X-Cart forums

[kevin34]

Hi Paul,

just starting out with X-cart and slowly getting to grips with it. However I am curious about your comment "You can really do some fancy stuff by playing around with these two templates. You really need an html editor to do this best, as you can then put the template into a "layout" mode. If you do this with the top_menu.tpl, you will see a table and in the top right is the code for the current speed bar."

I use Dreamweaver MX to edit my tpl files, but the "Code and Design" and the "Table/ Layout" view are ghosted out when I open a tpl file - really like the idea of being able to see the table layout within Dreamweaver - could you tell me what I am missing?

By the way am using 4.1.8

Many thanks
Kev

[balinor]

Hi Kev, welcome to X-Cart! I suggest starting with this thread:

http://forum.x-cart.com/showthread.php?t=21529

The thread you just posted in is over 2 years old, so anything in that thread is probably not relevant to your version. Be sure to pay attention to the dates of posts. This is probably best off in a new thread all together, so I have moved it to one.

Do you have the Smarty Plug-In for Dreamweaver? You will need that in order to view the templates correctly.

[kevin34]

Hi Balinor

i did notice the thread was old, but when I read that you can preview the tpl files in dreamweaver, I thought I had found the holy grail!

I have installed the Smarty plugin and can open the tpl files no problem - however I can only get the code side. Normally when I edit html files I can switch between code & design view, however when I have a tpl file open this option is ghosted out. Am I missing something or trying to do something that can't be done?

As I think I mentioned before, I am new to Smarty but been using Dreamweaver for a long time (MX version by the way) - just that I know if I could see both the code & a visual layout of the tpl files I know I can get better more easily.

Any advice greatly appreciated.
Many thanks
Kev

[balinor]

Sounds like something is not configured properly with the add-on. Have you tried it WITHOUT the add-on just to see if it shows in design view? You won't be able to view the actual images in the templates because they are called using Smarty, but you should be able to see the table outlines.

[kevin34]

Have managed to get it working - did a search on adobes website and found that i needed to edit both the extensions.txt & MMdocuments.xml inorder to view the tpl files in both code & design view. This is now working and I can see the table layout, but as you say no images - can this also be achieved? Was hoping that I could design & preview smarty templates as I have done with html ones?

Kev

[balinor]

Well the images are called using a Smarty variable {$ImagesDir} which points to nowhere when you are viewing the template in DW. What you can do is find and replace {$ImagesDir} temporarily with images/ and create an images sub-directory locally and put your images there.

[kevin34]

Hi Balinor,

sorry for the delay in getting back - been away for a few days.

Replaced the directory and all is fine - this will be a big help in me getting my head around the smarty templates.

Thanks again

Kev

ps appreciate that I should probably create a new question, however whilst we are talking, may I ask your opinion on another matter....

Which way would you recommend to get the data in and out of X-cart. I have tried csv files but these are limited due to formatting of text descriptions, I cannot use ODBC as my service provider does not allow access to the database in this way. I have tried exporting the info from MS Access, however a lot of my products have product options and I would need to export this separately (which is probably the way I'll end up with, but its not pretty). Just curious on any advice you may have?
Kev

[balinor]

CSV is the way to go. It will handle html in the text descriptions....just not carriage returns.