The real power of Satchmo is not in what it does out of the box but what the framework allows you to do with minimal modification. As you start to develop your online presence you will have a whole range of different ideas on how you would like to make your store look and feel. Satchmo provides a simple store layout that you can modify as much or as little as you wish. There are several ways to tweak Satchmo to your needs. The following list is in the relative ease of customization:
The simplest way to modify Satchmo is to change the attributes in the css file used by the default shop. The current style.css file is located in /satchmo/static/css. You can modify this file directly (not recommended) or create a new CSS file and modify the base.html template file to point to your new and improved css file.
The benefits of this approach is that it is simple to implement and makes it easy to update Satchmo as changes are made. The downside is that there is only so much you can do with css changes.
Template customization allows you to completely alter the look and feel of your site without having to resort to coding. The majority of the display elements are accessible via css or template changes. Before making any template changes, it would be useful to understand Django templates in general. The Django Template Author Guide is the best place to start.
Once you are ready to make template changes, the best option is to copy any of the templates that you wish to overried to a new location.
Next, modify settings.py to point to your new templates directory:
TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
# Put strings here, like "/home/html/django_templates".
# Always use forward slashes, even on Windows.
"/my/new/templates",)
Now, make the changes to the templates that you have to. Don’t forget, this is also the place where you can change the email messages sent to users as well as the pdf documents created by the admin interface. The amount of power and flexibility here is much higher than just about any “shopping cart” application out there!
Another nifty feature of Django is the flexibility in configuring the URLs of an application. Because a web store frequently requires good search engine ranking, you will most likely want to do everything in your power to help your store rise in the rankings. Using good, clean descriptive URLs is a huge plus. Another benefit of flexible URLs is that allows you to easily integrate Satchmo with an existing site or differentiate your site with a creative scheme (or language).
For convenience, urls can be modified by changing the SHOP_URLS variable in the local_settings.py file. Any url assigned to this variable will override the existing url naming scheme.
The comments in the dummy.py shipping module walk through how to configure shipping for your unique needs.
See Signals in Satchmo for an explanation of the available signals and how to use them to customize your store.