OpenCart Theme Development: My first opensource theme

 

 I ported the Argon Design System template to OpenCart. It is my first opensource theme, and it was quite the experience. 

OpenCart 3 ditched the old .tpl template system and switched to Twig, one of the best PHP template engines available so far. However, for some reason the development of a theme is little bit more difficult, because you have to create files for your theme everywhere. I understand the reasoning for the way themes work right now, but the developer experience is awful. 

Practically you have to download your theme to your computer to properly create your git repository, and it has to be done for each theme or extension that you develop. It is impossible to develop two themes and keep track of the changes with Git, due to the nature of OpenCart. You can even take a look of how difficult the theme development is here: https://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php?t=217095

 

At least with WordPress, you have just one folder in which you work on, and push your changes easily from there. There's no YAML, or XML theme configuration file, you just have to deal with the way things are.

If you want to take a look at the theme, I named "Sellr Theme", and you can find it here:

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/rjcalifornia/seller_theme