X-Cart forums

[Daedalus]

Here's a workflow question for all the experienced web designers who use X-Cart and Dreamweaver together. I'm looking for the most efficient way to use X-cart and Dreamweaver to generate static HTML pages.

So far, my thinking is to do as much as I can in X-cart design-wise, generate HTML files, bring these files into Dreamweaver, create a Dreamweaver template and apply the template to these pages and then FTP these HTML pages back to my web host for the live changes to occur.

The problem is that everytime I use X-cart to generate a new set of HTML pages and take these into Dreamweaver I'll have to do a lot of copying and pasting into the templated versions of these HTML pages before I can once again FTP these back for the live changes.

Is there a simpler way to handle this workflow?

[Inner Eye]

What kind of changes do you need to make to the html pages that you don't want in your actual cart?

[Daedalus]

I need to add text to the bottom of the product html pages on a per page basis. I also need to add images. I also have some HTML informational pages that don't have products on them that I need to keep updated as well.

[markwhoo]

My entire site is in DreamWeaver and I upload changes pages only.

I have yet to open webmaster mode. it is worthless to me.

I only look at the store in copde, then upload it to the site, clean cache, reload page and look for results.

Simple..... Cannot get easier than that unless you did it all in webmaster mode, but it doesn't trip my trigger.

[Daedalus]

What if all of your pages change such as when you add a new category page? Do you go back into Dreamweaver and do a lot of copying and pasting to sync up the old html pages with the ones that are newly generated?

[Inner Eye]

I need to add text to the bottom of the product html pages on a per page basis. I also need to add images.

You can add text and images on the product pages on a per page basis using the "extra fields" option. I use extra fields for everything from detailed pop up images (using html) to custom title tags for each product. You might have to do a little editing in products.tpl to put the extra fields where you want them to display, but it's worth taking the time to do/learn. Easier than editing your html pages every time you generate the html catalog. That's like writing with disappearing ink. I guess if you only have a few products, but when you have 50, 100, 200 products? Even 10 products would be too much.

[Daedalus]

Thanks for the tip. I knew there must have been a better way to add text to the bottom of the pages in X-cart, so I'll try using the extra fields as suggested.

[markwhoo]

You can do if statements and tons of things to tpl files, extra fields AND text code snippets etc.

There are tons of ways to make this happen without doing all of that hard work.

For example, if yuo have say 10 pages of content, pics and graphics and you want them to show at different times, all you need to do is enter all of that data into 10 text code snippets (ie: lng_lbl_product_x , lng_lbl_product_y , lng_lbl_product_z ) and with thiose 10 small else if statements can make the same results and not do all of the hard stuff, yet it is all stored in the dtatabase.

Can do this with specific product headers in flash also.


Tons of things.

Get a test store up onoine and have fun. If yuo break it who cares, restore from backups and start all over! there are a lot of things you can do with ease.

[Daedalus]

Thanks for the info. I guess I'll have to venture outside of my comfort level with Dreamweaver a bit and try some if else statements in X-cart so I won't have to do so much repetitive work in Dreamweaver everytime I generate new HTML files.