My own template and litecart shop

Hi everybody.

I'm a french artist (painter) and a web-designer designer for my work. So I began to study the code of litecart, as I think it's a light and brilliant CMS, and I believe a lot in that product.

I'll give you the url of my website : that's not advertisment fot my art work or anything (however you may have a look and apprciate !), but I wanted to show that we can build a template from scratch. When I began a week ago, I had no idea of how litecart was working. Indeed, I used some good ideas I found on other websites for time earning, and I'll modify or change this later.

So the litecart version for my website is 1.2.2.1. But my template goes well with litecart 1.3 too.
I made also some other modifications for my website : I replaced fancybox by swipebox (I like this plugin), I used original lazy loading (not a shipped module as lazy loading is free and opensource, and it's integration is very easy), I replaced nivo-slider by the 1.3 responsive slider, and I added or modified menu bars. I use personnalized webfonts. I added a 'featured products' mod (not the shipping module either but my own) and modified some other codes everywhere. The default template can be used, but there are some PHP modifications in /pages and /includes. So all that can't be packaged as a mod easily, and I don't want to try. It's nearly a whole litecart-mod ! My objective is just to show a new work, and I don't sell or give any code, as it's not very ""strict"" and should be redesigned to create a really integrated mod. But I can revert to default template without any problems.

The url : shop.laurentsailla.fr (litecart v1.2.2.1)

Take care, this is a fully operationnal website and the paypal module is fully efficient !!!

I'm working also on code optimization. For a long while, everyone has put all the scripts and .css in the head, like litecart. But it's ugly for google optimization and all other optimization systems. The scripts should be after the code, at the end of the page. However, if I do that, some things doesn't work anymore in litecart; so I'm working on that ! I created a new anchor head_scripts for jquery, responsive slide, etc, and some of the scripts have already been put at the end. I merged all the .css in one with a php script, and I put it in the cache with minification (via .htaccess). But that's not enough. Im' going on...

Happy to see you like our work. You have some interesting work in progress I see. Curious to see what can come out of it. Lighter weight and faster loading times is always interesting. Keep in mind the loader.css is cached in browsers and when we tried a php+css minifier it slowed down the performance instead. :)

You are more than welcome to publish templates in our addons archive if you want.

However, I don't think luceart.se and customfit.eu are very happy over your header and site footer which are pretty much copy and pasted. Just a heads up to avoid trouble.

Oh I modified a lot of things in css : it was a start point (effectively copy-paste is easy), I'll modify that later cause there's a lot of work everywhere ! That gives just an idea for a quick operational website. After reconstruct a site from scratch is a good way to learn how it works. The important however is not the design, but what is being sold inside !

If you have a look at the code, I began some mods with the javacript. I stop using the CDN for jquery and other. I stopped using google fonts. All that is an easy way of course, but it degrades performances. I reorganized the headers to group the javascript, and not have javascript + meta + link + javascript etc...

In a usual way, @import shoud be now avoided in css, and the number of .css or .js files should be decreased at maximum.

For now, if I put the javascript at the end (after the marker in my page) - and I use a very simple and efficient way of parallelizing loading - I've got some problems, because I notice you include on the fly some javascript with the boxes, and sometimes the result goes wrong, because jquery is loaded after the refresh and after the scripts. I'm tryning to remove all the scripts of the boxes (like box_slider_inc.php for example) for including them on the fly in the snippet javascript ath the end, after the snippet head_scripts. I think it's possible to do the job : finally it's the same script, it would be just optimized for better performance and better google indexing (it's VERY important for google !).

I didn't really understand why checkout and search pages for example have a separate mechanizm. Why have some scripts to be integrated wia a function like function_draw for fancybox, and not all of them ? I think it's a hard way of writing javascripts on the fly either. I'm just studying ! I don't know all of your reasons or objectives, I only intend to help.

Of course, I modified the default .htaccess for my own website optimization, and I've got more security options and different cache options. Yes, you're right, the css is cached on the browser, but I cache it, group it and minify it before on the server in the /cache directory. I've only got one main.css. That's for reducing ressources (but can be a problem for developping of course).

For the while, I use google pagespeed insight and pingdom .com for testing performances. At the start, default litecart gives an awful score of 28 for mobile and 50 for desktop. Now I reach 78 for mobile and 80 for desktop. But it's not enough. Other pages on my website reach the 99, and even 100 (you can test yourself) !

