Creating and renaming Fashion theme variations

Hi, I am using the Fashion theme and have the multi-site licence. I developed my first website by leaving the theme with the name "Fashion" and tweaked its files as necessary as the site only required to run the one theme variation. All was OK. I now want to develop new theme variations and tried copying the theme as detailed in the nopcommerce documentation to create a new theme with a new name. Whilst the new theme runs, it looks like it probably isn't running the nop-templates plugins. Do you have instructions how to successfully clone and run the Fashion theme by another name?

Thanks.

Hi David,

When you copied the Fashion theme into a new theme i.e FashionNew did you also made a copy of the Fashion theme folders into the plugins. Please note that each of our plugins is themeable, which means that it has a folder Themes that contains the styles, the additional widget zone and the views for the plugin specific for each theme. So if you have a clone of the Fashion theme then you basically need to clone the Themes\Fashion folders in our plugins as well.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for the reply, that made sense and following the advice, things are looking much better now.

Curiously, there's a "SevenSpikes.Theme.Fashion" plugin. There are various settings and configurations for the plugin via the control panel as well as many more settings in the two xml files it uses. How does this plugin relate to using clones of the Fashion theme? Does it need cloning itself somehow (indeed can it be?) to work only on a cloned Fashion theme or will whatever it does be applied to all cloned themes anyway as appears to be the case? I ask because I tried changing one of the settings in the control panel (plugins/nop fashion theme/settings - remove copyright) and it affected my newly named cloned theme. I hope you understand what I'm asking!

Hi David,

The Fashion theme plugin is required to manage the settings used by the Fashion theme. Since you have cloned the Fashion theme views (.cshtml) files then your new theme uses the same settings as the original Fashion theme. And having in mind that all settings in nopCommerce are shared between all themes this means that changing a setting via the plugin will apply in all themes that use it. In summary it is not a good idea to have multiple themes running at the same instance of nopCommerce as all the settings are shared as you are having a single database. I don't know why you want to run two themes on the same instance of nopCommerce but we wouldn't recommend doing this in production web site unless you are running Multiple web sites (Multi store) and be able to set a given setting per store.

I hope all these make sense.

Thanks

Thanks for the further info. I'm just trying to evaluate what would be the best method for me to support multiple websites from a development point-of-view. Having one master dev site with all the themes I've developed for various customers/sites in one instance (with custom theme names) seems a good idea to me as I only need a few sample products representative of the various types offered across all the themes and I can keep everything in one place and test an individual theme out simply by choosing from a drop-down! (i.e. no moving code around between projects to test). Also, if i need or wish to develop the core nopcommerce code it makes it easier (I imagine) to quickly check it out across all the themes I'm planning to support. From what you've explained to me I can pretty much do most of this now, but I'll need to keep myself aware of the fact that the fashion plugin is not tied to a specific theme (should I need to change any of the settings for a specific website). At this point in time I do not have any requirement for allowing any specific website instance to run a choice of themes, though this appears to be an option within nopcommerce (i.e. let the viewer/browser select a theme from a selection) and I could imagine at some point I might want to do this. Right now, I'm happy just understanding what the options/compromises are.

Hi David,

It is perfectly fine to have more than one nopCommerce theme on the same instance of nopCommerce during development. Actually this is how we develop our themes locally. We have all of them installed and just switch between them but we still haven't seen a real production store that allows theme selection.

Thanks

This would be a great post to blog about. Now with multi-store if you want to run two sites with same theme I wasn't exactly sure what to do at first as I used the theme roller to change the second store. I finally came across this post which explained what to do.

Hello-

I just posted on the forum ( here ) and then found this thread, which concerns me.



Can you please elaborate for me? Was I wrong to purchase another theme license for my new second store?

As explained in my previous post it is absolutely fine to have different themes for different stores.
It is not that OK to have many themes for a single store but this is not the case with you.
So you problem is not related to this but probably some installation issue that we need to check.
We will reply to you post as there is no point to write in this thread.

I think I just misunderstood you...