AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Can someone walk me throught the steps to create custom pages. We have many pages that will just include html, and others that will include html, a text input box, and a purchase button. What we do want is to use the same header, footer, and side bars, left and right, on all our pages like we do on the aspx pages currently, just making the content area whatever we want. I try to follow the instructions in the customization guide and can never get it right. Thank you. I know this is easy for anyone whos done it, but my knowledge of AbleCommerce is very limited. Been using other carts for years.

Read following thread about how to add new top level page.
viewtopic.php?f=42&t=9473

For those pages where layout would be same only content HTML will change it would better to create AbleCommerce web pages instead of adding new top level pages. You can create a category in your catalog and then change its visibility to hidden. Then you can create web pages in it, each web page will contain HTML contents. After saving those pages you can preview them by clicking preview option. All these web pages are served via WebPage.aspx top level page. So all you need is to adjust layout of WebPage.aspx and then preview each web page, copy its URL and create links in your website via that URL.

If you want to have some forms in your pages, for example some feed back form or some input method then for those pages first you will need to create a new ConLib control. ConLib control will include all that dynamic stuff, forms etc. Then you need to add a new top level page as discussed in above mentioned thread and finally reference that newly created ConLib control into newly added page's scriptlet.

Thank you very much for the prompt reply. I've been able to add top level pages easily. My problem is I want some of these page accessible from the left navigation bar so I've been trying to create custom content for these pages and let them act like empty category pages that just contain html. I'll literally put a hidden product on the page and add the html. When I change the content of just one page it is applying to all except for the top level pages. Is there a way I can add direct links from the left navigation bar to top level pages as they are generated dynamically right now? Thanks for your help. This would solve my problem for now.

As I explained above for all those pages having HTML static content you can create Web Pages.
1:- Go to your catalog.
2:- Create a Category.
3:- Change its visibility to hidden
4:- Now from side bar instead of creating a new product select Web Page option and create new web page.
5:- Edit you HTML contents for newly created Web Page
6:- Repeat step 4&5 to create as many as you want new content pages.
7:- Finally edit each web page and click its preview button and note down URL to the page.
Now if you want to appear those entries in left nav then edit ConLib/SimpleCategoryList.asx and locate following code and then edit as below

Thank you very much. You've been a great help. We had another programmer do some custom work for us and we updgraded to 7.02 as well move the site to its permanent location. I believe something broke when he moved it or created some custom code. We should be able to change the content area at will on any page, correct? Right now if we utilize a page for a new category and change the content for that page only, it hijacks all the category pages and changes the content on all of them. This makes no sense to me. Did I miss something?

If all category display pages are using same display page then changing content upon one category would change it for all. If you want to change content depending upon each category then you can first assign them different display pages and then edit specific contents.

If you want to have same display for each category but a small fraction of different contents for example you want to show some category specific information on the top of page, in this case simply you can place that information in category's summary field and then in related scriptlet write $category.Summary where you want to output that information. The other possible solution could be to create duplicates of that display page and its scriptlet with different names and then assign them to categories and change their content.

When I created another page my custom pages are not showing in the display page dialog dropdown
box.

Make sure that you have XML information available in your custom category display pages. For example your custom page should have following XML at top

I created a custom category page ESTEST.aspx with custom content named ESTEST.htm. When I try to assign this page to one category it hijacks all categories and assigns the page to all categories, as well as the custom content. We can not figure out what is happening. Essentially we are unable to assign custom pages to individual categories without it applying to all categories.

Can we just build our navigation bar structure and point to either dynamically generated pages or top level pages. This would be a temporary fix I would hope.

Application exposes two ways to apply category display pages,
1)- Administration > Website > Themes and Display Pages, this will change display page for all categories with applied one.
2)- If you are logged as admin, go to store side, visit category for which you want to change display page and check page bottom. You will found edit option there so choose it to edit the page and then change category display page from there. It will change category display page only for that single category.

No matter what I try it assigns the new page to all categories.