DESIGN PACKAGES AND THEMES in Magento Design

In looking at the hierarchy of websites, stores and store views in the previous section, you can see that a single Magento installation can run many stores which may or may not share the same look and feel.

To exactly control the look and feel of each store in your Magento installation, Magento allows you to create

themes. Related themes are grouped together in design packages. Each store in your Magento installation can use its own theme, or they can all share a single theme, or some combination of both.

A design package is a collection of related themes. If you have been working with Magento for a while, you might remember these being referred to as interfaces in earlier versions and earlier documentation. You can have any number of design packages installed, but there must always be at least one. When installed, Magento has a special package named the “base package.” There will also be another package specific to the Magento edition you have installed. In CE, this package is named “default;” in PE, this package is named “pro” and in EE, this package is named “enterprise.” To this you can add any number of your own custom design packages.

Themes inside of a design package contain the actual files that determine the visual output and frontend functionality  of your store. Themes are covered in more detail in the next section, but briefly, Magento themes contain templating information (layout files, template files, theme-specific translation files) and skinning information (CSS files, images, and theme-specific JavaScript files). A theme can belong to only one design package. By convention, each design package must contain a default theme. Additionally, a design package can contain any number of variations on that default theme—called variously non- default themes or theme variants.

Both a design package and theme can besigned on either the website level and/or store view level through the Magento Admin Panel. If you assign a package in the website level, all your stores in that website will inherit the package of your website. You can further assign a package at the store and/or the store view level, effectively overriding that of the website.

magento one step checkout - fancy product designer - magento extension store