Yet another template (+/- system) question

[OscMacs]

Hi All,

Sorry if this is a real nube question (but, to be fair, i am a nube!).

I’ve just installed oscmax (version 2.5.1) and already im loving how feature-rich and flexible it is. Ive got things working pretty much how i want them now but unfortunately i’m really not great with php. I would likt to make an HTML template to customize the shop look.

I would like to be able to:

1)***** Customise the background, font, etc using html and css

2)***** Move info boxes around in the pages (eg search info box at top)

3)***** Manipulate info boxes (eg so rather than shopping cart info box listing all products in cart, just say the total price of what’s in the cart with a link to cart itself)

4)***** Keep all the functionability of oscmax

I have read around the forums here and it seems oscmax is designed to make template design fairly easy, and there a number of contribs that can be added to make it even easier! I have been playing around with these and following advice on the forums, but none seem to be able to let me do what i want to do (or, more likely, i just cant work out how to do it!).


The ideas i have found so far:

A)**** Edit the inbuilt fallback-html mainpage.** So far this has the advantage of meaning everything still works as it should (except AddThis, which stops working if you make this your template). However, the big disadvantage is that the template on mainpage.html is pretty limited. The tags only let you move (for example) ‘left column’, rather than individual infoboxes (so cant do ‘2’ above).

B)***** *STS for BTS.* I like the idea of this as i have previously used STS so i know a bit about it. The problem is that it stops a lot of the stuff i liked about oscmax from working (eg ajax search suggest stops working,* xsell and recently viewed product boxes disappear, etc... It seems basically anything that STS doesn’t have a tag for (so cant do 4 above)

C)***** HTML template system for BTS.* Simply never got this working. Followed the install instructions (ie just upload HTML folder to templates) but all that happened when i selected this template from admin was to make index.php show me the template page as you would see it in dreamweaver (or whatever) design mode (ie, just a load of $tags, not the content they should display, if that makes sense).

Does anyone have any ideas about how i can use one of these systems to achieve 1-4 set out above (preferably STS but im willing to try anything, its the only way to learn i guess!).* From my experience so far it seems like ‘3’ is the most difficult of these to achieve?

Thanks in advance for any replies, sorry this is so wordy.

Matt

[niallb]

Before you start changing the current template MAKE A COPY OF FALLBACK and re-name it, then make your changes on this. DO NOT CHANGE FALLBACK, if your changes do not work your site can always FALLBACK onto this template.

[OscMacs]

Before you start changing the current template MAKE A COPY OF FALLBACK and re-name it, then make your changes on this. DO NOT CHANGE FALLBACK, if your changes do not work your site can always FALLBACK onto this template.

Hi and thanks for the quick reply. Sorry i should make clear that from my reading around the forums, that particular bit of wisdom has been well drilled in. As a matter of habit i have been only editing renamed copy templates of both the fallback and fallback-html, when dealing with these templates.

Best,

Matt

[OscMacs]

B)***** *STS for BTS.* I like the idea of this as i have previously used STS so i know a bit about it. The problem is that it stops a lot of the stuff i liked about oscmax from working (eg ajax search suggest stops working,* xsell and recently viewed product boxes disappear, etc... It seems basically anything that STS doesn’t have a tag for (so cant do 4 above)

Ah, noticed nothing javascript based seems to work using STS for BTS. I have been trying various things (including copying all the js files from fallback into STS folder but just cant seem to get things working.

Any help at all would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks,

Matt

[pgmarshall]

1)***** Customise the background, font, etc using html and css

Just change your stylesheet.css file in your template

2)***** Move info boxes around in the pages (eg search info box at top)

Just take the code out of the catalog/includes/boxes and paste it into the main_page.tpl.php

3)***** Manipulate info boxes (eg so rather than shopping cart info box listing all products in cart, just say the total price of what’s in the cart with a link to cart itself)

Just paste this where you want it: <a href="<?php echo tep_href_link(FILENAME_SHOPPING_CART); ?>"><?php echo $cart->count_contents(); ?> items - <?php echo $currencies->format($cart->show_total()); ?></a>

Job done.

[OscMacs]

Pgmarshall you are a hero! In the end i managed to get HTML template working so have been using that as i find it pretty difficult to follow the php. This has of course led me to the problem that your fix below doesnt work any more

3)***** Manipulate info boxes (eg so rather than shopping cart info box listing all products in cart, just say the total price of what’s in the cart with a link to cart itself)

Just paste this where you want it: <a href="<?php echo tep_href_link(FILENAME_SHOPPING_CART); ?>"><?php echo $cart->count_contents(); ?> items - <?php echo $currencies->format($cart->show_total()); ?></a>

is there a way to get it to say "number of items in cart: X", with the text being a link to cart? I guess edit the cart info box code in includes to output this, and then just use the {cartbox} tag in the HTML template? Problem is i have no idea how to edit the php to output. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks again.

Matt

[OscMacs]

Also, any idea about how to get AddThis to work when using the fallback-html template? Cheers.

[pgmarshall]

AddThis should work out of the box ... it does for me ... what is not working for you?

Not really up to speed on the HTML template - but I suspect you are right just put the code you want to run into the code file and call it from the html template.

Regards.

[OscMacs]

AddThis should work out of the box ... it does for me ... what is not working for you?

Humm... Nope doesnt work for me for some reason. Have tried a fresh install to no avail. In fact, i have noticed a number of javascripted things dont seem to work in falback-html that do work in fallback. For example cloudZoom and lightbox also do not work (lightbox just shows large image alone onclick of product image, and cloudzoom just doesnt happen). The problem that you get with Addthis, is that there is a grey outline box where the addthis buttons should be (and are when calling the 'fallback' template) but nothing inside this.

Comparing the two html files (html output from product_info.php using fallback vs fallback-html), the javascript code looks quite different, much lighter in the fallback-html code. Do you know which files this javascript is called from? (i dont mean the .js files, but the javascript called directly into the document from (presumably?) a php file). I was thinking i could just go there and manually add the missing javascript (would that work?)

Any ideas to try would be great?

Thanks!

Matt

[pgmarshall]

The stylesheet for fallback-html might not have been updated ... CloudZoom needs to go in there.

Regards.