Photoshop
I wouldn't confuse people to stay away from Photoshop because it is a vital part of the design portion of a creative template. You can't create a gradient tile to repeat on x axis in any WSYWG editor, nor can you draw graphics. So it isn't the "old way" whatsoever.
I think rather its safe to say don't use Photoshop to design the content or links but rather for the supporting user interface graphics that are integrated in tables or DIV CSS classes. For example, I slice my background repeating elements, headers, buttons and icons in PS. But I agree not to use Photoshop's HTML exporter. Just get your graphics in the images folder and build the layout in HTML and CSS. I personally believe in minimal tables though all the default templates that bundle with x-cart are table heavy. X-cart is bloated enough. haha
What still mystifies me is Smarty. X-cart templates are broken into so many pieces it is so daunting of a task to create a template from total scratch. It's like a jigsaw puzzle. I guess that's the way to keep the template design control in the hands of programmers and allow for higher prices in comparison to other shopping cart systems and their template engines.
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X-cart V4.0.13
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