Chapter 8. Creating a Theme Admin Panel

Now that we have a full working theme, we are going to create a powerful admin theme options panel. Through this awesome panel, the store manager will have the option of configuring some settings of the theme without having programming knowledge.

To create the admin theme options panel, we need to develop a custom Magento module that will have the scope of creating options in the backend, which will make changes in the frontend.

The following are the topics that will be covered in this chapter:

• Creating the theme options module

• Overviewing the System.xml fields

• Creating the advanced admin options panel

• Interfacing the admin panel with the theme

• Advanced options features

• Creating a visual color picker in admin

• Defining default values for options fields

• A quick theme option panel recap