What is Hyvȁ Themes and what are the benefits?

We sat down with Ryan Copeland, Director of Foundation Commerce, to discuss Hyvȁ Themes, a brand-new frontend for Magento 2. Ryan tells us the benefits of Hyvȁ Themes, how it integrates with Klevu and why he believes Hyvȁ Themes is the future for Magento 2 merchants.

Tell us about Foundation Commerce and your area of expertise?

Foundation Commerce is the result of me taking a chance on Magento 2 – and one which paid off. We’re known in the industry as a specialist Magento 2/Adobe Commerce agency – one of only a handful in the UK backing Hyvȁ Themes.

Our sole purpose is to help merchants develop a successful business online, by making their eCommerce site the best it can be. We partner only with Magento 2 merchants, as that’s where we are best suited to provide the technical foundation they need to be successful and thus, grow their business.

Whilst we’ve only been an agency for two years officially, we’ve witnessed significant growth and I credit our team and area of expertise for that. With the introduction of Hyvȁ Themes to the market, I can’t wait to see what the future brings. 

What is Hyvȁ Themes?

The love of my life! Joking aside, Hyvȁ Themes themes really is the next best thing. It’s a new front end framework for Magento 2 designed to solve the issues merchants experience with LUMA. A very honorable man, Williem Wigman, is the brains behind it. He was struggling to work with the existing front end, known as the Luma stack, and set on a mission to develop a solution. What he created in the end was an entire front end solution that not only solved those original issues, but also opened up development opportunities for Magento developers.

You see, HyvȁThemes removes everything from the front end, allowing you to start with a clean slate giving you two frameworks that you can use to develop front ends with. These are known as Tailwind CSS and Alpine JS – a JavaScript library. These options drastically reduce the complexity of developing the front end using Magento 2. A win win all round.

How did you first hear about Hyvȁ Themes?

Funnily enough, it was at a conference. I’d attended Reactacon looking for solutions that would work with Magento and I came across a tool from Willem Wigman. Basically, he had removed the hundreds of individual JavaScript files and removed all CSS from the Magento frontend stack and replaced them with two really easy to use frameworks, Tailwind and Alpine js. It blew my mind.

Instantly I was intrigued, so I reached out to Willem afterwards to learn more. The more I learned, the more I liked it. Not only did it exist to solve some of my development issues, it also appeared to be able to remove merchant’s frustrations with their sites. It felt very futuristic, I won’t lie. Having formed a relationship with Hyvȁ Themes quickly after this, we dove straight in with our first Hyvȁ Themes project and now proudly hold the title of being one of the first agencies in the UK to launch a Hyvȁ Themes themes project.

How does Hyvȁ Themes differentiate from other Magento templates?

Hyvȁ Themes sticks to the existing framework but removes all the complexity and completely simplifies development. This enables developers to quickly create new features and functionality making the time to market a lot quicker. It also makes for happier developers since less challenges are faced!

Why Hyvȁ Themes vs PWA/headless framework? 

The main benefits for me are, speed of development and cost of ownership. As an agency, Foundation Commerce works with a lot of SMB customers where PWA may be unaffordable. Using Hyvȁ Themes allows us to provide a lot of the benefits that PWA has in terms of performance for a fraction of the cost. 

For agencies, Hyvȁ Themes can quite easily be picked up using the in-depth knowledge of the existing Magento 2 platform therefore they don’t need to deploy a whole new development team to work with it. 

What was the first Klevu/Hyvȁ Themes integration you did and how was the integration? 

Our first Hyvȁ Themes client was KES lighting and they wanted to use Klevu Search. We started by reviewing the module and seeing where the dependencies were on the Luma stack. After quickly identifying what these were, we produced a compatibility module – in less than a day I may add – to make Klevu search fully compatible with Hyvȁ Themes. That module is now available in the Hyvȁ Themes compatibility module library. 

 Module compatibility may be a concern for merchants that aren’t familiar with Hyvȁ Themes but this is becoming less and less of an issue as many large extension developers are starting to create all of their extensions to be compatible with Hyvȁ Themes straight out of the box. 

What value does Klevu bring to your client base?

It massively improves the relevancy of search results. We’ve seen great results with a lot of our merchants after implementing Klevu. We ensure search is made prominent in the header of their sites, encouraging users to use the search and enabling them to find what they are looking for quicker.

We’re recommending Klevu for all of our Magento 2 projects now as at this point in time, we see it as the best search solution for our customers. 

What does the future of Hyvȁ Themes look like in your opinion?

The future looks bright, the future is Hyvȁ Themes. I genuinely believe Willem and the Hyvȁ Themes team are going to take the Magento world by storm. 

Ever since meeting Willem, I’ve been adamant that Hyvȁ Themes is the future of the Magento 2 frontend and the developments over the last year are making that a reality – so much so, that I think in five years time we will all be using Hyvȁ Themes. 

Merchants in particular should be super excited about Hyvȁ’s Themes development pipeline – it’s going to benefit them in so many ways, some even I didn’t think were possible.

If you’d like to see how merchant’s are already benefiting from Foundation Commerce’s expertise in Hyvȁ Themes, check out their work here. You can also find out more about the Hyvȁ Themes services they offer here. 

Klevu’s Hyvȁ Themes Integration and SDK 

At Klevu we have just launched our own Hyvȁ Themes integration to make the process as smooth as possible for any retailers wanting to use Klevu on Hyvȁ Themes!

The Klevu SDK is now also available. With Klevu’s brand new SDK library, you can pull the power of AI product discovery into any JavaScript ecosystem. It simplifies development giving you more time for innovation. Our SDK brings you the data from search, smart categories and recommendations as JSON. Then you can decide how to render this information. 

Klevu SDK brings smart search, category merchandising and recommendations solutions to your ecommerce store making it easy to create the best product browsing experience for your customers.

To find out more about the SDK, the Hyvȁ Themes integration and how Klevu’s Product Discovery Suite can help you, book a demo today.