the html/css code for how you want the store to look then integrate the EE and Store tags to make it functional.

Thanks for the information! That was very thorough. Sorry for the misues of terms, I’ve been working with wordpress for the past three years and other shopping carts.

I’ve worked with EE previously and never built anything from scratch, I always found templates that were close to what I wanted, downloaded them and modified to fit the project. Before I reinvent the wheel, I always start by getting a wheel.

Though ECommerce sites may vary, they all tend to have basic image display, price, size, shipping and other info in common and which take time to map out as an information architecture, and then design. Even the basic page structure (single product page, products under a category page, etc.) would have to be thought through from scratch by the method you’re describing. That’s an exhausting duplication of effort, considering the number of ecommerce site that already exist on the web. This effort can be best eliminated by installing an Ecommerce template set. That is what was supplied with the three previous shopping carts I have purchased. I Installed the ecommerce package and modified the e-commerce site to match my needs.

I am happy with my choice to come back to Expression Engine because I want to be able to customize the site more than I could with something like Wordpress. I’m not looking for anything that’s “turnkey,” but rather just a basic architecture that I can put the Store tags and my own design into.

You mentioned that Store has the “store_example” template set. I’m expecting that will be something that includes basic guides as you and I both have described. How would I activeate the store_example templates on my site?

Thanks!

Tom`

The Store example templates would be viewable at http://yourdomain.com/store_example/index/ (assuming that you are removing index.php from the URL if not add it after .com/) you can go again in the Template Manager and change the store_example template group name to whatever fits with your site architecture (ie. products, inventory, shirts). Having said that if you have a store theme that you have purchased/downloaded (I am going to use http://themeforest.net/item/simple-store/237807?WT.ac=search_item&WT;.seg_1=search_item&WT;.z_author=Chimpstudio as an example) that is an HTML/CSS theme you can of course integrate that into your site which has HTML templates for Product Listing, Product Detail, Shopping Cart, Account and Login pages you would just need to add the appropriate EE tags to get the content to display where you want/need it.

Hey Guys,

I love this conversation. Nice work!!

I am going to bump this over to the Community Help Forum so you can continue the conversation among other community members.

Cheers,

OK, so I got the store_example runnning on my site. That’s exactly what I was looking for - the basic functionality to support all the purchasing use cases/scenarios. All I need to do now is pull my design templates over from the old site.

Thanks for the help and thorough explanations!

Tom

Tom,

I’ve begun a quest to find the best Open Source or free HTML5/CSS3 (or WordPress) themes, and convert them to ExpressionEngine.

As I wrote a few days ago:

I think a lot more “regular” people would consider EE, if there were more high quality themes available, to get them off the ground fast and with ease.

So I’ve taken it upon myself to find great Open Source themes (or free, with a license or developer that will let me convert them), do the conversion to EE, and then release them for free to the community.

I want this mission and the themes that comes from it, to be a catalyst that makes people change over to our beloved platform. Because we all know how awesome ExpressionEngine is (and converting these themes has really shown me just how awesome), but new users considering the platform may want to see it in action - with some great themes - before they commit to paying for it…

After converting a theme, I’ll release it for free to the community. I really feel we need a lot more free - but high quality - themes available for EE.

I’m currently converting the first theme, AllTutorials from Site5. But perhaps my next conversion should be an e-commerce theme?

If you know of a great theme, that will make sense to convert to EE from whatever system it’s running under, be it an e-commerce system or pure HTML/CSS, let me know and I’ll take a look.

The easiest would be if you can find a HTML5/CSS3 theme, but other themes whose license will allow conversion to other platforms (and runs under a free e-commerce system I can install without purchasing) could also be made to run under EE.

Let me know if you find a theme, you would like to see running under EE. And that goes for every member of the community, let me know what theme you’d like to see on EE - e-commerce or others - and I’ll take a stab at them, when I finish AllTutorials.

You can post your wishes here, or in the comments to the article mentioned above!

Cheers,
Thomas 😊