Ease of frontend customization

The Magento frontend is designed to optimize storefront customization. Merchants are encouraged to use Magento components to customize the look-and-feel of their storefronts.

Highly extensible themes are the central mechanism for Magento front-end customization. Merchants are encouraged to extend and transform the appearance of their storefronts using themes.

Magento provides several tools to help you significantly jumpstart the storefront customization process:

See Frontend Developer Guide for information on creating your own themes.

Magento Blank theme

The Magento blank theme template provides a launchpad for storefront customization. You can use this boilerplate as a robust starting point for your own theme development.

Magento UI components

Using Magento standard coding and styling tools can help:

enforce for consistency in design across your storefronts
simplify (and speed up) the design process

This component library contains standard reusable components for form features, such as fields and buttons, and navigation elements. The Magento UI library is a set of generic web components and Magento-specific patterns, which simplifies the process of Magento theme creation and customization.

See Magento UI Library Components for details about this library.

Magento Admin pattern library

A pattern library is a collection of user interface (UI) design patterns that can be re-used in locations throughout your product installation. The Magento Admin Pattern Library defines examples of components that administrators working with the storefront can use.

Form elements included in the Magento Admin pattern library include:

address form
button bar
container
tabs
sign in form

Users of the default Magento storefront encounter examples of these form elements throughout the product. These patterns provide a valuable language of software components (and indirectly, user experiences) for extension developers and administrators.

The Magento Admin Pattern library is built on the LESS preprocessor and implemented as a module. You can download a free, current version of this module from Magento Marketplace.

See Magento Admin Pattern Library for more information on using this library.

Extensibility and modularity

Global extensibility features

Magento Admin Pattern Library

Magento UI Library Components