customization resources

Hi

I have found the forums and the community very helpful on most issues and the instructions on how to get a store up and running are very clear. However, I am finding it difficult to find a clear and straightforward way of altering the look of the shop. I can code sufficently well in CSS to make the changes necessary to headers and so forth but, does anyone know of any literature that focuses on customization alone? I can follow the logic of PHP but I don't know which files I should be looking in to alter so that I can make alterations.
A web tutorial would be sufficient. I find that some of the faq's are a little vague and I keep going around in circles.

Thanks in advance

"Customization" is a huge topic. There is not one resource that covers all of it; many articles and threads in the forum, tutorials and wiki cover individual aspects of customization. Just look around, and then ask if you can't find some particular thing.

There is no OVERALL tutorial covering customization, but there are a lot of community members willing to provide answers to specific questions you may have.

Customization is a pretty subjective and individualized term used to achieve the specific look/feel you want for your site.

What do you want to customize? Turn off the left and right columns? Turn off individual sideboxes? Change the overall width of your site? Change the colors, font size? Do you want to change the layout of individual pages? Change the text for portions of your site?

The answers to most of these questions are in the forum threads, the Tutorials/FAQ and the wiki.

The files you would need to work with also depend on the answers to these questions. The files could be: Language files (to change the text), the stylesheet (to change font size and colors), the admin panel (to turn on/off various options), the template (tpl_) files (to modify the layout of various pages.

I guess what all the above means is be specific in with questions so that when community members provide an answer it will be specific to your problem.

Again, always impressed by the prompt reply.
Specifically, I wish to alter the colours of sidebars, headers for categories and add borders to products on the layout. I also wish to experiment with some advanced css to help create a template that has curved borders.
I would also like to alter the size and position of headers and maybe introduce a couple more divs to the layout. Although I suspect that my PHP is not yet up to this!

Images of buttons are, of course, no problem as they are styraightforward gif/png/jpg

I suspect that the best way to look at customising the templates is to look at some of the existing folder structures and compare the differences between the files.

Again, thanks for any help. I susoect that once I crack this nut, I can get going at speed again!

Much of what you want will be done in the stylesheet.
If you haven't done it already, get the Firefox browser with its Web Developer extension. The tools in this will be your best friend in finding classes & id's to edit.
For rounded corners, you might look at the code for Kuroi's Future Zen template in Downloads and see how he does it.

Hello, fellow Newbie here with similiar questions when I started a month ago. What I found (find) to be helpful is to make a list of the things I want to change and use the search button to find the answers to how to change them. When I'm done I check off the items from my list and if I get stuck instead of pouting I just move onto the next item on my list and go back to the offending item when I have more time. This method really has helped my sense of self esteem with learning a new coding language as I finally GOT HTML to where I can fly through it. Now I feel like I'm learning to walk all over again.

Try the list, you'll find that it helps make things less confusing oh and buy the manual, I did and am holding my frustrations until it gets here.

Beth