Universal Header & Footer

[bodyflight]

I have spent more than a week trying customize these template options. There is no reason for this in my case, and I'm sure many others.

All I want, is typical, for all pages of my shopsite store to have the same header and footer... this is very common and judging by the dozens of completed shopsite stores, I haven't seen ANYONE yet use the ability to make their more product pages, shopping cart pages, checkout screens & main pages look different from eachother. Each and every template has to be edited for uniformity and there are LOTS. And even when you do.. some codes are not allowed in some templates.

So now.. no matter WHAT I do.. part of this store are going to look different from eachother. I pay almost $50 per month and the only option for me to get exactly what I want is to use the "Order Anywhere" links on an html site, unfortunately though, I lose some of the few features you offer like minicart & registrationsignin if I do the html site with a link to the store. Two sites, shouldn't be the solution to get my shopsite store headers and footers to be uniform. at least not for the price I'm paying.

The coding solution? Under Store Preferences add a button for UNIVERSAL HEADER & FOOTER. Add a checkbox to Activate Universal Headers & Footers (which would override the others) and two text areas for us to fill in the html. I have no problem hardcoding to secure images so that when the header/footer is used in secure areas there isn't any issues.

[atvutv]

Check out my site, it's not that hard to do, you just have to make custom templates and use a little HTML and it can be done.

Just remember to use https for the image urls when you edit the shopping cart template.

http://www.atv-utv.com/

[bodyflight]

Check out my site, it's not that hard to do...
http://www.atv-utv.com/

please forgive me if I sound sarcastic, but are you joking? I visited your site, your template consists of a simple graphic, not to mention, your site is not uniform at all.. you leave out the left nav in a large portion of it. I dont' see any sign of gift certificates or tell a friend at all.

Tell me if you think this is easy:

In order to get this store uniform I have to edit intensively the following:
1.main template
2.more info template
3.gift certificate template
4.tell a friend template, which includes several scripted response pages and an outgoing email, ALL of which must be edited so its more like editing 4 templates... not to mention, bypassing the whole popup nonesense (as if everyone doens't have popup blockers) was a chore in and of itself!!!
5.shopping cart template, which includes several scripted response pages including shipping, thank you, checkout etc ALL of which must be edited and so it's more like editing 4 or 5 templates
6.search template
7.customer registration template

now.. in order to get my entire site to look the same, I have to edit 7, thats SEVEN templates, 2 of which contain 4 or 5 templates inside of them! That's like 15 template edits, JUST TO GET THE HEADER, NAVIGATION and FOOTER to be universal throughout my site.

how is that simple?

and tell me how having a UNIVERSAL header & footer option for display throughout the ENTIRE site and every process... wouldn't be easier, and more user friendly?

[Query]

I'm with you bodyflight--it's messy. I outsourced some basic customization, which was a life saver. When I added customer registration I reverse engineered the designer's pages, but even that was complicated. Now I see I broke something...going in...

While it could use some enhancements to bridge the gap between a pre-fab layout with a text header/footer and full custom templates, I think the main problem is it's "old" HTML. Right now, formatting is tightly linked to content, instead of a nice CSS/DOM/XML style partitioning.

What I'd love to see for managing my store's design:

1) Set basic layout regions, margins and backgrounds:
- Overall page margins (fixed width, center/left)
- Header
- Main column width (where all the store generated content goes)
- Placement and width of 1-2 Sidebar columns
- Footer

2) For the Header/Footer/Sidebar, add HTML (without VAR.MyImages) or php includes. Add storewide Head code for meta, favicon, etc.

3) One screen for the store's font and table styles, or option to call external CSS (with documentation of ShopSite's style names).

4) Set buttons in one place.

5) For the Main column content, centralized editing. I want to go to a list of all the screens a customer might be shown, from pages to checkout to confirmation e-mails, and select the one I want to edit. It's very confusing how many pages are run together in one template, and like bodyflight I feel like I'm on a treasure hunt just finding all the pieces I need to update. Beyond the templates, style elements are scattered through at least three other areas of the site right now.

6) Preview changes.

Ann

[elsparkodiablo]

I handle this by using shopsite template includes. I create my universal header and footer HTML sections, then I create include files in the custom template sections. When I'm ready to use that code, I just do the

[-- INCLUDE 1sks-page-head-css PROCESS --]
[-- BLAH BLAH BLAH PAGE OR PRODUCT OR WHATEVER CODE --]
[-- INCLUDE 1sks-page-foot-css PROCESS --]

thing and away we go. A lot easier to just copy / paste that into the templates and change the include file when I want to make a sweeping site-wide change.

[flicman]

I use the built-in Header/Footer option to great success on my stores, so maybe I can help? Maybe I misunderstand, too, so we'll see.

As far as I can tell, there are two places that you need to put in Header/Footer information: for everything but the shopping cart, you go to Store Text > Page Header & Footer and then for the cart/checkout/thankyou there's Commerce Setup > Order System > Text at the top/bottom of the....

The simplest way to engage this code in non-cart pages is:

[-- IF PAGE.DISPLAYPAGEFOOTER --]
[-- FOOTER --]
[-- END_IF --]

And that's pretty much it. I wrote my own templates, but it's not that different in the supplied ones, from what I can tell.