A boilerplate 'blank slate' theme for Prestashop

#Prestashop Theme Boilerplate

Prestashop Theme Boilerplate is a 'blank canvas' theme built for developers to use as a foundation when starting a new Prestashop theme or project.

This project is UNFINISHED and not ready for general use. There is still a lot of work to be done.

##How does it help? When starting a new theme, you'd usually take another and strip back all it's design, structure and functionality, creating a starting point, while carefully attempting to retain Prestashop's features.

This took a lot of time, every time.

Based upon the new default Prestashop theme, the Prestashop Theme Boilerplate will be a more suitable starting point.

##Initial ideas & features

• HTML5

Valid & semantic markup, following techniques from HTML5 Boilerplate.

• Optimised for page speed

Focus on speed and performance e.g. order scripts correctly, keep requests to a minimum etc.

• White canvas design

Usable as a theme, but very minimal giving structure ready to be built upon.

• Commented code

Briefly describe templates, sections and techniques (using Smarty comments).

• Full feature compatibility

The theme will work with every setting in the back office, from colour pickers to multi-shipping.

• Works with all default modules.

This means the theme is much more likely to be compatible with 3rd party modules, too.

• Simplify templates

Some templates contain a lot of ‘logic’ and need to be re-written. For example: The checkout pages could be seperated to individual One Page Checkout and 5-step checkout template sections, as they are currently very confusing.

• Remove the bloat
• Unneccessary CSS / JavaScript not required by core.
• Default theme’s images replaced with CSS3 alternatives (buttons, backgrounds etc).
• Unneccessary IDs, classes and tags in HTML.
• Documentation

Provide documentation including best practices and techniques when creating a theme using the Boilerplate.

Features being considered

These are some points I’ve considered, but would like feedback on whether they should be included or if they’d be better left for the individual developer to include themselves.

I’m keen to keep the theme as simple and ‘bloat free’ as possible. If something is not absolutely neccessary then its not included, otherwise the Boilerplate loses all its purpose.

• Responsive / Adapative / Mobile First

Optimised design and layout that adapts to multiple screen sizes (mobile optimised)

• LESS Framework (http://lesscss.org/)

LESS is a popular CSS pre-processor that allows you to do much more with CSS. Checkout the website for details.

I’ve personally started using LESS in all my projects for the last 6 months and would highly recommend it.

Frameworks such as Twitter Bootstrap use LESS, but would Prestashop developers like it included?

Your feedback / ideas.

I’d really appreciate any feedback or ideas you may have regarding the above.

Get your hands dirty, fork the code, submit an issue etc.

I really think this could be something useful to the Prestashop community, and the more people who get involved and bring ideas forward, the better it will become.

##### Other articles / information

• Prestashop Theme Boilerplate - PrestaDB
• Prestashop Starter Theme / Boilerplate - My Blog Post