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Ecommerce Templates > Newsletter > October 2007
Over the next few months we will be bringing out a series of newsletters aimed at getting the most from your Ecommerce Template. This October issue focuses on some Tip & Tweaks to improve your store.
Many of the tweaks you can carry out on your store can be made in the file vsadmin/includes.asp or .php. These include things like layout features, shipping & tax adjustments and display options amongst others.
The includes file is best edited in a text editor like Notepad, it's not overwritten by updaters so any additions here will remain each time you update to a new version of the store.
The original includes file comes with a bunch of default settings.
If you need to change any of these then view the available
parameters in our help pages here
ASP Version
PHP Version
...or in the User Manual under the Tips & Tweaks chapter.
As an example let's take the parameter, actionaftercart. Basically
what this does is tell the software what action to take after
an item has been added to the cart.
The default setting is actionaftercart=1, which means that
when an item is added to the cart you will see a screen with
a confirmation message and then be forwarded to the categories
page.
If you want to skip that screen and have customers stay on
the same page then you would need to change it like this:
ASP Version -> actionaftercart=4
PHP Version -> $actionaftercart=4;
Other options can be found in the help pages above.
The includes file doesn't contain all the various tweaks so
you may need to add those that aren't already present. The
first important step is to check to see if the parameter is
already listed so in Notepad go to Edit > Find (Ctrl+F)
and search on the name. This is an important step as having
duplicate entries in the includes file may cause issues.
A new feature added in Version 5.4 was the ability to have
a thumbnail image of the product purchased in the cart page.
This feature isn't found in the includes file by default so
would need to be added if you haven't already done so - do
search the file first for useimageincart.
If it's not there then it can be added anywhere in the includes
page above the line, ' Please do not edit anything below this
line, like this:
ASP Version -> useimageincart=TRUE
PHP Version -> $useimageincart=TRUE;
Most of the tweaks are quite straightforward changing a "1" to a "2" or a "TRUE" to "FALSE" but some will require more work. We have outlined some more common requests in the Tips section here.
Ecommerce Templates makes extensive use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This allows you to control many display options from one central file.
We have listed all the available CSS classes in our help file and in the User Manual but we would like to further highlight a couple of the classes here.
In version 5.4 we introduced a new css class, ectlink. The idea here was to give every link generated by the store its own class. Beforehand the link properties were only taken from the main link class in the css file and all would use the same color, font, decoration etc. Although you probably wouldn't want to customize each of the links, it may sometimes be necessary to make changes when you have a clashing background for example.
One common scenario would be if you had changed the background color to the cells that make up the minicart. That change is pretty simple with this addition to your style.css file
td.mincart {
font-size: 11px;
font-family : Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
color : #FFFFFF;
background: #000066;
}
This would give your minicart (and customer login box) a dark blue background with white text but the links would still be the default from the main style sheet so we would need to overwrite that with this addition
A.mincart.ectlink:link {
color: #33CCFF;
text-decoration: underline;
font-size: 11px;
font-family : Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}
A.mincart.ectlink:visited {
color: #33CCFF;
text-decoration: underline;
font-size: 11px;
font-family : Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}
A.mincart.ectlink:active {
color: #33CCFF;
text-decoration: underline;
font-size: 11px;
font-family : Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}
A.mincart.ectlink:hover {
color: #FFCC66;
text-decoration: none;
font-size: 11px;
font-family : Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}
Now the link colors in the minicart would be light blue, changing to orange on mouseover.
Changes you make to the style.css or includes.asp / .php will not be touched by updaters so the changes above would not have to be reset following each update.
The updater will replace all the files in the vsadmin and inc
folders except the includes file and the connection string in db_conn_open.
If you have made any modifications to the languagefile then these
will get overwritten so we suggest backing up the file first and
pasting in your changes to the updated version. New additions to
the file in each update are added to the top of the list for easy
reference.
The latest updater is always available from here.
If you are outside of the 6 month updater period then the updater
can be purchased for $39.95 from here.
For help on updating please visit our updater
help page
and our tutorial.