ThemeFlood.

Please note: RapidCart Pro (by Foreground) has been discontinued. The last update was version 5.0.4 on March 2nd 2022. However the Boutique theme is able to work with other e-commerce plugins, including Ecwid and simple PayPal 'buy now' buttons. Please ask for help on the community forums, if you are seeking a suitable e-commerce solution for your business.

Introduction

Boutique is optimised for the RapidCart Pro plugin and other e-commerce plugins; making this one of the best, dedicated e-commerce themes ever created for RapidWeaver. Wikipedia defines a boutique as 'a small store that sells stylish clothing, jewellery, or other usually expensive things'. The Boutique theme certainly rises to this standard and provides a framework to build brilliant e-commerce websites with.

Like the Longitude theme, the option of ten, full width, horizontal blocks is provided. Just about any type of content can be embedded within these blocks, using the ExtraContent technique. Embedded web fonts, the complete Bootstrap toolkit, Font Awesome icons, a responsive lightbox, retina image support and responsive video is all built-in as standard; saving you the time, trouble and money of getting these separate components added to your website.

Optimised for RapidCart Pro

RapidCart Pro is the a popular e-commerce plugin for RapidWeaver. This excellent plugin by 4gnd (not included with the purchase of the Boutique theme) provides the most flexible shopping cart system available for RapidWeaver. The Boutique theme includes a placeholder (ExtraContent 2) to display the shopping cart quantity or shopping cart total alongside your page navigation links, at the top. This automatically updates when customers add items to their cart. The code snippet to achieve this functionality is fully documented in the knowledgebase article.

The main content container is blank, making it a perfect space to setup your RapidCart Pro product inventory and detailed information for individual products. RapidCart Pro generates its own right-floating sidebar container, so the normal theme sidebar is set to 'hidden' by default.

As well as brilliant compatibility with RapidCart Pro, Boutique should work fine with a majority of other RapidWeaver shopping cart stacks and plugins. The free demo version of this theme allows you to test the theme against real addons and content.

FreeStyle Banner

Websites which are selling stuff need to be distinctive and make an impact! Like many other ThemeFlood RapidWeaver themes, Boutique makes use of the revolutionary Freestyle banner technique. This gives you a flexible blank space to display just about any type of responsive content above your page fold, including static images, slideshows and even video.

Boutique comes pre-loaded with 40 example banner images, which you can use or replace with your own. An unlimited number of static banner images can be added to your website (ideal if you want to display a different banner image on each page) and possibilities certainly exist to make your static banner images compatible with retina display devices; for extra high-definition, pin-sharp images.

The example images we supply in the Boutique theme already are 2000px wide and 800px tall, to create a pleasant 'letter box' shape. Each image is saved in JPG format at 72 DPI. To ensure pages continue to load fast on different devices and internet connections, we've made and effort to keep the majority of banner images less than 200KB. The banner container spans the full width of the page; with your title, slogan or logo image layered over the top.

Configuring your navigation bar

The navigation bar in Boutique can support up-to 10 individual items. You can change the number of items you want to display in the theme style settings. This ensures that your navigation items will be equally justified in width, to span the full width of the navigation bar on screens greater than 992px wide. Like our Boutique demo site, you can replace some page names (like the homepage) with Font Awesome Icons, like a 'home' icon.

A significant feature in Boutique is support for 'Nav Bar Functions'. These display on the far right of the navigation bar. Nav bar functions let you do things like display a RapidCartPro total, a RapidCartPro quantity or some ExtraContent.

Easy navigation

On smaller screens less-than 996px wide, the page navigation links are displayed in the format of a simple toggle navigation menu. This makes things far easier for your visitors on smaller tablets and mobile devices to quickly navigate to all levels of your website in just a few touches and swipes. The colour scheme of this toggle navigation menu is fully customisable within the theme style settings.

For screens greater than 976px wide, visitors to your website will see an attractive drop-down menu with subtle CSS animation effects.

You can display chevron icons, next to pages which have subpages. This is easily done (as per our Boutique demo site) by inserting the Font Awesome syntax for arrows, after the page name like this:

Our Services <i class='arrow fas fa-caret-down'></i>

By giving the icon a class of arrow, we can automatically omit these icons from the toggle navigation layout, footer navigation links, breadcrumbs and sitemaps. It's personal preference as to whether you wish to include these indicator arrows; some people do, others don't. But the option is there.