Finally, the website is fully bilingual : I use the translation mechanizm () and the database for my new etiquettes.

Can you show us some performance conparison as test scores could point you in a right direction but doesn't prove that the performance was more than doubled.

The draw_listing functions are pretty much components that origins from the early versions of litecart where several pages shared one same component. It might be better to move that completely to the views today.

As for main.css the benefit from the performance would need to be so much higher, for the loss of development key features to be worth sacrificing.

Removing the cdn wouldn't make LiteCart able to simultaneously load data. The cdn components can have been cached from other sites as well.

Of course i can show you.
PS problem with the forum: it doesn't allow me to join urls !
Do you know google page speed insights ? it's a developper helpful program
Google takes care of the score of each page (mong others criterias) for it's indexation.
You're right; the CDN doesn't mean parallelizing loading. But using jquery locally instead of cdn means better performance. After all, that's only a talk show.

Demo litecart obtains 44 (mobile) and 53 (desktop) with red points.
Mine, with a greater mutualized database, obtains respectively 68 and 78 (work not finished). I intend to reach 75 for mobile and 85-90 for desktop, you won't have better whatever you do. The optimization is visual after that: we can really see the difference, and it's not only a problem of server response.

Hello Theoden, hello Litecart team!

I'm a french user too and have just discovered Litecart today. It is exactly what I was looking for and I am surprised seeing that it is so little known in spite of its enormous potential.
I just regret there is nothing for french shipping and that's why I'm asking for help... How did you integrate Colissimo to your site, Theoden, please?
Thank you in advance.

I just wanna say thanks for the nice words Faign. Spread the words. :) LiteCart is still a baby and we need people to chat, blog, and let others know we are here.

When I wrote it was just what I was searching for, I meant : something that works, easy to install, not so buggy (for ""a baby"" :)), not complicated (as some CMS wich have lots of things I don't need), aesthetically pleasant, fast, free, open... (what else?! lol) and still maintained :)
Just one thing is missing : french shipping module. But I'm sure you'll remedy it.
I don't know how I could help because I'm not a regular of social network. But if I have suggestions or bugs, I'll tell you.
Now it's time for me to familiarize with the code and customize it :)

The shipping modules are pretty general meaning you can pretty much rename them and do some slight editing. What shipping module features is it that you are missing?

The ""So Colissimo"" by La Poste (the most common shipping way in France). There are also other alternatives like Mondial Relay.
Here are the links to it :
Colissimo : http://shop.quadra-informatique.fr/fr/modules-so-colissimo/34-so-colissimo-prestashop.html
Mondial relay (optionnal) : http://www.mondialrelay.fr/solutions-pour-les-pros/proposer-mondial-relay-sur-mon-site/
Those two modules are free in other CMS.

Those are the names and homepages, what are the features required?

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean by ""features required"" (my english comprehension is limited :/). If you're meaning the files to download from their site and to integrate, that's what I was asking to Theoden because I see no link on their site, only links to contact them.
If you mean ""conditions to get it work on Litecart"", I'm afraid it is too technical for me to tell you...

Hello,

And well I would add this: Nice work done by Theoden. I am far from reaching its level. It's just my nose that tells me that the Litecart platform is made for me the beginner not encoder.

And since who does not try anything has nothing, I want to ask Theoden if he could help on another channel than this one.

The reason is that I am French like him and I do not speak English, and that my texts are necessarily translated approximately by Google translation.

Anyway, I imagine, a Frenchman (take in hand) a kind of tutorial in French to explain and praise Litecart's merits. And if it is not him, it will be another. I stay on the lookout.

In the meantime, he can contact me.

Good parties of New Year

Hi everyone and happy Christmas.
Of course I can help, it would be a pleasure, but I'm very busy and I don't have much time.
I've never intended to make a package of anything for litecart, but I tried and succeeded to understand and disassemble the whole product for my own personal usage and for the fun. My mods and optimizations are not only a template, they are not supported by the litecart official repository, and however I must repeat : litecart can't no more be easily updated cause I modified a lot of php. However I've tested all versions, and I must say : the best version for me is 1.2.2.1. It's the most stable and quick, and for my usage it was the best. Since later releases don't support Paypal anymore, as it was specified , it makes no sense for me to use it, except with paying for shipping modules.

