Best theme for TB 1.5.1 + ?

[Mark]

Im wanting to revamp the look of my site and am mulling over themes.

Ive only ever used the community theme plus Datakick's one page checkout module and so I'd say thats one key reason why the site isnt very good especially in the eyes of site analysers who often find things wrong with the site. I acknowledge its pretty cr*p looking, even if it is functionally pretty good the front end does not cut it to the point where I want to push this website because people go there and I never see them again.

But I want to change that so its smart, fast and looks great and looks trustworthy and try this again. (In terms of fast I use cloudflare CDN already so its not bad, but faster still is better still)

So who uses what theme successfully and happily? and all the indications are your customers love the theme?

 

Edited April 4 by Mark

[30knees]

I've used Panda and Community. I'm now with Community. I found Panda to be better in terms of customisability but they stopped updating it, which is why I switched. I believe Panda has been updated in the meantime.

[Adik]

@Mark Check out Cisero template from Zen described in another thread. Four months ago I was in a similar situation looking for fast and modern template. After optimization page speed improved significantly. CLS of 0.46 is too high, I'm waiting for Google update.

BTW. It's still the same VPS server. Updated PHP, nginx, mariadb and Debian.

 

 

Edited April 5 by Adik

[zen]

Can you also try with Php 8.2 version ?  the CLS seems to be taken car of.. can you also post the Profiling results ?

🙂

[Adik]

Ok, here is profiling results from my toaster VPS 😄

A way to reduce CLS is to add min-height and min-width in CSS for divs that change size when page loads. I have also moved price filtering to the end of blocklayered module.

 

Edited April 9 by Adik

[x97wehner]

Well, you can't get an official Warehouse theme anymore, so that's probably off the table. I find it the best, however, due to it's easy configurability of many options. I don't know the ins and outs of software licensing, but at what point could someone create a TB theme that is basically an updated copy of it since the dev has verbalized they will not ever do it and it's been multiple years now since their last update?

[Obi]

On 4/3/2024 at 9:11 PM, Mark said:

Im wanting to revamp the look of my site and am mulling over themes.

Ive only ever used the community theme plus Datakick's one page checkout module and so I'd say thats one key reason why the site isnt very good especially in the eyes of site analysers who often find things wrong with the site. I acknowledge its pretty cr*p looking, even if it is functionally pretty good the front end does not cut it to the point where I want to push this website because people go there and I never see them again.

But I want to change that so its smart, fast and looks great and looks trustworthy and try this again. (In terms of fast I use cloudflare CDN already so its not bad, but faster still is better still)

So who uses what theme successfully and happily? and all the indications are your customers love the theme?

 

I've created my own theme using community theme as the starting point. I'm on my second round of revisions and while there is still much to do to get it up to the level that Panda used to be (I don't like the new version - too "glitchy" for me), I still use Panda's features and UI design as my foundational vision. I prefer a left column - blocked theme design as that is what I have found to be most appealing to my customers and new visitors. It seems to have some "sticky" to the site once a live person visits - I believe because navigation is easier and you can change left column options very easily, allowing you to experiment with "widgets" aka blocks that your customers find useful.

Here is the first UI rendition of my theme:

Here is the second theme derivative, based on the first theme effort (for various reasons this site is still in development):

A shorter product listing that shows the various "status" details (drawn from keywords in the available_now/later variables):

Out Of Stock (deny order), Out of Stock (allow order aka backorder), Available but Discontinued aka Out of Print, Coming Soon - essentially an Out of Stock (deny order) setting but keyed off of the available_later text. I was going to key this off of availability_date and allow_oosp, but opted for the keyword option instead because the available_later text can be overriden within the template file and that keyword can be seen in the back office as an indicator.

Product Detail Page:

I apply a "wrapper" class in an outer div at the head of the description to achieve this effect based on brand - not really fond of this particular one, but it is easily changeable in the custom.css file that gets loaded last (can't use autoload for this purpose) ensuring the custom theme at least has the chance to override most elements if you cannot get specificity on desired target elements.) I know others disagree with me on this approach, but it works well for me as the majority of what you see is because of the theme's custom.css file.

Cart Pulldown:

Checkout button turns to a lime racing green when hovered.

Built in (but modified) One Page Checkout featuring stock status indicators:

It is responsive and mobile "friendly", though there is still a bit of tweaking needed on some elements for mobile optimization, everything is functional on both an iPhone6 (very old phone) and a Motorola G 2024 (recently purchased) at this time.

I haven't done a bunch of speed tests yet, but things are pretty snappy on a shared hosting account (used for development). I do plan to add a few other touches, like search results with icon image and some variation of the owl carousel (the homeslider module that ships with TB1.4 is atrocious).

Side note: I also do not plan to port this to TB1.5 as that version is going off the rails from the original stated mission/purpose of the project (IMO) and I fear that it will ultimately be another Prestashop scenario for store owners and developers alike.

My point in posting the visuals is so that folks can see the potential of the TB1.4 platform. It is substantially better than PS ever was but the same ills that befell PS seem to be creeping into TB - and while that is a sad situation - I cannot find a better open-source solution available at this time.

Good Luck - I am open to helping others, provided you have a solid plan of what you want to achieve and at least some idea of how.

PS: There is a security vulnerability in the header.tpl file of the 1.1.0 version of community theme - it has to do with the IE polyfill.io library. You can find more info here: polypill.io malware? - Technical help - thirty bees forum

 

 

Edited September 29 by Obi

[Obi]

On 4/15/2024 at 10:58 AM, x97wehner said:

Well, you can't get an official Warehouse theme anymore, so that's probably off the table. I find it the best, however, due to it's easy configurability of many options. I don't know the ins and outs of software licensing, but at what point could someone create a TB theme that is basically an updated copy of it since the dev has verbalized they will not ever do it and it's been multiple years now since their last update?

What is this "Warehouse theme" that you speak of? I'm always interested in looking through code that provides cool features to see how other developers implement those features - it is how I have taught myself to code in php, javascript, and smarty, primarily for prestashop and now thirtybees.

Edited September 30 by Obi