RealCart FAQ || Does your shopping cart work with Front Page?

Does your shopping cart work with FrontPage and other editors?

Answer: Yes. It does. although 90% of your e-commerce store configuration and publishing happens with the shopping cart program itself you can use FrontPage to edit the template files that compile with our software to create your shopping cart pages. To use FrontPage to customize your shopping cart pages to match your existing site:

RealCart™ comes with a well stocked template folder with templates that are FrontPage/WYSIWYG friendly. Here’s how to get started on customizing one of them for use with your site.

Step 1. -- Just click on the File menu and select Themes... and the Copy Template Theme dialog will appear.

When the Copy Template Theme dialog comes up just select the theme you want to copy and then give your new copy a name. Call it something with the name of your store in the name so you’ll know which store the theme goes to. Enter a name for your new theme and click the OK button.

Step 2. -- Click the “Theme” pull-down menu above the browser area in RealCart™ to select the newly copied theme as the current theme for your store. You will be asked if you want to rebuild all of your pages. Answer Yes.

Step 3. -- Locate your current theme folder on your hard drive.

With RealCart™ running click on the “Cart Start” in the upper left corner of the program window.

Click the “Templates” link in the browser area (above the graphic).

Your current template theme should open. If it does not, double click one of the folders that you might see instead if doing this before a store has been set up. If this doesn't work, Double click on “My Computer” then on Drive C, then double click the Program Files folder, then open the RealCart.com folder, then the RealCart folder.

The Templates folder can be found here. Double-click it and then, finally, double-click the template theme you want to change. edit the files in this folder with FrontPage making sure to save them back to this folder after you edit them rather than allowing FrontPage to “import” or otherwise merge the edited file into your existing web site. You are not actually adding these templates to your web site. You are adding the pages that they help create. The template files, although they contain our “Weird Looking” tags like [Products_ItemPrice], are really nothing more than plain old html. You can edit the background images, fonts, sizes, colors, hyperlinks and every other aspect of their appearance as long as you leave the tags intact.

In other words. When you come across a tag like: [Products_ItemPrice] feel free to format it with FrontPage. Just make sure you select the entire tag and don't format only part of the tag as bold, for example, without making the entire tag including “[” and “]”.

Step 4. -- As you make changes to each template rebuild either single pages or all pages in your store to see the difference your customizing efforts have made on the store files. There are both “Rebuild Page” and “Rebuild All Pages” buttons in the smaller toolbar that begins with the “Back” and “Forward” arrow buttons. You will notice that the last small toolbar icon is the printer. This button will print whatever is in the browser window and the time it is clicked.

Next is the Edit button. This button doesn’t do anything yet but is being hooked up in a future release.

The third button from the right end is the “Rebuild Store” button. Clicking it will result in all of your store pages being rebuilt at once. Normally, if you are just modifying “product.html” then you should only need to click the 4th button from the right end of the small toolbar. This is the “Rebuild Page” button. Like the Rebuild Store button it will refresh the current page by reloading the template from the hard drive and then displaying the finished product in the browser for you to preview.

Think of the entire process as a form letter that gets created from a word processor program and then merged with a database of some sort. The result is ONE letter that get’s personalized, so to speak, with data from each individual customer record. The same thing happens with your product data and the product and department and other store templates files. It’s like a really elaborate mail merge for lack of a better term.

You can customize RealCart™ more than any other shopping cart. Simple HTML files comprise your on-line store. Enjoy customization capabilities that are unparalleled with ANY shopping cart at ANY price.

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