[php] How to modify WooCommerce cart, checkout pages (main theme portion)

I have been researching and tweaking away at my custom Wordpress theme and overridden WooCommerce templates with now WooCommerce installed to rectify a bunch of small formatting issues that occur on the WooCommerce pages. I'm down to now the cart and checkout, which yeah they use cart.php (and whatever checkout php), but also uses the main Wordpress theme page.php. I've been able to use is_woocommerce() in conditionals other places but not here as I've learned the WooCommerce docs say that can't be used on checkout and cart.

is_woocommerce() - Returns true if on a page which uses WooCommerce templates (cart and checkout are standard pages with shortcodes and thus are not included). http://docs.woothemes.com/document/conditional-tags/

So how can I alter the appearance of these pages? I have a "View All Posts" and a date/time at the top, and categories sidebar of page.php that I don't want showing up for obvious reasons on the checkout and cart since they don't make sense at all. What are my options?

Can I make it use a different template other than page.php?

Is this an option? Is it bad practice... does it cause more load on every page with this loop? Where do I put it? http://saiyedfaishal.wordpress.com/2014/01/06/check-if-it-is-woocommerce-page/

What's the best way to go about this? Thanks for any help! This question is somewhat related to - How to modify woocommerce_before_cart action

I've found this works well as a conditional within page.php that includes the WooCommerce cart and checkout screens.

!is_page(array('cart', 'checkout'))

I used the page-checkout.php template to change the header for my cart page. I renamed it to page-cart.php in my /wp-content/themes/childtheme/woocommerce/. This gives you more control over the wrapping html, header and footer.

You can use the is_cart() conditional tag:

if (! is_cart() ) {
  // Do something.
}

Another way to totally override the cart.php is to copy:

woocommerce/templates/cart/cart.php to   
yourtheme/woocommerce/cart/cart.php

Then do whatever you need at the yourtheme/woocommerce/cart/cart.php

WooCommerce has a number of options for modifying the cart, and checkout pages. Here are the three I'd recomend:

Use WooCommerce Conditional Tags

is_cart() and is_checkout() functions return true on their page. Example:

if ( is_cart() || is_checkout() ) {
    echo "This is the cart, or checkout page!";
}

Modify the template file

The main, cart template file is located at wp-content/themes/{current-theme}/woocommerce/cart/cart.php

The main, checkout template file is located at wp-content/themes/{current-theme}/woocommerce/checkout/form-checkout.php

To edit these, first copy them to your child theme.

Use wp-content/themes/{current-theme}/page-{slug}.php

page-{slug}.php is the second template that will be used, coming after manually assigned ones through the WP dashboard.

This is safer than my other solutions, because if you remove WooCommerce, but forget to remove this file, the code inside (that may rely on WooCommerce functions) won't break, because it's never called (unless of cause you have a page with slug {slug}).

For example:

• wp-content/themes/{current-theme}/page-cart.php
• wp-content/themes/{current-theme}/page-checkout.php