Pages with subpages will display a simple animated drop-down menu on rollover. Again like with the toggle menu, you can adjust the colour scheme of this menu. Together with a drop-down menu (enabled by default) you can also switch to a split or sidebar block navigation layout too.

Simple site searching

E-commerce websites typically have a lot of pages. A user-friendly drop-down navigation menu is normally the route a majority of website visitors will take, when casually browsing a website. However those seeking a particular product will benefit from having access to a search box. Boutique includes a distinctive search box which animates-open, from under the navigation bar. RapidSearch or similar addons are not included with this theme, but are recommended.

Horizontal blocks

A common request of users of some other ThemeFlood themes is the ability to have blocks of content that can span the full-width of the page. Boutique has ten of these optional 'horizontal blocks', and they can be turned on in the theme settings when required. Each of these ten blocks contains a single ExtraContent container (referenced in the theme settings or using the ExtraContent previewing option in the theme settings); so you can easily get content like text, columns, images, slideshows, video and whatever else swiftly embedded with ease. You can use as few or as many of these content areas as you want. The width of content placed inside each area can be changed in the theme style settings, together with colour schemes.

Lots of extras

Boutique includes the complete Bootstrap Toolkit; by far the most complete and popular web development front-end framework in existence. You'll also find that Boutique incorporates Font Awesome Icons; giving you instant access to several hundred, retina-display compatible icons for use anywhere in your project. A fully responsive lightbox is built into Boutique and supports the opening of images, video and other content at fullscreen; plus gallery support. If you host your website images remotely (using the image warehouse technique) the built-in support for retina-display images in Boutique could be of significantly benefit to you. Likewise if you're embedding YouTube or Vimeo content into your pages, these get automatically scaled to fit responsively into your pages. Boutique proves yet-again you can easily do a lot with one theme; without needing to invest heavily in lots of additional RapidWeaver addons. The theme knowledgebase explains all these listed features in detail.

Sidebar

By default, the sidebar container is hidden in Boutique. However if required (like for a blog page), you can turn it on in the theme style settings. Options exist to customise whether the sidebar is floated left or right of your content. The sidebar can be setup in a variety of flexible (percentage) widths. The colour scheme of the sidebar text and links can be customised too.

Translating labels

Text labels applied to elements like the mobile navigation button and breadcrumb links can be safely customised using this custom CSS code:

#mainNavButton .lang-label:after {
	content: 'Menu';
}

#mobile-search-label .lang-label:after {
	content: 'Search';
}

#lastUpdated .lang-label:after {
	content: 'Last updated: ';
}

#breadcrumb .lang-label:after {
	content: 'Currently viewing: ';
}

Add this code into either the Page Inspector > HTML Code > CSS box or your Settings > Code > CSS box. Change the wording to suit your requirements.

Other details

Boutique uses valid HTML5 markup; for the best possible performance on modern web browsers and excellent compatibility with a wide range of different RapidWeaver addons. This theme has been tested and confirmed to work reliably in all newer web browsers.

Work has been done in the theme to optimise page loading and reduce the overall bandwidth of pages. Internal theme components like stylesheets, Javascript and images have been optimised for the smallest possible file sizes. We call files like Javascript at the end of pages, so that your content loads first. This gives pages a fast and 'snappy' feel to them. jQuery Javascript code within the theme runs inside its own namespace and closure, to greatly reduce the risk of conflicts with other scripts or addons you later add to pages.

Website accessibility is a very important factor when publishing content online. Simple site navigation structures ensure that users can easily find their way quickly around sites build using Boutique. Optimisations have also been made for the benefit of search engines indexing website published using Boutique. Print styles are built-in throughout Boutique, providing excellent print and PDF output.

What's not included?

Our Boutique demo website makes use of RapidCart Pro. RapidCart Pro is needed to build your inventory of products and empower the entire shopping cart and checkout process. An addon like RapidSearch Pro is needed if you want to provide your website visitors with a powerful search engine. Because both of these addons are developed, maintained and supported by other companies, we do not include them in the purchase of the Boutique theme. You may already own one or both of these plugins, but if not you may need to consider purchasing them or using alternatives. Please make use of the free Boutique theme demo version already provided, to understand what the theme can do and how it works.