Templates for Community Store products and product lists

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I was wondering if anyone has / will be developing any templates for the Community Store? Whilst the functionality of it is awesome, the product list and product detail page out of the box isn't as pleasing on the eye (i.e., additional image sizes and padding, text layout etc.).

Which is a shame, because I've still got an old "Vivid Store" instance running (which looks to be built on the same framework) and, despite its many faults and bugs, comes with pretty nice styling for the product list and product detail.

I guess what I'd like to see is something that isn't a million miles off ishttps://oakleymc.net/merchandise/menswear... (still not perfect, but certainly better in terms of aesthetics for both the list and product detail).

I don't mind tweaking CSS etc., but I'm not massively code-savvy so wondered if anyone was looking at developing templates for the Community Store?

Cheers

 
PineCreativeLabs replied on at Permalink Reply
PineCreativeLabs
Here's a theme that is compatible with Community Store:
https://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/themes/shopin...

I am looking at possibly developing an ecommerce theme for Community Store, at some point.
baysmedia replied on at Permalink Reply
Thanks for the pointer. I had cast my eye over that theme, and I'm certainly considering it, though ideally I'd like to get something for use with Pixel or Fundamental themes to satisfy other requirements outside of the eCommerce element. I don't mind paying for a template - so if you or anyone else would like to quote for this then please do PM me.

I for one would certainly encourage more eCommerce themes in C5 - I've got two eCommerce projects in the pipeline, and a couple of C5 5.6 instances which use the old eCommerce add-on (which I really want to rebuild into 5.8, but need to be sure that the eCommerce styling is up to it!). I can't be the only one in this position, so I look forward to seeing what eCommerce themes you develop in the future! :)
mesuva replied on at Permalink Reply
mesuva
I might just add a few points here to help with the understanding of how Community Store is themed.

Community Store doesn't actually have any styling as such, this is very intentional and because of its target audience.

What it does have is basic Bootstrap classes so that it looks neat and functional on a Bootstrap based theme, in particular the default theme Elemental.
But apart from a handful of smaller bits of styling where Bootstrap doesn't really have something available (some model stuff and spinner), there isn't actually a look-and-feel applied.

For example, you can install Community Store and then play around with Elemental's theme controls - the blocks, cart and checkout will then adopt the same styles and colours as the general content.

The layouts themselves are intentionally simple too, to try to keep the initial block template code as easy to adjust as possible (and even then they are still pretty complex).
It's more like a baseline or bootstrap based start-point. The initial appearance on Elemental is more of a demo.

The target audience for Community Store is perhaps more aimed at developers who need to add a shop to a custom design/theme, or add a store to an already custom themed site.
In this case there aren't existing styles that have be stripped back and overridden, the few styles that are present won't get in the way.

On the blocks and single pages many additional classes have actually been added purely for custom styling purposes. Often the HTML structure is fine and it just requires custom CSS to match it to a custom theme.

Where design requirements are fiddlier, the idea is that you can still override the block and single page templates with the custom adjustments you need, but because things aren't too complex to begin with it's not a nightmare of stripping out stuff.

Personally I had some great successful projects with eCommerce on 5.6, but found that a lot of the work was in trying to un-pick some of the ways things were pre-styled, especially the cart. More generally, I find it pretty frustrating with add-ons if they include opinionated styles like shadows, gradients, radiuses, rollovers or even colours, that you then have to override and remove. Personally I want add-ons to adopt _my_ styling as closely as possible, not introduce their own look.

So I'm not sure if they'll be a case for developing individual block templates for community store, as I'd say it's all dependant on the theme you are using/developing. A mish-mash of slightly different styles from lots of seperate add-ons isn't a strong look.
Certainly complete themes that _support_ community store would make a lot of sense, especially if they are Bootstrap based.

There might be some aspects of styling, like the sizing of output images that should still be included in things like block editing controls - there's certainly scope to add more flexibility into the output.

If you are after a specific look and feel, and customising things like this isn't something you do often I certainly would look to engage a developer to help here.

They might either create your theme from scratch, incorporating the community store related theming as well, or alternatively might be able to help you add some additional styling to a pre-built theme. There are some easy ways to inject an auxiliary stylesheet into a site, so community store specific styling could be added without having to either the theme or the community store package directly.