X-Cart forums

[BoomBoomBap]

For Moonlight Toys I copy the index file from the catalog, update all the links, and then move it to the root - this is a major pain in the butt - often leading to at least one dead link or image per update.

For BoomBoomBap Im using php header location to redirect to the correct place.

Im not entirely sure HTML Catalog generation is necessary. Take for instance a search for "DJ Justes Fierce Transition" on Google. The resulting link points directly to the php page of the product category

Meanwhile, a search for summerset bullet shows a link to the html page of the product on Moonlight Toys and behaves in much the same way.

So, one site is PHP only version. The other site is HTML Catalog and yet google seems to crawl them both and find unique product names.

Although I havent delved too deeply into this, the only difference seems to be that the HTML version has search results link directly to the product while the PHP version has results linking to the category.

[redace]

The theory, while sound, needs a bit more tweaking to get it to work.
Since the cart is configured with relative paths, the moment you alter the base location, say to the catalog directory, to point at the index.html there, then x-cart will look for images from a directory relative to that folder, not back at the root folder. <oops!>
<That got put back to normal real quick!>

I too am struggling with search engines going deeper into my site, and so far, google is only touching my catalog index page, and not following any links deeper.

Could it be that the index.php header-location bit turns away the google nose? I too do not need a splash page, and have content changing daily.

Next phase is to get a some cron jobs running nightly to update my catalog, and my froogle submissions.

I'm planning on migrating from 3.3.x to 3.4.x this weekend. It will give me more power to work with, and perhaps the search bots will have mercy on me.

Live 3.3.5
http://www.wizzywig.com

[rackit]

Ok, I see this subject come up a lot and I've meant to post my solution, but I kept forgetting.

This is how I made my x-cart front page show up as the front page of the site:

<?php

//This part takes the html from your front page and turns it into a string.
// Replace 'store' with your x-cart directory.

$contents = file_get_contents("store/home.php");


//These functions change the paths of most x-cart related links to their
// original locations.  Change 'store' to your x-cart directory name.

$contents = ereg_replace("home.php","store/home.php",$contents);
$contents = ereg_replace("product.php","store/product.php",$contents);
$contents = ereg_replace("help.php","store/help.php",$contents); 
$contents = ereg_replace("search.php","store/search.php",$contents);
$contents = ereg_replace("cart.php","store/cart.php",$contents);
$contents = ereg_replace("register.php","store/register.php",$contents);

//This spits out your the html code and the browser does the rest.

echo $contents;
?> 

Save this as index.php and put it in your main directory. This works really well for me. You can check it out in action at www.rack-it.com.

It's possible that this won't work on some servers as it requires certain options to be enabled.

[groovico]

Now that's a sweet and simple way of doing it, nice one.

Add this line too

$contents = ereg_replace("pages.php","store/pages.php",$contents); 

It'll catch page links.

[rrf]

Don't forget that starting from X-Cart version 3.5.* you can rename customer/ directory as you want and even put it to your root directory (and cart URLs will look like www.shop.com, www.shop.com/home.php, www.shop.com/product.php, not as www.shop.com/customer/home.php).

[DogByteMan]

Originally Posted by BoomBoomBap

For Moonlight Toys I copy the index file from the catalog, update all the links, and then move it to the root - this is a major pain in the butt - often leading to at least one dead link or image per update.

If you were to use Front Page for this all you would have to do is drag index to the root, Front Page would then change all the links for you.

[forefront]

Originally Posted by rrf

Don't forget that starting from X-Cart version 3.5.* you can rename customer/ directory as you want and even put it to your root directory (and cart URLs will look like www.shop.com, www.shop.com/home.php, www.shop.com/product.php, not as www.shop.com/customer/home.php).

How is that done? Where is the setting to change that?

[BoomBoomBap]

Originally Posted by DogByteMan

If you were to use Front Page for this all you would have to do is drag index to the root, Front Page would then change all the links for you.

I've found that Dreamweaver does this quite well too.

Ironically - I actually took the splash route in the end since it's an adult site and I'd like people to agree before entering.

[forefront]

This post does not answer or address my question.

[groovico]

Originally Posted by forefront

This post does not answer or address my question.

He was replying to someone elses post hence the quote block