Let's say I just found it amazing that an artist is also a developer. You are a special case.
I am also surprised to know that an earlier version may be better than a new version. (What good is the use of making new versions in this case)
Regarding Paypal, I understand better why I can not install it.

In my previous post, I was simply expressing the wish that we could speak French in other places than here. I have a number of questions.

Good parties of New Year

Theoden: Later releases do support running the module but the module is removed as it is no longer in development due to Paypal partner termination.

There is a wiki article on how to not lose your changes when upgrading.

LiteCart 2.0 is in works.

@tim
Hi. I know about Paypal partner termination, I'm following the news ! That's the reason why, after multiple tries, I prefer an older release because I'm not famous enough to have a big website with expensive modules ! Paypal is amazing for that. 
I've tested 1.3 releases until 1.3.4 with all my mods, it was very difficult to maintain and follow the evolution of the product, so I stopped development.
And however, there are a lot of problems, more precisely I had a lot of problems  while updating the product and the database, and some problems are ASCII and awful encoding problems (UTF8, ISO8859-1 etc), in the database and in the release. I had to patch all that too for French translation (it can be also a problem with web the server, I know, but I can't correct that, I'm only a client of a cloud) and hit endly a stable situation. When I have time, I'll have a closer look at 2.0 release.

@laurentmaman
Evidemment je parle français, mais l'usage de ces forums veut qu'on écrive en anglais, langue que je pratique suffisamment correctement pour être compris ! Pour causer de litecart et/ou modifications, il faudrait échanger par mail. Il suffit d'aller dans mon profil, il suffit de cliquer sur contact pour que je reçoive un message par mail (de mémoire).

@theoden, sounds like you had a really bad experience. Does your charset problems reside from the change in PHP 5.6? Because other than that, LiteCart supports multiple charsets and have already sorted out problems like osCommerce users suffered from, namely database link encoding issues, table encoding etc. You can convert your database encoding in Admin -> Languages -> Storage Encoding. But it's important no data is byte scrambled. Browsing your database with phpMyAdmin should show if anything is scrambled.

We hope to release an alpha version of LiteCart 2.0 in the beginning of 2017. It will have better options for creating templates, also being bootstrap compatible, we finally threw out Fancybox and upgraded jQuery to version 3, we replaced jqPlot with Chartist, and the Checkout is completely rewritten. Oh, and the source code is even lighter than before. :D

Seems like good news... I'll try this release as soon as possible. But I'd like to updaty my database without errors also, instead of recreating all of it.
I've already tried swipebox and other lightboxes instead of fancybox, but finally I use fancybox 2.5.1 as I've modified my own css.
I keeped jQuery 1.3 as my website is compatible with older releases of browsers and even IE9 and IE8. I updated other js and added infinite scrolling and other little things...

@theoden Fancybox is removed because LiteCart used Fancybox version 1, prohibited to use v2 for licensing issues. Fancybox requires jQuery 1 but does not run without jQuery migrate. It does not run on jQuery 2 or 3 at all. Instead 2.0 will use Featherlight which is ultraslim and requires 2 files instead of like ~70 like Fancybox.

If you upgrade using our upgrade script your database should be in great shape. That is if your data is in great shape before the upgrade. Although your template will need a makeover for 2.0 as we are changing many things for the better.

I recommend straighten out all your current troubles and adapt to vqmod for your best experience and to benefit from future updates. The forums are here to help.

When the 2.0 release gets out, I'l have a try. The template is not a problem, I'll do the makeover easily.

Hi everybody. I haven't posted anything since a very long time, but I'm very active with litecart deployment, and I know litecart very well, since first releases (1.x).
My french e-commerce websites are updated regularly, so they use the latest 2.5.1 release, and each time, vqmods or vmods now and templates must be updated, despite there are often significative modifications of the core. Each template is unique and no, I don't intend to sell my mods or templates. I develop unique solutions for each customer. There are 20 active mods for toile-popart.fr, some of them concern the core, other ones the official vmods, some are updates for the template, etc ! You may hire me for a personalized work !
Happy Christmas.

https://www.retro-vintage.fr
https://www.toile-popart.fr