Themes and Templates

[Gaspumpman]

Jim,

I have requested SP2 from Webex, I am waiting to hear back from them. Is there any way to extend the life of my demo store for another week? It will expire on Friday and I am afraid I won't have access to copy the settings over to my real store once the update is finished.

Byron

[ShopSite Nicole]

Byron,

Yes, you can ask for an extension of your demo store by emailing info-team@shopsite.com. Make sure (if you are using a different email address than you signed up with) that you include at least the email the demo store was opened with. Make sure to send the email before your demo store is closed.

-ShopSite Nicole

[Gaspumpman]

Jim SP2 is on the way. Is there a way to move the search box on to the menu bar with my other links?

[Jim]

There is not an easy way to move it. It would involve changing a couple of templates, one to remove it from where i currently displays and another to put it in the area where the color bar is.

[Gaspumpman]

Any way to shove the company logo to the left?

[Jim]

It looks like it is centered on the page. I tried setting the page alignment to Left but that didn't make any difference. I don't know the templates well enough to see right off where the alignment is being set so I don't know exactly where you would have to change the code to fix that. It doesn't look like it is something simple to do, so ti would probably require a change to the template. The logo is 890 px wide, you could try reducing the size and see if that would make it look better.

[Gaspumpman]

SP2 was added last night and I have made the theme switch on the live site this morning. Everything seem to be working and looking good excetp these little black tags all over the text . Take a look http://www.benfordfueling.com/shop/spilltechhazmat.html

They show up as empty squares here:
HazMat Sorbents for Acids, Bases and Unknown Liquids
When hazardous or unknown liquids spill, use SpillTech� HazMat sorbent products for quick, efficient response.
HazMat Pads and Rolls
Made from 100% polypropylene to absorb most aggressive or caustic fluids. Sonic-bonded �dimples� add strength and fast-wicking power.
HazMat Socks Used to contain and absorb hazardous or unknown spills. Keep fluids from spreading to larger areas. Available in 3" diameter with lengths of 4', 8' and 16'.
HazMat Booms
Contain and absorb largevolume spills. Available in 5" and 8" diameters at a 10' length.
HazMat Pillows
Toss on contained liquid. Easy to deploy�quick to absorb. The Pillow�s large surface area and sizeable amount of sorbent filler enables you to attack spills with speed and efficiency.
Color-Coded
All HazMat Sorbents are color-coded in safety yellow for quick identification.

They are everywhere, thousands of them. I think these tags are showing up on text copied from other sites or perhaps PDF's. Is there a font change perhaps that will make them go away?

[Jim]

You will need to replace the characters with the valid html entities or characters that fits in the ISO-8859-1 character set which is the character set that ShopSite is designed to use.

It is hard to say what character set they came from but if the document they came from was created in a Microsoft application (Word, Excel etc.) they were probably from the Windows 1252 which may work fine on windows machines but won't be found in character sets used on the web, Mac's, Linux etc. The characters may also have come from UTF-8 source which ShopSite doesn't support.

[Gaspumpman]

Shopsite supported this character set for the past 13 years. It wasnt until I moved over the the .sst theme that this showed up. Their are over 4600 items in the catalog that I will have to edit the text on?????

[Jim]

What do the characters look like in the back office text fields?

View the source of the generated html pages and see what encoding type is specified. It should be within a couple of lines at the top of the source.

[Gaspumpman]

They shoy up as blank squar boxes. I think most of them are trademark symbols’, Copyright, Apostrophie's and such. All I can tell you is they wern't there before. I have a new issue to resolve. I have a product image showing on a more infomation page even though the image wasn't selected. I cant get rid of it.
http://www.benfordfueling.com/shop/product3554.html
The first image top left is not supposed to be there.

[Jim]

It looks like the top product is a parent product and all the rest of the items on the page are subproducts. Is that correct? If that is the case you can either remove the image from the parent product on the Edit Product Info screen or uncheck the box Image Toggle: [ ] Check here to display this product's image on the Edit Product Layout screen.

What page are you seeing the black box characters on?

PS this post is now on a second page so it would probably be better to start a new post for future questions so all answers display on one page.

[Jim]

I found one of the black box characters on the page http://www.benfordfueling.com/shop/thermoid_hose.html
I tried switching the browser character encoding method and when I switched it to Windows-1252 the characters displayed properly. So that confirms that they were copied from some type of Microsoft application. I think in previous version of ShopSite there was no character encoding specified in the template so the browser may have had to check the page as it loaded to try and guess what the type was. This may have worked but it probably hurt your search engine rating since they like to have the encoding method on the page to make pages load faster.

A solution would be to edit the templates and change the character encoding line that looks like this -
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> to
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Windows-1252">

[LaurenH]

Working with the Dynamic.sst template. The product page is displaying both a thumbnail image and below that a full size image right above the add to cart button. Is there any way to turn off the larger image in the template? http://ademostore.com/ssdemos/ver112/evaluate6/gasboyparts.html

Hi there,
I am relatively new to shopsite and am taking over site developed over several years by several people. It too needs a serious makeover and when i tried simply changing the color scheme on the "themes" page it reset my product/page defaults requiring a lot of work just to get it back to where it was previously . I am hesitant to select a more updated theme fearing that the product/pages will not come out looking good. I am wondering how to upload my current store to my Demo store in order to play with it before committing to the changes on my site. Thank you!

[Jim]

You can move your pages and products from a live ShopSite store to a demo one by going to Utilities > Database > Download and download the pages and products. The in the demo store go to Utilities >Database > Upload and first upload your products and then the pages. That will get most of the data for your store to the demo one. But there is no easy way to move other settings like the store header, footer, modified text fields, etc. so you would have to do those by opening the particular configuration screen for both stores and copying and pasting from the live to the demo store.

Note: It is difficult to see new posts when they are on the second or more page of a particular post. Please start a new topic if you have further questions.