5 Useful Must-Know Tips for Your CS-Cart Theme Organization

Hello dear readers of the «Learning Session» rubric.
Today we continue our tutorial series on the website themes’ customization topic. The last post was devoted to Setting of multistore functionality in Opencart. Current article is about CS-Cart Theme Organization.
So let’s review some useful features, which any user of cs-cart should know. We have based our tutorial on the 4.3.1 version. However, the same features may be included in previous or the future versions of CS-Cart also. Thus, this tutorial can be useful for different users.

1. Theme editor panel

Despite the fact that the most of CS-Cart users know how to use it, we will pay your attention to the Custom CSS field of the panel.
Go to admin: Design -> Themes.
Press the button «Visual Editor» located near the active theme. Options panel will appear on the left side of your screen. Press the button «Customize», and set required options. Here you can change / add new logo, favicon, set some colors of texts, backgrounds, font sizes and font types. Also, here you can find such a useful thing like Custom CSS block. This is the place for writing of your own css styles. Using the block you won’t be in need to open files via ftp or in the cpanel.

2. Online editing of the texts

This feature has been placed in some previous versions.
Using it you can edit texts for each language directly on your website as well as save all of them.
Go to admin: Design -> Themes
Press the button «Edit Content On-Site», which is located near active theme.

3. Cleaning of full cs-cart cache

Sometimes you have to change template files of your theme: change position of some elements, remove some elements completely, “hardcoding” in files etc. After you have made any changes, you need to clean full CS-Cart cache to review them.
Don’t be afraid. It’s a simple action.
First of all, you have to be logged in your admin panel.
Ok. Go further.
For example, if you haven’t renamed your default admin.php file, you should write such a link: your_site_link/admin.php?ctpl
Then press «Enter».
Finally, go to admin: Administration -> Storage -> clear cache.
In just a few minutes your cache will be cleaned.

4. Editing files directly in admin

Very useful and quick working feature is editing files directly in admin panel. It saves your time requiring for ftp connection creating as well as entering cpanel to edit some file of your theme.
To use this feature go to admin: Design -> Themes
Press folder name of your current theme.

You will be redirected to the list of all theme’s files. Clicking on some file you will see its content. But be careful! To make changes directly in code you should have at least basic css, html and php skills.

5. Install Basic theme in admin

Perhaps you will need this to do, if you use CS-Cart from version 4.3.1. The reason is starting from this version of the product there is no installed Basic theme in admin. However this theme is located in files for default CS-Cart package.
Find basic theme in the path:\var\themes_repository\basic\.
Create zip package of this folder. Then go to admin: Design -> Themes
Press button “+” in the top right corner “Upload theme”. Choose your local package.

Press button “Browse all available themes” near with the button “Installed theme”. If you don’t see the basic theme for some reason, here you have to rename package with it to some another name. Create package again, and upload it anew.
For example, let’s name your_basic_theme.

After that the basic theme will be installed.
Make it active and enjoy.