MASE2 Optimus theme

About and purpose

Optimus is a free and home-made Magento 2 theme, developed by Studio Emma . Its purpose is providing a starting point for the development of our own client projects. It's a solid base to extend the Magento 2 Blank theme with functionality & styling without breaking future upgrades. It is continuously being worked on, both refined and expanded. All added changes and new features are extends; we try to stay away from overrides until there is absolutely no other way possible.

It comprises of the following:

• module-core (separate composer install) with several helper functions which can be of use throughout your own client theme.
• module-optimus (separate composer install) which stands in for our example content pages at [rooturl]/content. More on that later.
• theme-frontend-optimus (separate composer install) which is the actual front-end theme and works together with the two above.

Optimus works with Magento 2, starting from the initial 2.0.0 BETA all the way up to the current 2.1.2 release.

Demo

Demo available with a list of extra features. (Note: this is a base theme and it is does not look pretty by itself.)

Module-core

This module contains a lot of handy helper functions:

• getCurrentStore() : returns the current store
• getLocale() : returns the current locale
• getCurrentCategory() : returns the current category
• getParentCategory() : returns the parent category of the current category
• getCurrentProduct: returns the current product, if available
• getBackUrl() : returns the back url value when browsing products or categories
• isLoggedIn() : return boolean if user is or is not logged in
• getCurrentCustomer() : if logged in, returns current customer object
• getCurrentCustomerGroup() : if logged in, returns current customer group object

Module-optimus

This module contains the necessary files in order to build the example content pages. After you installed Optimus, navigate to [rooturl]/content. These pages were setup to give you a visual overview of all of our content-related changes. This includes basic layout (titles, lists, quotes, ...), page/section layouts (grids, sections, structures ...), interaction elements (accordeons, FAQs, toggles, ...), reusable classes, specific contentblocks, images and videos, ...

Theme-frontend-optimus

This module contains the front-end theme itself. We divide our work into two main sections:

• Changes: Extends the blank theme with changes to its functionality, styling and technologies according to our experience throughout the years.
• New features: Extends the blank theme with new features that are of interest to most our clients. These can easily activated/deactivated when needed.

Technicalities

• The theme inherits from the Magento Blank theme.
• The theme itself is declared in theme.xml. This file is a necessity for all Magento 2 themes and contains information about inheritance.
• The composer.json file contains the dependency information required for this theme.

Installation

The modules are intended to be installed using composer. If you do not have composer installed (check by entering the command "composer --help" into your terminal), please install it using the following commands:

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

After installing composer, use the following commands to install Optimus to your Magento 2 installation:

composer require studioemma/magento2-theme-optimus

After installing "Studio Emma Mase 2 Optimus" theme, you can verify that the installation succeeded by going to the Magento 2 back-end and navigating to Content -> Design -> Themes. If it listed there, you should be happy.

Normally, this theme will never be set as a the main theme for a client, but to set this theme for development purposes on the storefront, go to: Content -> Design -> Configuration and set the Optimus theme on the Store View you wish to use. Do not forget to flush the cache afterwards.

Using Optimus as the base theme for your own client theme

A client project will inherit from the Optimus theme. To do this, set the theme.xml of your own client's theme inside the client's package to inherit from Studioemma/optimus.

<theme xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="../../../../../lib/internal/Magento/Framework/Config/etc/theme.xsd">
    <title>Own client name - Own theme name</title>
    <parent>Studioemma/optimus</parent>
    <media>
        <preview_image>media/preview.jpg</preview_image>
    </media>
</theme>

Because of the Magento 2 inheritance system, we had to create an additional _extend-custom.less file per module. This means that all of your client theme, module-specific, styling should be added in this file!

An example. You want to edit the footer for your client theme:

• Add the "Magento_Theme" folder inside your app/design/frontend/ClientPackage/ClientTheme/ folder structure
• Add the web/css/source folder structure inside your newly created "Magento_Theme" folder
• Create the _extend-custom.less file inside the newly created "source" folder
• Make changes in this file
• Watch your Grunt process this file using the "grunt watch" command in the webroot of your box.
• Reload the front, your changes should be visible
• It is possible though that Grunt won't pick up your newly created file. In this case, simply stop watching and re-watch using, again, the "grunt watch" command. Re-save the file and Grunt should pick it up.

