Introduction

Introduction

What is the storefront?

Your Aero storefront is your customer facing front-end.

Storefronts are built using a component based structure. This greatly reduces both your development and maintenance effort. Using components allows you to make store-wide changes quickly and efficiently.

A storefront uses a theme to control how the content is displayed. This content can be both static text or dynamic product information. The advantage of using a theme is that it can be easily changed to show a new design - ideal for website re-designs. For more information on themes, see Introduction to themes

Introduction to themes

Your Theme holds the individual collection of components, visuals and styles that make up your storefront.

Themes ensure consistency within your site. Allowing you to quickly and easily alter the look, without affecting the underlying logic. Themes give you the ability to package-up the look and feel of your storefront to be shared, reused or archived.

See our section on themes for more information

Introduction to storefront structure

The following structural elements are used to create your Aero storefront:

Introduction to image factory

The Aero Image Factory allows you to scale images appropriately and therefore accelerate page load times.

See "How do I use Image Factory?

Introduction to the breadcrumb

Aero includes breadcrumb navigation as standard. Breadcrumbs allow users to easily track and access the pages they have visited within your storefront.

See our section on breadcrumbs for more information.

How do I access the admin for the first time?

To access the admin, open the project in your browser and navigate to /admin.

Default login credentials

Use the following login credentials to access the admin for the first time. You'll be prompted to update your details and set a more secure password.

Email Password
admin@example.com aerocommerce

Custom URL

For added security, the URL path to access the admin can be changed from the default /admin. This can be done by simply setting the slug value in the project's .envfile:

AERO_ADMIN_SLUG=iqjwd9809i1e

Introduction to blocks for storefront developers

Whilst the layout of the storefront is dictated by the theme, the displayed content is managed through blocks. This includes navigation (such as header and footer menus), promotional imagery, static text and HTML snippets. Each block can contain multiple items of different types, allowing for features like image carousels and mega menus.

For more information about creating and editing blocks please see "What is a block?

For more information about using blocks in your storefront please see "How do I display content blocks on the storefront?

Introduction to storefront pages

Pages form the core of your Aero Storefront.

Pages are the main structural element of your store. Aero Pages are dynamic, this allows a single page to display various content, depending on customer actions. This makes Aero pages easy to update and low maintenance.

For more information see our section on "storefront pages

Introduction to sections

Edit once, change everywhere - Sections remove unnecessary code duplication and streamline developer activity.

Sections are reusable chunks of markup and/or code that allow developers to componentise functionality.

Sections allow developers to reduce duplication

When to use Sections - An example

Let's say you want to use image carousels within your eCommerce store. You want carousels on a number of different pages, and multiple carousels on a single page. Rather than repeating identical markup/code, you create a new enter the markup/code in a new 'carousel' section. When you want to add a carousel to a page, simply call the 'carousel' section, passing through different parameters if required.

Section location

All sections are held within your local Aero installation. You can find them here:

resources>views>sections

Default Sections

Aero Themes contain the following sections by default: