Create a new Magento theme

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Magento @ 10th OCT 2008

There are many new Magento stores that are published each day. If you are with Magento for a longer time, you will also notice that many of those look similar to default or modern Magento theme. Creating an totally unique and custom one can be a difficult process, easpecially taking into consideration number of different interfaces we have. This is why many Magento developers choose to use the CSS from one of mendioned Magento themes that come with default installation and style those up. This is not a bad choice at all as it speeds up the process and those default themes are very good. But, for those of you who wish to make an extra effort, we suggest that you to take a look at Magento Blank Theme for a head start.

Before you get to this point, be sure to read Magento Designer’s Guide, where the Magento design terminology is explained in this PDF document.

Blank Theme is a sample skeleton theme for Magento designer and a perfect way to start a new one. Let’s be honest, we will rarely want to develop a totally new layout. We wish the header on the top, footer on the bottom. We wish to have 1, 2 or 3 columns, we wish to have boxes. Blank Theme does just that: provides a layout, but without any heavy styling. This makes it excellent base ground for a new Magento project. It doesn’t come with default installation, so you will have to use Magento Connect to get it.
http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/518/blank-theme

Magento community member Ross gave a good review comment:

This is a great theme to use for wire-framing or as a base for developing a custom theme! It looks like a lot of work has gone in to slimming down the HTML and CSS, which makes it much easier to work with compared to the default theme. I particularly appreciate the well structured and commented CSS. The only things I would want different at this stage is for the ‘callouts’ to be taken out (and removal of associated media images), and for this theme to be included in the main Magento download (I would even like it to be the ‘default’). 5 stars from me!

Take a sneak peak of how does product info page looks line with no styling, but in finished layout. I’m sure that the CSS wizards will find this invaluable.