LemonStand Blog

Theming feature preview

3 | published by Aleksey Bobkov on Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Soon we will release the Theming feature which adds more power to the LemonStand templating engine and CMS module.

What are themes

Themes are sets of CMS objects - pages, layouts (layouts is the new name for templates), partials and resources. In other words themes completely define a store appearance. Each theme contains its own set of CMS objects.

Multiple themes can be installed in a single LemonStand installation and you can switch between themes with a single mouse click. You can import new themes, create and edit your own themes and even duplicate existing themes if you want to experiment. Theming adds flexibility for both store owners and theme developers. Developers can now work in a single LemonStand installation on multiple themes. Store owners can magically change the store appearance on Christmas, for example.

Global content blocks

Along with the theming we will release the global content blocks feature. Unlike regular content blocks, global content blocks can be shared between pages and even themes. This means that if you have the "Welcome" global content block, its content will stay unmodified if you activate another theme. As global content blocks are not bound to any page, you can output them in partials. This enables you to create an editable content block for the website footer, which the store owner can edit in WYSIWYG mode.

Improved Resource Manager

As each theme requires its own space for storing resource files (images, CSS, JavaScript, etc.). Theme resources are stored in the new directory "themes" in the root LemonStand folder. We modified the Resource Manager to display these two separate areas - the website resources directory (normally it is the /resources folder, but it can configured) and the current theme resources directory.

This allows you to manage website resources, like images for the blog that are not tied to any theme, and theme specific resources with a single tool. We also impoved the Resource Manager's usability by introducing collapsable folders and some other minor updates.