SuiteCommerce’s new release, Aconcagua, drastically changes the landscape of the SuiteCommerce product and its offerings. With this release, users can implement themes and extensions to improve their web stores by using the SuiteCommerce customization functionalities. Site administrators can install themes and extensions as bundled SuiteApps or as custom-built code deployed to an account by in-house theme designers and site developers.
What is a Theme?
A theme is a type of extension that affects a domain’s design, look, and feel. Themes can contain any number of HTML templates, Sass files, and other assets that are available as published themes (bundled into a single SuiteApp) or deployed to a NetSuite account by theme developers. Developers can also develop and work on SuiteCommerce themes locally, and then upload them to a site.
Some of the benefits and features of using themes include:
- Themes allow any developer working with SuiteCommerce or SuiteCommerce Advanced (SCA) to create and manage their own themes (using Site Management Tools) and activate them for any domains associated with their site. Partners can also publish and distribute themes as bundled SuiteApps.
- Themes can control how a site looks, and what customizations a site administrator can make to their site’s appearance via the theme customizer.
- Only one theme can be active per domain at any time
What is an Extension?
The extension framework (introduced in the Aconcagua version) represents one of the biggest changes made in the NetSuite SuiteCommerce module. Not only does it simplify development but it also provides a new way to approach website customization.
Benefits of Extensions :
- Using the Extensibility API, extensions allows developers to create new website functionality (in form of bundles) without having to touch the website base code. The new bundles built on extensions can easily be versioned, distributed, and activated across different sites and different versions of sites.
- SuiteCommerce extensions are the only option available (versus SCA) when it comes to creating website customizations for a SuiteCommerce website.
- Extensions can be bundled as SuiteApps. The key advantage is that features of currently deployed extensions can be upgraded whenever required and re-deployed in existing systems, meaning that existing systems can be upgraded without any change in the existing source code.
- A few of the other advantages include :
1) Minimizing the effort of keeping a site up to date
2) Easy sharing between production and sandbox accounts
3) Extensions are backward compatible
Features of Extensions :
- Extensions are micro-packages of modular SuiteCommerce code, which adds functionality on top of the web store in a specific domain. Extensions can be bundled and distributed using the SuiteBundler
- Extensions can have any number of JavaScript, SuiteScript, configuration JSON, and other files bundled into a single SuiteApp or deployed to a NetSuite account
- Extensions can be used to develop new Sass and HTML templates and deploy them as themes
Create Custom Content Types (CCTs) as extensions.
4. Components: Components are ready-made classes and methods used by the Extensibility API which can be used as a substitute for objects and functions. This saves time in creating new objects and functions on a regular basis
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