2. Building your Theme

Creating your own Themes

There are two approaches to creating your own theme:

1. You can create a child theme, the same way default Magento works
2. You can create a duplicate of the hyva-themes/magento2-default-theme and modify that

How to choose between a child theme or a duplicate:

If you are just getting started with Hyvä you probably want to start with the first approach.

If you want to heavily customize and optimize your Hyvä Theme, you might want to go for approach 2.

Info

You can always start with a child theme and switch strategies in a later stage, by creating a new parent theme that is a copy of the default theme, and optimize that parent theme.

Creating a Child Theme

Follow the instructions from The official Magento Docs to create a new theme.

Set the parent theme to Hyva/default.

Theme Preview Image

Please note we ship with a preview.png file instead of preview.jpg, which is referenced in the theme’s theme.xml.

You should copy over the web directory from the parent theme vendor/hyva-themes/magento2-default-theme/web/ to your own child theme app/design/frontend/Acme/default/web/.

Next you must configure the parent theme path in the web/tailwind/tailwind.config.js file of your child theme.

For example, if your child theme tailwind.config.js file is app/design/frontend/Acme/default/web/tailwind/tailwind.config.js , then configure the parent theme with:

module.exports = {
  ...
  // keep the original settings from tailwind.config.js
  // only add the path below to the purge > content settings
  ...
  purge: {
    content: [
        ...
        // parent theme in Vendor
        '../../../../../../../vendor/hyva-themes/magento2-default-theme/**/*.phtml',
        ...
    ]
  }
}
...

Please read all instructions on working with TailwindCSS and Tailwind CSS purging.

If you want to further optimize the purging of Tailwind CSS, please refer to this (advanced) doc: advanced purging methods.

Extending your theme works just like with default Magento Themes. You can override .pthml files and extend layout xml the same way as you could with a default Magento theme based on Luma.

Creating a Duplicated Theme

Why would you want to create a Theme duplicate instead of a Child Theme?

The reason you might not want to inherit from the Hyva/default theme is that you will likely end up with a lot of unused tailwind classes. The CSS-classes used in the parent theme, that are overwritten in the child theme will still be generated in the final Tailwind CSS file, because of the way purging works.

You will need to be comfortable with advanced purging methods to inherit from the Hyva/default theme and at the same time avoid adding any unused tailwind classes if you want to work with child themes instead.

Creating a Hyvä Base Theme

You can create your own base theme either in app/design/frontend or in a vendor package.

To do this, copy the Hyva/default theme into your desired location. In this example we’ll assume you’re using app/design/frontend/Acme/default.

Edit the registration.php, theme.xml and composer.json files to reflect your theme name.

app/design/frontend/Acme/
├── default/
│   ├── registration.php
│   ├── theme.xml
│   ├── composer.json

Editing layout in your Hyvä Base Theme

All layout in your theme lives in the base theme you created. The Hyva/reset theme creates an empty layout with containers only. No blocks are declared in the reset theme.

That means, if you remove a layout xml file from your theme, the blocks are entirely gone from the frontend.

Removing blocks is still an option, but removing them is a perfect solution to create the smallest amount of code you need to build your template.

Info

In case you where wondering, <referenceBlock name="block.name" remove="true"/> works, but you may also delete the original <block name="block-name"> from layout.
If you where not wondering, don't worry.