Best Approach for Customizing the Main and Admin Template?

Hi everyone,

At first, I was planning to directly modify the main template, but then I noticed there’s a guide for creating a custom template. My customization needs are pretty simple. I just want to:

  1. Change some icons and hide the ones I don’t need (e.g., the regional settings icon).
  2. Redesign the buttons for a cleaner look.
  3. Remove certain columns in the admin panel (like “Country” and “Tax” in the order section).
  4. Adjust the footer grid to make it more compact.

I’m not a pro at this, so my initial idea was to use Inspect Element to redesign things visually. But I’m not sure which approach is better:

  • Directly editing the main template, or
  • Copying the main template and then editing it as a custom one.

Any suggestions or best practices would be really appreciated!

tim

If you modify the default templates your changes will be overwritten every new upgrade to a new version. Therefore custom templates are a better option. But if it's minor tweaks only, a vMod might be a better choice.

Inspect element is a great way to find element names etc. You can use the search function in Github to find lines in files. E.g. site-menu:
https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Alitecart%2Flitecart+site-menu&type=code

The wiki has some good to know information for creating templates:
https://www.litecart.net/en/wiki/how_to_create_a_template

View code on GitHub