Additional Id/Class Attributes Needed

[euroluxantiques]

As a several year user of AbleCommerce, it is a wonderful program. However, it would be VERY useful if you guys could include more non-dynamic id/class tags in your markup to help designers hook CSS to the webpage elements. Right now, I often have to add <div> and the like to provide the proper hooks due to the dynamic Id and Class attributes. This makes it very difficult to upgrade from one version to the next without blowing up my design. As I don't have a lot of custom programming in the code-behind pages, it's easy to upgrade those, but the actual web pages is much more difficult, often taking weeks to upgrade. The time required to upgrade causes me not to do it often (even the patches), and it's difficult to keep our store up-to-date and running its best. Please consider this STRONGLY in future versions, if you have not already done so.

[jmestep]

What kind of non-dynamic are you suggesting? One of the new features of .net 4 is the ability to not have the long ids that .net 2 and 3.5 generated. Here's an example:
http://www.dotnetcurry.com/ShowArticle.aspx?ID=492
I agree with what you are saying about upgrades and would be interested in what you feel would help. I spend many, many hours integrating custom styling code into files for an upgrade. I'm working on a site now that had gone through Able 7.0.0 and changed most of the table tags to div tags.
I did make a suggestion the other day that Able put style classes on portions where the html generation is buried in the source code and uneditable. Like the infamous OptionPicker.

[euroluxantiques]

Where I find the most problems is the content ConLib. The headers/sidebars/footers aren't bad because the Conlibs your normally integrate into those aren't really complicated. For the main content controls, there just are not enough hooks to grab onto for a complicated CSS design. I have to add a bunch of classes or <div>, etc, into the ConLib controls themselves and this makes upgrading a real mess.

I've thought about actually creating scriplets to accomplish this and just reference them into the page using include statements, but you still end up having to use some child/sibling CSS selectors, and that gets messy, and your design blows up if any upgrade inserts something in between.

I would be happy if they would just section off the different logical groups on a ConLib with a class and include a unique ID in an overall <div> at the start of each ConLib, e.g.,

<div id="CategoryGridView4">

<div class="productHeader">

<div class="breadCrumbs"></div>

</div>

<div class="productBody">

<div class="productDetails"></div>


</div>

etc.

</div>