As per the Platonic theory of idea, there should be an ideal theme of Magento 2 along with many imperfect implementations in the digital world. And this revolution has hit the ecosystem of Magento 2. Hyvä has introduced the closest realization of such an ideal theme. This Hyvä is potent to deliver outstanding usability and performance. It can be considered as a better version of the Magento Luma theme. Hyvä is also an alternative to PWA which extends your ecosystem from web to mobile. In this article, we will go through all the different aspects of the Magento 2 Hyvä theme, where to get it, and how it is better than the existing solutions.
Magento 2 Hyvä Theme Has Been Released
The first version of the Magento 2 Hyvä Theme is now available. You can find it here: Magento 2 Hyvä Theme.
Basics of Magento 2 Hyvä Theme:
Let’s know some basic things about Hyvä. Currently, it is a single solution. But you can find certain speculations over the Internet about a bunch of Magento 2 themes under its name. It has been developed from scratch based on a completely blank theme. Its UI library is continuously for Magento 2.
Theme with almost No JavaScript Libraries:
There is no use of layout.xml and .phtml files in the development of the Hyvä theme. Also, you will not find as many JS files in this theme as in other traditional Magento themes. Hyvä doesn’t use JS libraries, except Alpine.js, to achieve this goal.
Minimum Dependencies:
Hyvä company products are aimed to reduce dependencies on 3rd party libraries. The development team utilize the minimum required technology stack. There are two default dependencies by default in Hvya themes. One is TailwindCSS and the other is Alpine.js. They are used to implement the user-friendly UI and experience.
Principles of Hyvä Core:
The Magento 2 themes of Hyvä Core incorporate these core principles:
- Reduced Complexity: The Magento 2 themes of Hyvä are quite powerful and have many features but with less complexity.
- Improved Performance: The speed of e-commerce really matters a lot for the customers. A delay of 1-second can make you lose hundreds or thousands of dollars. Thus, fast-working web pages are also a focus of the Hyvä theme. To achieve it, these themes have the principle of improved performance and increased efficiency.
- Better Developer Experience: Just like the user-friendly environment for your audience, the developer-friendly work environment is equally important. Hyvä Magento 2 themes are having a forte in it.
- Better Development Pace: Since the complexity has been reduced and the work environment is also user-friendly, the developers can implement and customize Hyvä Magento 2 themes faster than existing solutions. Thus, the time-to-market gets reduced to a huge extent.
- Reduced Dependencies: As we mentioned above, these themes contain only two dependencies. Thus, they are more reliable than most alternative solutions.
- Reduced Learning Curve: All the above-mentioned factors reduces the slope of your learning curve of using Hyvä Magento themes. You would easily get used to it.
Tools Behind Hyvä:
The tools used in Hyvä themes have been originated in the Laravel ecosystem. Laravel is a PHP framework that follows the latest trends to grow rapidly. The development team has used tools like TailwindCSS and Alpine.js. These tools make the themes fast and flexible which are not just captivating but are also fast. The frontend is utilizing a frontend stack with various native Magento mechanisms. So if you are already familiar with Magento Luma or Blank themes, Hyvä will be not something completely new.
Hyvä as a PWA alternative:
PWAs are one of the most impressive products in web development history. It is like a revolution in the world of Magento 2 frontend solutions. But not everyone thinks the same. The development team of Hyvä themes weren’t highly excited for progressive web apps. They have never considered it as a solution for all e-commerce problems.
The main concern of PWA is that you can’t just implement even a basic e-commerce store without the next-level of expertise in the technical domain and it also requires a lot of time, money, and effort.
Developing an online store on the basis of a PWA solution is a very complicated routine available for large market players. Henceforth, a huge majority of online retailers are looking for an alternative solution to PWA. And Hyvä has achieved that.
The project’s team aims to close the existing gap to let Magento remain the best solution for merchants of all sizes. The merchants can choose a system that can follow their business requirements.
Do you require a PWA for your store?
There are many reasons why you may not require a PWA if you are using Hyvä. It can suit your business in a better way. These are the common concerns associated with PWAs.
· Limited Functionality:
Currently, the PWAs are limited in features. Although they have many basic functionalities like geolocation and advanced features remain beyond their competence. PWAs doesn’t have features like fingerprint scanning, NFC, advanced camera controls, proximity sensors, audio & video recording, or even Bluetooth. And you should know that fingerprint scanning is crucial for an e-commerce app.
· Ready-made developments:
An existing mobile app is one of the main points against PWA. If there is already an app that can meet your business requirements, why do you need a project with complex development and additional expense? Note that you have to create everything from scratch as converting a ready-made app to a PWA app can’t be done within a few code lines. But you can also combine both the approaches, a native mobile app and a PWA.
