RealCart.com Help || Editing the template pages

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Editing Templates Help
Editing themes with HTML editors
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Understanding Themes and Templates

With RealCart™ V2 we introduce a new approach to building e-commerce sites. We start with an “HTML template” (very similar to templates in Word or Excel.) This template already has V2 Tags inserted for merging your product and store information into them to create your finished pages. The “tags” will remain undisturbed by your formatting and the formatting will be undisturbed by the program when it merges your info into the templates to create the finished pages that will upload to your web server.

REMEMBER:
To customize the look of your store EDIT THE TEMPLATES not the finished pages containing your products or services.

The V2 program will re-create the finished pages each time products or departments are added, edited or deleted. The “template” technology in RealCart™ is similar to Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) that combine data from a database on the web server as the page is displayed in your browser. Because some UNIX web hosts have no ASP support we created the database integration of your product info on your local PC before the pages are uploaded to the server. What this means is that RealCart™ V2 will run on ANY server. No special extensions needed.

Getting Started

Editing your templates is easy if you follow some simple guidelines.

Locate your template folder on your hard disk.
The easiest way to do this is to go to the main menu in the program by clicking the [ Home ] button, then clicking the Templates link.
Edit the template page(s). If your HTML editor is “Associated” with your HTML files then you should be able to just right-click your HTML icons and click Edit.

If your HTML editor does not load when you do this you will need to start the editor and then open the template.

Be careful with the V2 Tags when editing your template pages in FrontPage and other editors. When setting the color for the “stock number tag” be sure to select the entire tag including both braces ([ and ])

You can change fonts and color etc on any of the tags as long as you carefully select the entire tag when customizing.

This is the wrong way to select tags:

Selecting only part of a tag and setting the color, making it bold, a different font, etc will “break” the tag and cause V2 not to merge data with it.

This is right way to select tags:

If you select the ENTIRE tag all at once (including the braces [ and ]) then changed the color to blue it should look like this when you’re done:

If you somehow slip with the mouse when you format the tags in FrontPage just select View / HTML... and examine the tags for contamination. If you see anything resembling the example below you can fix it as follows:

Look for tags that have stuff inserted into them:

 
[Products_
ItemStockNumber]

You can fix it by removing the font information from within the tag like this:

 
[Products_ItemStockNumber]

If you have trouble with the tags showing up in the V2 program instead of your product information you may have to “fix your tags” as described above. To avoid having to do this always select the tag CAREFULLY when changing colors of the text and other formatting changes.

If all of your tags look OK you are ready to save the template.
Save the template on your hard disk. FrontPage and other editors may try to persuade you to “import” your templates into your existing FrontPage Web. DON’T DO THIS! The templates need to remain in the ‘theme’ folder (e.g. Real Soft Classic) in the Template folder under the RealSoftCart folder to work properly with the program. When you save it, click the [ Save as File ] button and locate the theme folder under the RealSoftCart/Template folder in the cart’s program folder:

FrontPage may attempt to rename the file to “product.htm” (instead of “product.html”) when you save it so just click the appropriate filename in the save as dialog box and click Save.
Rebuild your page(s) in the V2 program by clicking either the [ Rebuild ] or [ Rebuild All ] button.

Doing this will cause the program to re-read the template file and merge your product info into the finished page which will then display in the browser preview window on the right side of the V2 program screen.