Table of Contents for
Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce - Second Edition

Version ebook / Retour

Cover image for bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce - Second Edition by Robbert Ravensbergen Published by Packt Publishing, 2015
  1. Cover
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce Second Edition
  4. Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce Second Edition
  5. Credits
  6. About the Author
  7. About the Reviewers
  8. www.PacktPub.com
  9. Preface
  10. What you need for this book
  11. Who this book is for
  12. Conventions
  13. Reader feedback
  14. Customer support
  15. 1. Setting Up WooCommerce
  16. Installing WooCommerce
  17. Setting up WooCommerce
  18. Summary
  19. 2. Creating Your First Products
  20. Creating your first product
  21. Setting the categories, tags, and images for your product
  22. Summary
  23. 3. Using Downloadable Products and Variations
  24. Using attributes
  25. Setting up variable and grouped products
  26. Other product types
  27. Summary
  28. 4. Payments, Shipping, and Coupons
  29. Shipping methods and prices
  30. Using discount coupons
  31. Summary
  32. 5. Working with WooCommerce Themes
  33. Making or buying a theme
  34. Installing a WooCommerce theme
  35. Using the Storefront theme
  36. Summary
  37. 6. Customizing a WooCommerce Theme
  38. WordPress theme basics
  39. Developing WooCommerce themes
  40. Summary
  41. 7. Running Your Online Store
  42. Deploying your WooCommerce store
  43. Working with sales orders
  44. Reporting
  45. Summary
  46. 8. More Possibilities Using Plugins
  47. Popular and useful WooCommerce plugins
  48. A store in multiple languages
  49. Summary
  50. Index

Chapter 6. Customizing a WooCommerce Theme

Working with standard themes is a quick and effective solution to get your store up and running, but soon you'll feel the need to make changes to the theme that you're using. Or leave the standard theme and create one from scratch yourself. In this book, I cannot offer you a complete development course. I'll discuss the basics that will give you a good start, working with the Storefront theme. In this chapter, we will cover:

  • General directions for changing or creating a WordPress theme
  • Tips for changing or creating a WooCommerce theme
  • Some practical examples of changes in the Storefront theme

What we need to get started

First of all, before we do anything at all, you need to be aware of the fact that this chapter is not suitable for the real beginners. Did you ever work with HTML, CSS, and PHP and have some experience in these areas? Good, then you're good to move forward. If you do not yet have knowledge on these topics, it's probably better to skip this chapter and jump to Chapter 7, Running Your Online Store. That will be easier to follow.

If you're not yet familiar with the techniques mentioned, there's plenty of information available on the Internet to get you started. From short tutorials to complete online video training, everything is already there. The following websites are highly recommended:

Would you rather work directly from a book? In that case, we can recommend the following books from Packt Publishing:

This chapter is too short to cover the topic of WordPress theme development completely. As we've seen, there have been complete books written about these topics. For this chapter, we'll stick to the basics and add specific WooCommerce information on top of that.

Before you start making changes to your theme, find out if it's really necessary to do so. WooCommerce comes with a lot of shortcodes that you can easily use on your posts and pages to call WooCommerce functions that you need. See http://docs.woothemes.com/document/woocommerce-shortcodes/ for a full list and examples.

Tools every web designer needs

Every web designer or developer has his/her own favorite tools. That's fine; just use what you like. If you're just starting, the minimum that you need is as follows:

  • An image editor. Photoshop is top-notch, but expensive. Photoshop elements would work as well, just as the free, open source Gimp.
  • A plain text editor, being able to help you with your HTML, CSS, and PHP files. Windows users could look at the free Notepad++, Coda is a good tool for Mac users but has its price. Alternatively, have a look at Sublime Text, which has a free version.
  • A set of browsers and devices to test your work. Do not underestimate this part, it could be very annoying and time-consuming to fix some issues that are related to a specific browser and version. Firefox users should look at the Firebug plugin as well, it really helps when making changes on a theme to be able to see them immediately. Chrome and Safari have such functions built-in. The example below shows Google Chrome. Using the Inspect element function (just right-click on any element on your page), you are able to see which CSS styles were applied to that element. You may easily try to change the CSS code, but please note that these changes will not be stored and are only useful to test them. The following image below shows you the Inspect element function within Chrome:
    Tools every web designer needs