For all the things that Interspire Shopping Cart does well (and it does do so much, so well) when it comes to creating custom themes you might find information a little sparse. Thankfully it is both incredibly easy, and incredibly powerful. Unlike X-Cart, osCommerce and Zen Cart Interspire Shopping Cart does not use Smarty Templates. It uses it’s own version of templates that are very easy to follow and are either full HTML files or partial HTML Snippets and Panels.
The HTML files are very elegantly form and incredibly easy to follow. Once you lay a few foundation pieces you will be able to cut and paste your way through Interspire Template creation in no time.
The Bare Essentials to an Interspire Shopping Cart Theme
- Create a folder for your theme. Everything will live under it.
- Create the following folders within your theme folder
- Backup – this is where the cart will save revisions of your theme for safety
- Panels – include things like global headers and footers
- Snippets – list item templates and such
- Previews – small screen shots that display in the shopping cart admin area
- Styles – CSS style sheets
- Apart from your theme name you can specify a color, shade or variation. If it is a true custom theme I tend to stick with Default.
- Using Default create an image Default.jpg 250px wide and 154px high, put it in the Previews folder
- Create a style sheet default.css in Styles
Upload all of that into the templates directory of your Interspire installation and you will be able to activate it and begin the process of copy and editing the template files.
Part 2: Editing an Interspire Template
Have you ever created an Interspire theme from scratch ? What is the website ? We would love to hear about your experience.
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Tags: themes
Thanks for the info…
I´m working in a brand new theme
Thank you Andrew.
I tried this. It will work. Now I can make any PSD image to interspire theme.
Nice intro to interspire theming, but where is Part 2? I looked around the site but couldnt find it.
It’s yet to be moved, I got all tied up and never finished and posted it. I will email you as soon as it is done.
Hey Andrew!
Could you please post the 2nd part of your tutorial? I am really keen to learn how to make themes from scratch
I will very soon, I have been quite slack with it
Dang.. There is so little information about this out there, and here I now sit waiting for part 2..
Wow, Andrew! Fantastic post man… I could see this getting a lot of traffic as there is so little information available, last I checked.
I just like to thank you for getting me started, I can probably figure it out from here, and of course, like everyone else, I’d love a part two
Rock on man.
Thanks mate. I have started to get through my back log – I promise to get to it very soon
Hi Andrew, Really good intro into creating interspire template, but would love to see Part 2