X-Cart forums

[bodygems4u]

Hello,
I have a couple of questions.

1. I have generated the HTML catalog and would like to know how and where can I change the links that are automatically created for the company logo and the images? I want them to point to the catalog home page rather that the xcart welcome page. I made the appropriate changes I wanted from home.php, but don't know where to go to change links for the catalog/index page.

2. Just so I am understanding this correctly. The HTML catalog is simply for use because it's search engine friendly. So customers will browse the catalog, but when they start shopping they are automatically redirected to the php pages. There isn't the possibility that they could go back to the html catalog, right? My concern was that if they could jump back n forth they would lose what they put into their cart. Hope this is making sense!

3. I would like to make the html catalog pages validate using W3C Markup Validation, but I am a bit leary of messing with the pages. Is this something that I really don't need to be concerned about? or if it is, then what is the best way to go about editing the catalog pages?

[balinor]

Honestly, this is a much better solution than using the HTML catalog:

http://www.safetynetweb.com/Dynamic-Search-Engine-Friendly-URLs-pr-1.html

If you would rather use the catalog, here are some suggestions:

1. Generate the catalog in the root directory. Re-directing customers and search engines to the catalog is just not good practice.

2. Make sure you block the search engine spiders from indexing .php pages if you are going to use the catalog. If you don't, you will get penalized for duplicate content.

[Online Michael]

Ok, just wondering.... how do you generate the catalog in the root directory anyway?

Does anyone here use the safetynetweb mod for generating SE friendly HTML? Has it helped?

[balinor]

Just change the directory at the bottom of the screen where you generate the catalog.

And yes, I'm using the mod on a few sites and it works great.

[Online Michael]

Originally Posted by balinor

Just change the directory at the bottom of the screen where you generate the catalog.

Hmm, but I already tried that. By default, x-cart automatically selects '/catalog' as the HTML file destination. But when I empty the field (I presume this is how you specify the root), I get the following error "No languages are selected" at the top of the screen. If I allow it to generate in the default directory (/catalog), everything works fine.

[balinor]

Try /

[Online Michael]

Originally Posted by balinor

Try /

I did, and this is the error I got:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Generating catalog

Converting pages to HTML

Warning: fopen(/home/xxxxxx/public_html/index.html): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/xxxxxx/public_html/admin/html_catalog.php on line 129
Cannot save file: /home/xxxxxx/public_html/index.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Could this be a permissions problem? I have the permissions set for the 'public_html' directory to 755

[balinor]

Need to have write access to that directory and make sure index.html is writable as well. Remember, it will overwrite index.html, so if you have customized that page be sure to save it!

[Online Michael]

YOU IS THE MAN! Bingo!

Thank you Balinor, you've done it again

[bodygems4u]

Hello,
OK...still have a few more questions.

I did place a robots.txt file in the root directory.

# All robots will spider the domain
User-agent:*
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /lab/

User-agent: GoogleBot
Disallow: /*.php$

Is this correct?

Also, I generated the catalog using the default /catalog. If I change it to the root directory (/), then do I need to mark the box that says: "Drop the old catalog before generating the new one". ??