Help with Standard Templates

Questions and answers about ShopSite Custom Templates

Help with Standard Templates

Postby gkcbn » Sat Aug 25, 2012 7:42 pm

Hi, I'm new to Shopsite. I have ver 11, pro. I want to use the standard templates that come with it but have little to no coding experience. How do I go about getting the templates to work? Is there some kind of tutorial or video for just starting with those? I've seen alot for creating your own but right now, I'll be happy to use what is already available.
Thanks!
gkcbn
 
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Re: Help with Standard Templates

Postby Jim » Sat Aug 25, 2012 10:32 pm

The easiest thing to do is go to Preferences > Themes and look at the different template styles that are available. You can select one and it will change all the required files to use that look in your store. Once you have selected the theme and said OK to change to that theme the page, product, search, shopping cart etc templates will be reassigned to be the one used by that theme. You can then publish your store by clicking the Publish tab (or Utilites > Publish > Regenerate) and the view the changes on your store pages.
You can learn more about each theme at http://www.shopsite.com/templates/cookbook/builtintemplates.shtml
Jim
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Re: Help with Standard Templates

Postby gkcbn » Sun Aug 26, 2012 7:15 am

I currently have a site already up and active. A company that is no longer in bus "built" my site. Some of it was made outside of Shopsite (home pages and soforth) I want to have everything in Shopsite so that I can make easy edits. My footers are also all seperate. If I change one of those themes like that, won't it mess up what is currently there? How do I just add a page and change it's theme so I can create each page individually that needs to be redone.. Thank you soooo much. I really appreciate your help. :)
gkcbn
 
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Joined: Sat Aug 25, 2012 7:40 pm

Re: Help with Standard Templates

Postby Jim » Mon Aug 27, 2012 8:12 am

Yes if you change the theme it will change all ShopSite generated pages to the new theme look. Any pages created outside ShopSite will not be affected UNLESS you have a page that is generated by ShopSite that has the same file name as a page that was created outside of ShopSite. So for example if your home page has the filename of index.html and you create a page in ShopSite with index.html as the filename, when you publish your store the home page will be replace with the one generated by ShopSite. So just make sure you don't create a page in ShopSite and give it the same file name as any page that is created outside of ShopSite.

What template was used for your current ShopSite generated pages?

To assign a template to a page or product the backoffice screens for Pages and Products need to be in the Advanced Editing mode. If you click on the Pages icon in the navigation bar and look at the bottom of the screen there will be a button that says either Advanced Editing or Basic Editing. If it says Advanced editing then you are in the Basic Editing mode so you need to press the Advanced editing button. If it says Basic Editing then you are already in Advanced Editing mode. Both the Pages and Product screens will be in the same Editing mode
In advanced editing there will be a list of Pages with buttons to the right, one of which is Edit Page Layout, when you click that button on the screen there is a field Page Template that you can select the template for that particular page. Any pages already being generated by ShopSite will list the template being used, so when you create new pages in ShopSite that will be the template you want to select.
Product templates are selected similar to how page template are but they will be done on Products > Edit Product Layout.

There is also a section under Preferences for setting the default values that are used for Pages and Products so you can select the templates and other values that you want most often for your page and products on the appropriate Preferences > Page Defaults or Preferences > Product Defaults. That way you won't have to make the basic changes to a page or product when you create a new one.

Converting your non-ShopSite pages to use a ShopSite template will be a matter of creating a page within ShopSite with the various fields using the data from your existing page. I would start by creating a page with the same page name as your page but make sure that you give it a different file name, maybe add a "temp_" to the original file name, i.e. your home page is index.html so create a home page in ShopSite with temp_index.html as the file name. Then when you publish your store you can compare the two pages to make sure the ShopSite generated one is how you want it. Once you are satisfied with the new page you can change the name from temp_index.html to index.html and when you publish that will be your new home page.

Having the existing page it may be a simple matter to just select text from your existing pages and copy it into the fields of the page you are creating in ShopSite to replace it. It might also be more work than that depending on how complex your non ShopSite pages are.
Jim
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