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Native XSLT and Smarty templates support and a new tool for managing them

Native XSLT and Smarty templates support and a new tool for managing them

30 November -0001

We want to be maximally open to customizing online stores and templates, introducing the possibility of implementing changes by any developer. After many months of work, we provide you with a completely new system for managing and publishing your own templates. It is based on the ability of customizing and publishing store templates in XSLT, which we use, and native support (without conversion) of templates in Smarty.

What is XSLT and why do we recommend it?

XSLT is an XML notation based template language developed by W3C, the same organization that standardizes HTML, CSS and other relevant standards. At the IdoSell Shop, we've been using XSLT for templates that we build ourselves. XSLT is a supported and recommended way for us to change the design because we have been using it ourselves for almost twenty years, both in creating standard templates and individual solutions created on request.

Thanks to the provided template download function in XSLT, you can download - without conversion - the original template code for self-changes. The developer therefore has a full control over how the template will work and look.

New native support for Smarty

We proposed the language of Smarty templates to clients, because it seemed to us that developers would not be able to understand XSLT, which we love, but it is not a very popular language. And Smarty has been one of the most popular template languages for years. When someone wanted to change the template themselves, we first converted XSLT to Smarty, and after finishing the work, when the developer uploaded the Smarty template - it was again converted from Smarty to XSLT. This double conversion, despite many years of work, still does not go perfectly and it happens that even the Standard template, downloaded in Smarty and then uploaded again to the store, was displayed incorrectly. Many people did not understand why such errors occurred, and they were the result of double conversion.

The big challenge was to reconcile with the systems created so far page acceleration and general template support and a separate template support engine. Currently, each server has two engines that, depending on the assigned for the given store and template language, they generate the page code either by the XSLT or Smarty engine. For the end user there should be no functional or speed difference.