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Why Too Much External Customization

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Hello, First of thanks for such a nice theme and such a nice options. Big fan of your really really awesome work but is there any special reason for making this so complected ? It looks like all the options that you are giving can be easily integrated by following opencart’s default framework structure. I think each store build with opencart are using at least few extension. It looks like if anyone wants to customize or update or change something or add new extension or add new module than he or she has to learn all your fundamental logic. You have also integrated library of Symphony framework. At least publish detail documentation with proper example so that other developers and designers learn your basic work flow so that they can integrate their extensions into our stores.	ddtech
June 13, 2012 at 11:56 pm #10311
Hi ddtech! The Shoppica code may seem too complicated, but is actually compact and modular and saves us really great amount of time when adding new features and upgrading/bug fixing old ones. With Shoppica 2 we created a solid platform for all of our future themes and there are some very important reasons for our choice. Firstly, by using the default opencart structure, we must scatter all of the theme’s files across the folders. The default opencart extension structure is not very well tought. Shoppica 2 is the most advanced theme on the marked (correct me if I am wrong) and we have to maintain many tens of features. By having dozens of files all around it’s a nightmare to develop and maintain. So we need a compact core, which is just a mini-framework inside OpenCart. Second, Shoppica does not prevent the other opencart extensions from working. Shoppica does not change the way the extensions are working and does not set any rules for the extensions developers. Shoppica does touch only two opencart core files in a very compatible way. Actually you can copy these files and paste them to an opencart store without shoppica in this will cause no issues. The only incompatibilities that arise are from the theme’s HTML markup. We changed the HTML a lot, because we find the default theme markup to be awful. We just couldn’t implemented most of the Shoppica features with the default theme markup. So, the extensions who rely on the theme markup (especially vqmod) can have issues. These issues can be easily fixed and does not involve in any way modifying the Shoppica core. We integrated some tiny parts of Symfony in for our core, but at this point we didn’t really mean that other developers should modify and work with it. That’s why we didn’t publish any documentation – you just don’t need to modify it. The core is for the Shoppica team mainly (for now). For the extensions to be compatible with Shoppica, all you need to be modified is in the default opencart template folder – `catalog/view/theme/shoppica2`. As with any other theme. Nothing new here. Hope this answers your questions. Best, ThemeBurn team	TB Support
June 14, 2012 at 7:05 pm #10361

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