Theme/Template frustration

[FredW]

Hello ShopSite folks,

I'm hoping you can bail me out of a frustrating hole I'm in.

Currently we are using buyanywhere buttons on our classic web page, using only the ShopSite shopping cart and checkout process. That has worked well for us.

Now, we have an objective to re-build our entire website with ShopSite generated pages using off-the-shelf themes and templates.The goal is to keep it technically simple. Customize templates can come later after we are live with the new ShopSite off-the-shelf pages.

In the past two weeks, I have been trying to finalize on a theme, and hence a set of page and product templates, that will work for us. I will admit because our website is not simple, and this has been a challenge. Since none of the themes fit all our criteria, I had to compromise and go with one that fits best.

I started with the "3-column" theme and after working with it for a week and creating a fair number of pages, I decided to abandon that theme and go another one. Last week I changed the theme to "line Sessions". When I did this, my first surprise was that the way the 'assigned pages' were handled in the new theme vrs the "3 column" theme. However, after giving it a fair amount of thought and testing in the top five browsers, I decided that we could make good use of the way the 'Line Session' themes worked. So, I spent two days reworking the new placement of page links and where the Textx fields were displayed, then I continued to build more pages.

I normally use Firefox to develop the pages and then test with IE and Chrome. For the past three days I built a number of additional pages. then today, I checked a change using IE (version 9) and much to my surprise, the whole top of the page looks unusable.

The tabs that are displayed just under the header that have pop-down links that work fine in Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari do not show up as tabs in IE. I'm sure I tested this template using IE last week and it looked fine, but today, it is totally not useable.

The url is keithdemo.keithspecialty.com - any one of the 342 pages have this issue.

Is it possible that I did something that caused this? I turned off/on "Compatibility mode" in IE with no change. Because I had changed the layout colors trying to change the page link colors I figured I may have touched the color that control the css files, so I reset the theme and regenerated the pages and I still have the problem. I just can't believe this theme does not work in IE.

I can't tear my hair out for I have too little left to do that. Can you folks provide some insight into this and maybe help me out of the hole I have dug?

While you at it, can you point me to your documentation that describes what page and product templates work with the various themes?

Thanks in advance,
Fred

[Jim]

I use linux so I don't have an IE browser on my system so I can't actually view your site in IE. I do know that IE is very picky if things are done its way. I really doubt that changing a color would have affected the way the pages view in IE so it had to be something else that got changed. I ran the page through an html validator and it was pretty clean. It did report some issues with xhtml style closings for tags i.e /> that are not valid in html. It also reported some closing </p> tags that weren't ever opened, which may mean there is a nesting issue. Maybe someone else can give a little more help with regard to the Windows issue.

As for what templates are used with the various ShopSite themes go to: http://www.shopsite.com/templates/cookbook/builtintemplates.shtml If you click on each of the sample images it will load a page telling how the colors are configured and what template files are used. It also give a list of all the themes that are related by the basic files they use.

[FredW]

Jim,

Thanks for the pointer to the theme cookbook information. It does help.

I assume somebody in the ShopSite organization has the ability to run IE. I''m not a fan of it, but I do recognize it has a big chuck of the market share pie.

I'll dig dipper into this. I have too much invested to have to change themes now.
FredW

[Jim]

I loaded up a windows install in a virtual machine and I think I may know what the problem is.
Go to Utilities >Publish and uncheck the box "Insert an html comment before each include file " and then click the Regenerate button.
See if that fixes the issue. If not let us know and I'll forward your post on to the template designer.

[FredW]

Jim! You are my hero!

It worked. Thank you, VERY much.

Now I can continue on...

Your support is first class!

FredW

[FredW]

Hello again Jim and others,

This is a follow up to the theme: Line Section issues. They appear to be more than that we found and circumvented - where IE did not display the top tab links correctly.

In trying to refine some of the color options in the layout, I'm finding many of them do not work as documented in the link you gave me: http://www.shopsite.com/templates/cookbook/builtintemplates-linesections.shtml

The issues I have found so far are:
Link color: Top navigation background color, left navigation link color, and "share with a friend" link color. appears to do nothing
Visited Link Color - Background color of the footer, hover color for the left and top navigation menus, and flyout menu background for the top navigation. - Appears to do nothing.

Active Link Color - Header background color. also appears to do nothing, certainly does not change the header background color.

So, is there some other flag that controls the setting of colors that I'm not aware of?

Am I wasting my time trying to get the theme to work? I hate to switch to another theme, go through the rework to adjust and then find it, may also have issues like this.

I'm open to suggestions.

Thanks,
Fred

[Jim]

Some themes have color schemes set so they cannot be changed from the backoffice except by choosing a different color scheme on the theme selection screen. The reason for doing this is that the buttons need to match the colors on the rest of the page and if you change the colors the buttons may clash or may not look good.

Where are you trying to change the colors?
The store pages will be changed under Pages > Edit Page layout and can be different for all published pages.
Product Moreinfo pages are configured on Preferences > More Info Pages
Shopping cart pages are configured on Commerce Setup > Order System > Layout Info.
Gift certificates - Merchandising Tools > Gift Certificates > Configure Gift Certificates
If there is something else you are using check the Configure screen for that area and see if there are color fields there. (Some features will use the Shopping Cart colors)

Note that if you want to change all of them at once you can go to Preferences > Layout Settings, enter the colors you want for the various field and then select the areas you want the colors applied to (Page, Product More Information, Product Quantity Pricing, Search, Order System, Gift Certificate, Mobile) and click the Apply button. That will change all database fields for the selected area so they use that set of colors.

[FredW]

Hi Jim,

Thanks for the reply.

The changes I attempted to make were in the Layout Setting (Preferences->Layout Settings). And I had the pages checked I wanted to change.

What I had NOT done was press that little 'APPLY' button. I was publishing without pushing the APPLY button. That is a big DUH!

A suggestion may help others: add a comment or note in the 'help' page for Layout Settings in the area where what pages are affected. I admit I often scan help information and went back to see if I had missed it. I could not find anything that said the APPLY button needs pushed before you PUBLISH.

I'm find and happy now. Hopefully not dangerous. Yet!

Thank you again, that was not apparent.
Fred
Fred