In this tutorial we’re gonna walk through the basics of finding and using a stencil Theme from the marketplace. We’ll also look at how app installations may differ on the new platform and what settings may have changed or moved if you’re trying to access the new stencil themes prior to the marketplace swapping over you’ll start by navigating to storefront design then you’ll click explore new themes in the upper right corner.

You should now see the new theme marketplace if the soar is already on the new marketplace you can instead go to storefront design than theme marketplace merchants can search for themes using the industry filters on the left and can filter for free or paid themes using a filter on top.

Each marketplace theme also comes with style variations which are called out in the bottom corner of the theme card if I want to purchase or apply one of these themes I can click on the theme here which should redirect to the themes page with this page up I can click on theme options and visit the demo store.

For the theme if I scroll down the page I can see all of the style variations that come with the theme I can also see links to the documentation and information on the features of the theme I’m going to go ahead and add this theme using the add theme button this is one of the free themes available so I’m not going to be prompted for any payment.

I’ll now get the option to apply the theme or wait until later and continue using my current theme I’m going to go ahead and apply the theme now once the theme is applied were redirected to the my themes page which shows the currently installed theme scrolling down the page I can see any previously purchased themes including older blueprint themes.

We scroll back to the top there’s an option here to customize once that’s clicked a new tab will open to the Theme Editor this is where merchants can make changes to their store without having to touch any code. We’ll discuss downloading and uploading themes customized with the CLI as well as using the edit theme files option within the control panel in later posts.

There are a few theme editor options that can be found in every marketplace theme like the theme history to see and apply previous versions of the theme you’ll also see styles to swap between the available presets style variations and some other settings like toggling credit card logos on and off in the footer.

There’s a lot of additional functionality that can be made available in the theme editor if the themes developer chooses to add them for example the number of products that show up on a category page image resizing or logo repositioning because a lot of this is left up to the developer.

The theme editor options can vary greatly from theme to theme once you make changes within the theme editor you can click Save Changes which will save your edits to the history section so you can apply them to this store later or you can click apply Fein to publish the changes immediately if you’d like to revert to the original version of the theme you can use the view original theme settings option at the bottom of the theme editor navigation after closing out of the theme editor tab.

We do have another section in the storefront design menu to add other design elements the design options tab is where you can add carousel images Store logo and a favicon for recommended image sizes for the logo and carousel.

You’ll want to visit the themes documentation page one new area you may have noticed is the scripts box some apps require the installation of custom code on specific template files most apps can now have this code paste it into the scripts box for the store footer here instead for example you’ll notice here I’ve got an embed code for a marketing pop up app handlebars scripts do work in this box so the embed codes for various apps may be different for stencil stores than they were for blueprint last let’s have a look at some of the settings that may have moved or changed first we’ll navigate to store setup than store settings.

If you’ve worked in the Bigcommerce control panel before you may notice that the Images tab no longer appears image resizing is one of the options that can be built into the theme editor for a stencil theme so again it’s up to the developers discretion whether to add that as an option if I click on the display tab there’s a whole host of settings that no longer appear as with image resizing these settings have been made available as options to add to the theme editor now that we’ve got the basics of the marketplace in control panel covered we’ll take a deeper look at customizing a theme we’ll start with how to install the command line interface or contact us now if you need help with stencil and the Bigcommerce control panel.

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