Configuring grunt (development purposes only)

You need to configure Grunt in order to work with your theme and pick up the Optimus files too, open /dev/tools/grunt/configs/themes.js and put in a new config for your theme like in our example below. Only replace the items between curly brackets {{item}}.

{{themename}}: {
    area: 'frontend',
    name: '{{themepackage}}/{{themefolder}}',
    locale: 'en_US',
    files: [
        'css/optimus-m',
        'css/optimus-l',
        'css/styles-m',
        'css/styles-l',
        'css/print',
        'css/email',
        'css/email-inline'
    ],
    dsl: 'less'

Next : run the following command that generate symlinks to the .less files that are watched by grunt (see command below) when you edit the source .less files (see next command). You need to re-run this command every time files are added/deleted.

bin/magento dev:source-theme:deploy --theme=vendor/theme --locale=en_US css/styles-m css/optimus-m css/styles-l css/optimus-l css/print css/email css/email-inline

Run grunt watch in the webroot of your box.

grunt watch

Upgrading Magento 2

Normally, no problems should rise when upgrading Magento 2 to a new release. If they do, please let us know.

Changes in Optimus extended from the Magento 2 Blank theme

As discussed, we divide Optimus specific work into two sections:

• Changes: Extends the blank theme with changes to its functionality, styling and technologies according to our experience throughout the years.
• New features: Extends the blank theme with new features that are of interest to most our clients. These can easily activated/deactivated when needed

Changes

• Removed breadcrumbs for screens smaller than 768px
• Added a mobile pager (< select >) on category pages instead of default pager for screens smaller than 768px
• The grid on category pages falls back to one column for screens smaller than 480px
• Product actions (add to cart, add to wishlist, add to compare) have been added back to the category grid/list on screens smaller than 640px
• Changed required form elements's colour from red to the default text colour, removed right align of labels
• Removed all Paypal and other marketing callouts
• Changed the way the review action breaks down on category listview on screens smaller than 768px
• The wishlist in the left column has been rearranged so that the product image and product description are now placed below each other instead of the 50/50 column view
• Made several changes to account section to improve usability
• Page zoom has been added to touch devices
• Added a home link (text + icon) to the main navigation
• Adjusted the print stylesheet to focus on the real necessary content
• The empty state wishlist & compare blocks will not be shown if they have no items inside of them

New features

• Added our own grid system (called _colm.less) in both regular and mixin flavours
• The contact page now includes a static block with identifier "contact-us-info" for contact info. You have to create this static block in the back-end.
• Added all necessary favicons and touch icons to head
• Modernizr library has been added to default head for usage
• Added a whole bunch of show/hide classes based on viewport width. See /content/responsive
• Added a "Go to products" link on the cart page on screens smaller than 480px
• Hid the "Clear shopping cart" button on the cart page
• PDP + Cart page: Quantities from 1 to 5 are shown in a selectbox. If the user wants to add even more to his cart, he can select the "More" option in the selectbox. The selectbox will then be hidden and replaced by a regular textinput.
• Added social sharing options to PDP
• Adjusted the complete footer section through layout XML.
  • 4 columns:
    • Column 1: Sitemap (level 1 categories)
    • Column 2: Static block
    • Column 3: Static block
    • Column 4: Newsletter block and social sharing block
  • Full width payment icons
  • Full width copyright + address
• Made it possible to change the view of the additional product detail blocks on the PDP. The file _sections.less explains what you have to do to:
• have the desktop view display these blocks as an accordion instead of tabs
• have the desktop view display these blocks without any UI modification
• Header has a new top row of USPs, derived from static block "store-usp"
• Added a static block "product_info_stock" on the PDP next to the "Add to cart" action. You have to create this static block in the back-end.
• Added the language block to the footer on screens smaller than 768px
• Added an SVG loading animation to the regular search in the header after submitting the search form
• Added the Font Awesome library
• The checkout success page now includes a static block with identifier "checkout-success". You have to create this static block.
• Added Flex Slider library. See /content/images
• Added possibility to make the header sticky. Edit the default.xml file in Magento_Theme/layout; see comments.
• Added a new layout handle: 1 column - wide. This will have your content expand to viewport edge. You can choose this layout when editing a page in the back-end. This new option will be selectable from the layout dropdown.
• Added own icon font library:

.myicon {
    font-family: 'optimus-icons';
    content: 'a';
}