X-Cart forums

[Group Imaging]

I am thinking about doing a pretty significant redesign of our current layout and I was wondering if someone who has had more experience with customizing sites might be able to weigh in on a couple of questions I had.

1) Ideally I would like to pull elements from traditional x-cart design and make them fit into a design I am working on. I attempted to try to strip down the home page on my test server yesterday but was having difficulty getting it to process correctly once elements were removed. Is there a list somewhere of required includes or other elements that have to be there in order for the cart to function at a base level?

2) Is there a way for me to build my site like a regular xhtml/css site and then drop x-cart elements into it (login, search, categories, etc.)?

Thanks in advance for any help,

Brad

[balinor]

MUCH easier to use X-Cart AS your site rather than trying to shoehorn it into an existing site. What, exactly, were you having trouble with? If you could provide details, we can let you know what you did wrong

[Group Imaging]

Overall I want to just clean up the general appearance, lose the right column, move around different elements (search and login specifically) and possibly change the way the categories look as I have two different "classes" of products that I want to keep separate but am not too much of a fan of how they look currently.

I am also finding that the current set up I have limits usability and I want to tidy that up a bit to make sure users have something they can easily find their way around.

The current site is www.groupimaging.com (the site is live so please don't order unless you plan on buying )

[Group Imaging]

Any additional information on this?

[JMC]

Hi Brad

Sorry I cannot help you with answers to your questions, but I was wondering if I may ask you a few.

1/ How did you insert the youtube video.

2/ How did you implement the horizontal menu with drop down and place your logo on the right.

3/ How did you insert the picture graphic at the top of the front page.

4/ How did you set the width of your site, my site uses the same template as yours, but it fills the whole screen width.

Thanks for any coding direction here, I am still trying to learn how to make changes. My site is using the standard orange template, its not that nice looking.

Your site looks really nice, well done.

Regards

John

[Group Imaging]

Hey John,

1. I just added the embed code provided by YouTube into the detailed description of the product.

2. (a) The horizontal menu is javascript and not populated by x-cart itself. It's a manual update made by me when we add or change categories.
(b) I created a separate file called header_nav.tpl from the existing header table. I just modified it to be 2 cells and moved the logo to the right side and kept it's existing HeadLogo class.

3. You modify that area in skin1/customer/main/welcome.tpl
You can just use regular html to add images or text. I put that particular image inside a div.

4. Width can be modified in skin1/rectangle_top.tpl
Mine is set to 1000px.


Check out this thread: http://forum.x-cart.com/showthread.php?t=21529

It has some general info on what some of the more common pages do in x-cart. It's a good starting place to get a better idea of where to look for different things.

Good luck!

Brad

[JMC]

Thanks Brad

I will give it all a go, so much to learn.

Regards

John