· Audience:
You have to identify whether your audiences use mobile devices or not. If your audience doesn’t browse your store through a mobile device then putting efforts to develop a PWA would go in vain. A good e-commerce store is always enough in this regard but makes sure it is optimized for mobile devices. But with the evolving technology more and more buyers prefer using smartphones for buying anything online. Even B2B buyers also preferred mobile devices for purchasing. Still, if your focus is on mobile & desktop users, then a PWA app would be in vain.
· In-browser Downloads:
The PWA nature forces your store visitors to download PWA right from your e-commerce website. Remembers certain aspects may prefer app store download as they are more secure.
Hyvä GitHub:
You can also explore Hyvä on GitHub. Currently, there are 4 repositories available there.
Magento 2 Hyvä Admin:
This module can be used to create grids and forms in the Magento 2 adminhtml area. The theme lets you do that without any obstacle.
Magento 2 Hyvä Checkout:
The customizable React checkout of Hyvä is headless due to GraphQL. It not only works on Hyvä but also on Luma and PWA studio. It is also free and open source.
Magento 2 GraphQL Tokens for Hyvä:
Apart from the Customer and Cart tokens offered by Hyvä, you can use them to improve the customer experience associated with the CustomerData sections of the Magento 2 website.
Hyvä Admin Test Module:
There is a tiny test module for the Hyvä_Admin module available on Hyvä’s GitHub page.
Magento 2 Themes Vs. Hyvä Themes:
The existing Magento 2 themes follow the Magento/Luma pattern and use the Magento theme as parent theme but there is a different approach of Hyvä. Even the themes of Magento that don’t inherit from Magento may rely on it as a starting point. But Hyvä doesn’t do that.
Magento modules use class and ID names to render HTML. The default .less files also use them. Due to this, an average theme depends on Magento/blank to leverage the work the Magento 2 core team previously did. It is like a neural connection that the brain uses instead of creating a new one. Thus, using the Magento can improve efficiency and reduce the cost & time and resources required to create a new Magento 2 theme.
The main thing is that nobody forces Magento developers to use Magento/blank. It is a fact of life that coders don’t want to break things in complex and time-consuming ways.
Hyvä’s Approach:
If you check the Hyvä theme for the first time, you will find Hyvä/reset and Hyvä/default themes present there. These themes have a similar relationship as between Magento/blank and Magento/luma. Thus, the Hyvä/rest theme is a base theme without any parent theme and a parent theme for Hyvä/default.
At the same instant, the Hyvä/reset theme and the blank theme of Magento are of different purposes. Hyvä theme can remove Magento’s LessCSS styles to implement a Tailwind CSS-based environment. Apart from this, it can also remove all blocks that Magento’s modules place in the base page layouts as well as frontend asset files, including JS and CSS.
Consequently, Hyvä/reset dramatically reduces the complexity of an average Magento page. It ultimately leads to a useless website, while Magento/blank creates a fully-functional storefront. At this instant, the Hyvä/default theme hits the stage. It rebuilds the entire Magento 2 frontend experience page by page and recreates new blocks and templates. Thus, Hyvä gives you a new approach to Magento’s front end. Although it incorporates a modern technology stack, the theme perfectly suits the system’s application architecture.
Pros & Cons of Using Hyvä:
Let’s go through the good and bad aspects of Hyvä. What’s wrong with it?
- Pricing: In comparison to an average Magento 2 theme, Hyvä themes cost a lot. Within this amount, you would be able to buy a robust Magento 2 template and several useful extensions for this money.
- New Technologies: You have to find experts familiar with this technology behind Hyvä. Although the developers are generally familiar with Magento 2 themes, there are always certain challenges hidden behind them.
- 3rd party extensions: Another limitation of Hyvä is that it can’t work 3rd party extensions out of the box. But Hyvä offers compatibility modules to address the issue. For e.g. you can use solutions like Elasticsuite, Sentry, and Google Tag Manager Extensions.
But there are many pros in comparison to these cons.
- Less Complexity: We have already explained how a Hyvä theme is way simpler in comparison to an average Magento 2 theme. It will not just improve the developer experience but also the speed of development.
- Improved Performance: Due to less JS and dependencies, Hyvä has better productivity and fast page load speed.
- Relatively Low Comparative Costs: If you consider the creation of a similar theme like Hyvä, its price doesn’t seem so frightening.
- Hyvä Community: If you are buying the Hyvä theme, you also get access to the Hyvä community via a corresponding slack room.
Wrapping Up:
In this article, we have gone through all the different aspects of the Hyvä theme. At Ceymox Technologies, the best hyva e-commerce development company in India, we are having expertise in developing Magento stores using Hyvä themes from scratch. Let us know your requirements.
