Create a Custom Page in OpenCart

If you want to create a custom page in opencart, there are two ways to do it :

1. You can go into the information section using the admin area.

2. You can create a controller file for your page, which points to a few other pages.

In codeigniter you would create a controller and a view and if setup was needed, we would create some rules in the routes file. This application is just a bit different.
Thankfully, this is a really simple task in OpenCart web Development.

How to create a custom page in OpenCart:

You need to create a controller for your file, naming based on the folder and filename. For instance common/home.php Has the class initialization like this :

Class ControllerCommonHome extends Controller

This is accessed using index.php?route=common/home and accesses the index() method.
If you want to call another method, for instance bananas, you would need to define the method as

public function bananas() {
    // Code here
}

and we would call it using index.php?route=common/home/bananas.
Now, we need to render the view. Simply add all of the following code to the end of your controller method :

 if (file_exists(DIR_TEMPLATE . $this->config->get('config_template') .
     '/template/common/new_template_file.tpl')) {

        $this->template = $this->config->get('config_template') .
        '/template/common/new_template_file.tpl';
    } else {
        $this->template = 'default/template/common/new_template_file.tpl';
    }

    $this->children = array(
        'common/column_left',
        'common/column_right',
        'common/content_top',
        'common/content_bottom',
        'common/footer',
        'common/header'
    );

    $this->response->setOutput($this->render());

Which will render the following :

 /catalog/view/theme/your-theme-name/template/common/new_template_file.tpl 

If that file doesn’t exist, it will attempt to use the same path in the default theme folder.

Take a look at a few controllers and templates to get your head around where everything comes from properly, but that’s the basic gist of how creating a custom page in OpenCart works.

We hope that you have enjoyed our short post in OpenCart Web Development. Stay tuned …