Sorting

[malljess]

I have Pro 11.2. When attempt to use arrange products to sort them by certain criteria - not happens. Actually want to sort them by relevance automatically. Any thoughts?

[Jim]

Can you give us a link to the page you need this on?
What you are searching for?
What should the most relevance item be?

I assume that you have set the priority of the fields on Preferences > Search Settings > Search Indexing. And that you have the terms that you consider most relevant in the highest ranked fields.

[malljess]

Jim,

I set the search criteria for importance in the preferences. I am using the extra fields called long description and the name of the book as the most important and want to sort by these variables. The website is www.nmhrc.com.

If the user can sort, I don't see why we couldnt code in something to sort.

Brad

[Jim]

So are you talking about search results sorting or sorting on regular pages?

I did a search for "modern". The list of results displayed articles with "modern" in the title first, then articles that contained "modern" in the body of the text. Is that not sorted the way you want it?

[malljess]

Yes. I think it is working better now. I am now using the title of the book first (10) and then the long description second (9). The results are better. Thank you.

Since I have you Jim - question:

I have developed an index page for my store (nmhrc.com), which was created in Dreamweaver. It has no tags in it at all. When I attempt to put a tag in it is ignored. Is this because I did not create with a shopsite template like I did the others? I used the cookbook source for the more info page, search result page and shopping cart - but not the index page.

What can I do to rectify this? That is how do I get the index page to recognize the tags.

Thank you (again),

Brad Lindell

[Jim]

Yes, for a page to recognize any ShopSite template tags it must be a ShopSite template.

Depending on how much you want to be able to modify the page with data from your store you could make it very simple or quite complex.

If there is only one or two things on the page you want to be changed based on your store data you could basically put your entire html in the template like this
[-- DEFINE PAGE --]
all your html for the page goes here.
[-- END_DEFINE PAGE --]

Then where ever you want your data from the store placed, you just use the template tag that outputs that data.

Note this will work fine for a single page like your index.html page but if you want to use the same template for other pages you would need to add template tags to insert the page data for each individual page that you use the template on.

This is a good starting point for developing a template. Since you already have your page laid out you could just define blocks where you want specific type of information and replace that with the template tags to display that information.

For example you have a header across the top, put that info in the Preferences > Layout Settings > Header section and use the template tag [-- header --] to replace the information in the template. Next you have some navigation (List Your Seminar, Home, About NCS, Contact us. You could use the navigation setup under Preferences >Navigation to create the navigation and then in the template use the [-- PageMenu {CSS, no_jscript} --] template tag to display it. Then just continue breaking the page out into parts, left column contains an image, some text, search forms, Center top section contains list of products, center bottom on index.html contains search and featured products (Cross-sell) , Other pages contain search results or detail product info.

Taking an existing page apart and creating a template from it isn't really too hard to do once you get the hang of what a template is.

[malljess]

Jim<

I did as you said in Dreamweaver and uploaded it to server. I put an [-- INCLUDE minicart PROCESS --] in an this is exactly what was printed on the html page (i.e., [-- INCLUDE minicart PROCESS --]). What am I doing wrong? Does it need to be in a different directory? Do I need to create the template in the customs pages section?

Thanks (again) (oh and again),

Brad Lindell

[Jim]

The custom template must be entered as a new custom page template under Merchandising > Custom Template >Pages
You also need to create a page in ShopSite and assign that page the template that you created. This can be done when you create the page by selecting the template from the pulldown Template near the bottom of the screen. Also make sure that the "Filename" field has "index.html" (without quotes) as the name.
Unless at some point you change the template to include other page fields, the page name won't be used so that won't be important for publishing but you should probably give it a name that will indicate that it is your main page so you don't accidentally delete it.

Note that when you publish the store in ShopSite the "index.html' page WILL be overwritten by the page using the template so if you have any doubts make sure you have a backup copy of the current index.html page.

When using the [-- INCLUDE minicart PROCESS --] it might be necessary to have some additional javascript files included. Give it a try without adding anything first but it the mini cart doesn't display check what javascript it is calling.

[malljess]

I need to create pages where I want to use the tags from shopSite. For example, an about.html page. I copied the index.html page and named it about.html. I published the page; however, can't find it anywhere. How do I create new pages so they use the ShopSite tages and are recognized?

AS always, thank you.

[malljess]

Never mind. I figured it out. Thank you.