edan_f0/docs/source/howto/how_to_handle_statics.rst

================================
How to change Oscar's appearance
================================

This is a guide for Front-End Developers (FEDs) working on Oscar projects, not
on Oscar itself.  It is written with Tangent's FED team in mind but should be
more generally useful for anyone trying to customise Oscar and looking for the
right approach.

Overview
========

Oscar ships with a set of HTML templates and a collection of static files
(eg images, javascript).  Oscar's default CSS is generated from LESS
files.

Templates
---------

Oscar's default templates use the mark-up conventions from Twitter's Bootstrap project.

LESS/CSS
--------

Oscar contains three main LESS files:

* `styles.less`
* `responsive.less`
* `dashboard.less`

These use the LESS files that ship with Twitter's Bootstrap project as well as
some Oscar-specific styling.

A few other CSS files are used to provide styles for javascript libraries.

The core CSS files are not committed to source control to avoid duplication
issues.  However, they are included in the released Oscar packages.

By default, the CSS files are used rather than the Less ones.  To use Less
directly, set ``USE_LESS = True`` in your settings file.  You will also need to
ensure that the ``lessc`` executable is installed and is configured using a
setting like::

    COMPRESS_PRECOMPILERS = (
        ('text/less', 'lessc {infile} {outfile}'),
    )

Using offline compression
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Django compressor also provides a way of running offline compression which can
be used during deployment to automatically generate CSS files from your LESS
files. To make sure that compressor is obeying the ``USE_LESS`` setting and
is not trying to compress CSS files that are not available, the setting has to
be passed into the ``COMPRESS_OFFLINE_CONTEXT``. You should add something like
this to your settings file::

    COMPRESS_OFFLINE_CONTEXT = {
        # this is the only default value from compressor itself
        'STATIC_URL': 'STATIC_URL',
        'use_less': USE_LESS,
    }


Javascript
----------

Oscar uses javascript for progressive enhancements.

For the customer-facing pages,  Oscar uses:

* jQuery 1.7
* a few selected plugins to provide functionality for the content blocks that can be set-up.
* the Bootstrap javascript
* an Oscar-specific JS file (ui.js)

In the dashboard, Oscar uses all the JS assets from the customer side as well
as:

* jQuery UI 1.8
* wysihtml5 for HTML textareas
* an Oscar specific JS file for dashboard functionality (dashboard.js)

Customistation
==============

Customising templates
---------------------

Oscar ships with a complete set of templates (in ``oscar/templates``).  These
will be available to an Oscar project but can be overridden or modified.

The templates use Twitter's Bootstrap conventions for class names and mark-up.

There is a separate recipe on how to do this.

Customising statics
-------------------

Oscar's static files are stored in ``oscar/static``.  When a Django site is
deployed, the ``collectstatic`` command is run which collects static files from
all installed apps and puts them in a single location (called the
``STATIC_ROOT``).  It is common for a separate HTTP server (like nginx) to be
used to serve these files, setting its document root to ``STATIC_ROOT``.

For an individual project, you may want to override Oscar's static files.  The
best way to do this is to have a statics folder within your project and to add
it to the ``STATICFILES_DIRS`` setting.  Then, any files which match the same
path as files in Oscar will be served from your local statics folder instead.
For instance, if you want to use a local version of ``oscar/css/styles.css``,
your could create a file::

    yourproject/
        static/
            oscar/
                css/
                    styles.css

and this would override Oscar's equivalent file.

To make things easier, Oscar ships with a management command for creating a copy
of all of its static files.  This breaks the link with Oscar's static files and
means everything is within the control of the project.  Run it as follows::

    ./manage.py oscar_fork_statics

This is the recommended approach for non-trivial projects.

Another option is simply to ignore all of Oscar's CSS and write your own from
scratch.  To do this, you simply need to adjust the layout templates to include
your own CSS instead of Oscar's.  For instance, you might override ``base.html``
and replace the 'less' block::

    # project/base.html

    {% block less %}
        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/less" href="{{ STATIC_URL }}myproject/less/styles.less" />
    {% endblock %}