Free prestashop themes an alternative to the Classic theme

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The PrestaShop Classic template is an end-of-life project and not very performing, what alternatives exist while waiting for the new Hummingbird theme? In addition to commercial themes such as WareHouse , there are some interesting projects. Some of which also aim to improve accessibility which is often overlooked.

The Classic template was introduced with the beta of version 1.7, but its development has not followed all the updates of the CMS, for example even with the latest version there is no support for high resolution images for retina type displays . Apple with high pixel density. Prestashop presents the item " Generate high resolution images " in the back-end which can be activated in: Design> Image settings.

To be precise to date, I do not know templates that use this functionality, PrestaShop correctly generates 2x images for these devices if we enable the voice, but these are not used. For more information see: PrestaShop: 2x images and WebP support

How can we read here:

https://github.com/PrestaShop/PrestaShop/issues/26599

The problem will not be solved in the Classic template, in fact the project in reality is almost completely abandoned and moved to a dedicated repository , efforts are concentrated on the new template for version 8.0 of PrestaShop which should also bring another important news regarding the images with native support for the WebP format . And neither is expected to be maintained.

PrestaShop Classic Rocket

A Free PrestaShop Template derived from the Cassic theme. The template was designed to maximize performance, accessibility and SEO. It reduces the CSS of the Classic template from 80kb to 33kb and the JS from 155kb to 86kb. Use the latest version of Bootstrap, lazy loading, and the srcset attribute for images in product-cover-thumbnails.tpl. It brings many improvements that allow the full score in Gooogle PageSpeed.

Unfortunately it is not compatible with the latest versions of PrestaShop. Current version 3.1 is max compatible with PS 1.7.6.X

This is a major limitation, we will have to use PHP 7.2 and fix some security flaws by hand.

You can follow the project from here:
https://github.com/prestarocket-agence/classic-rocket

PrestaShop Modern Starter Theme

Another Free PrestaShop Template derived from the Cassic theme. This theme was designed to maximize performance, promises 100/100 in Google PageSpeed, and lightning-fast loading times. It uses Webpack 5.53 and Bootstrap 4.6.

It is meant as a starter theme for developers, giving them the latest tools and frameworks available.

Compared to Classic Rocket it is also available for the latest version of PrestaShop, but it is not suitable for the end user.

The appearance is spartan, almost vintage, certainly to aim for accessibility by people with disabilities , which is often overlooked as it is graphically not satisfying, so if you want to develop a custom theme, it can be a good starting point. Using it as a base, compared to the Classic theme we will already have everything updated.

You can follow the project from here:
https://github.com/Oksydan/modern-prestashop-starter-theme

Theme ClassicBlinders

Among the free themes for PrestaShop it is the most interesting project, designed to obtain the highest score in the Core Web Vitals metrics and for SEO optimization. It makes several improvements in the checkout and in the user management area (my account).

Among the three free improvement projects of the Classic theme, it is certainly the most accurate.

Also in this case we are faced with a Spartan theme completely similar to the Classic theme of PrestaShop, which is an excellent basis for developing a custom theme. Waiting for the new Hummingbird , and PrestaShop 8.

You can follow the project from here:

https://devblinders.com/es/theme-classicblinders-para-prestashop.html