AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

We just attempted to upgrade out sites to Gold R^ (from 7.0.7) and ran into two issues that forced us to revert back to 7.0.7. Any help in resolving these so that we can complete our upgrade would be greatly appreciated.

1) We run two websites from one DB. One of the sites had no issues, however, the second site would not pull up any product pages or category pages. The home page displayed correctly (aside from the issue noted below), but if you clicked on a category in the left panel, the resulting page simply returned no products (the page displayed correctly, but the main panel was completely empty). What is most strange on this is that our test site (http://www.moonshine-still.net) functions, but when we pointed the live site to the same web folder, the products / categories would not display. In short, after the upgrade if you went to

http://
www.
brewhaus.
com/Hot-Sauce-C7.aspx

the products would display, however, if you went to

http://
www.
hotsaucedepot.
com/Hot-Sauce-C7.aspx

the products would not display. Everything else seemed to function correctly, and you could even do a search and it would return products, however, if you clicked on a product that the searce returned, the main panel would be blank.

2) Because we run two websites from one DB we cannot seem to split out the meta description, keywords, description, etc., as they are now maintained in the DB. We need the description, etc., to be different for the two websites. Is there a way to get the two sites to display different "content" information and remain on the same DB? The same goes for the Contact Us page. We need to run from one DB because one of the sites sells products from both main categories.

Your first issue sounds like you have the store search set to Lucene. Since that search runs off physical files, they would have to be generated on each site so they would be in that site's folder. You will be OK if you switch to Sql search.

Lucene appears to be the default search. Is there a disadvantage to using SQL?

Also, why would the test site (which is using the exact same folders- upon upgrading the DB I pointed IIS to the folder that is being used in a DEV environment) work, but not once we have gone live?

Lucene appears to be the default search. Is there a disadvantage to using SQL?

In the latest version, we made SQL the default search because it seemed that Lucene was causing so many issues with the rebuilding of the index.

It's hard to say why the test site didn't work as a live site. Is this fixed now that you are switched to SQL? Did you reboot the server to eliminate any cached files?

I thought that I had the latest version (7.0.86.6169), but possibly not. Either way it is pretty easy to change to SQL for the search.

It is strange that everything worked on one site, but did not work on the other. Once we have issue 2 above resolved we will try the upgrade again, but we cannot upgrade until that is resolved as we need to have different text and meta data for the two sites.

I just download and installed the newest version last night and it defaulted to Lucene.

Can anyone help with the issue of the homepage information (description and metadata)? Without the ability to display different information on the homepage for each site we would have to split the sites onto separate DBs, and we could not longer sell items from one category through both websites, which is a substantial concern for us.

You could put code on the page to check the url then depending on which it is, generate different meta content.

I think that is a bit beyond me. In v7 the code was in a scriptlet, which was easily made unique for each site. In Gold it pulls the information from the DB, but I could not find anywhere in the files where I could change anything for the Default.aspx file / creation.

I was thinking more on this, and would it be reasonable to write (let's be honest- have written for me) a routine that would pull the inventory from the Products table, and then a routine that could write this information into our other DB? This would allow us to split the sites onto separate DBs, and update the inventory counts by running these routines. Because one site only sees a small amount volume of sales of the second category (ie. the Brewhaus website sells only a small volume of hot sauce products, but we do not wish to remove them from the offering as some stores stock products from both categories) we could manually update the hot sauce stock counts when those items are sold through the Brewhaus website. However we could use a routine to pull the counts from the DB for hotsaucedepot.com and update them on brewhaus.com to keep inventory accurate.

This would be a reasonable option for us that would not require messing with the AC files. We could even pull the data from the Products table manually (a simple highlight, copy, and then paste into an Excel spreadsheet), so maybe just a routine to write the information into the Brewhaus DB would suffice.

Any thoughts?

I'm not sure if this would work, or exactly how to do it, but maybe it someone else can develop the idea further.

In the ac_Webpages table, copy the record for "Home Page" but use a StoreId of 2. Then change the other fields as desired. You would have to do this manually from SQL Server Management Studio instead of from within AbleCommerce. Now for the part I'm not sure how to do - in the AC source, wherever it is reading from that table to create the Default.aspx page, have it choose which record (StoreId=1 or StoreId=2) to read based on the request url. This would be similar to what Judy mentioned, but you wouldn't have to hard-code your meta data. The down side is you would have to maintain the meta data for one store via SQL SMS instead of AC.

I had considered this option, as well, but have the same sticking point- how to adjust the AC files to pull a different record. I also thought about creating a new record and trying to pull based on the record ID. Either way would work basically the same way, and require the same adjustment to an AC file... which is where I have gotten stuck.

compunerdy wrote:I just download and installed the newest version last night and it defaulted to Lucene.

You mean the latest AC Gold R6?

Thinking of having multiple views based on the same database...

In ACGold we have three type of pages.
1. Virtual web pages. Like Home page, Contact Us page and etc.
2. Physical web pages. Like Login, Logout, Search, Basket, Account pages, checkout pages etc.
3. Pages with physical place holder files but actual content loaded dynamically. Like Product pages, Category pages

No 2 is relatively easy to tackle. The physical web pages can be simply be edited in VS to take care of different content based on different URL.

No 3 can also be handled in the similar manner. The physical placeholder file can be edited, and the corresponding ConLib control can be edited to ensure that different content is loaded based on different website URL. For example Product.aspx(.cs) and ConLib/ProductPage.aspx(.cs)

No 1 can be tackled in two ways. One thing that can be done is to eliminate the virtual page and make use of a physical page. i.e; it means that 'web page' type objects from AC should simply be deleted. Their corresponding physical pages should be created. The URL redirection setup for the virtual page will no longer exist and the request will reach the actual physical page. The physical page can then be edited like 2 and 3 to achieve the desired result.
The other thing that can be done is simply update the Webpage.aspx(.cs) file and depending on the store load the description field.

Would this not require us to somehow tell the store that it is store 2? I have never seen anywhere that specifies the StoreID.

Brewhaus wrote:Would this not require us to somehow tell the store that it is store 2? I have never seen anywhere that specifies the StoreID.

This is all up to your implementation to decide which store it is. Most likely, in your case, you will decide based on the domain name the request has arrived at.

You can not use StoreID because technically you have only one store. You are just showing that one store on two different domains with slight difference in content.

For store 1 you may chose to put the product descriptions in Description field. For store 2 you may chose to put them in DetailedDescription field.... or whatever suits you.

I think that the risk of mistakes is much greater going this way. I realize that AC was not built to run multilple stores from one DB, but it seems that AC7 was far more able to handle this than Gold, so we should probably find a way to split the sites or look at other software options.

How were you doing it in AC7?

Yes, we were able to run two sites from one DB in AC7. It was really not difficult at all, but we were able to control things like the home page through scriptlets.

I wanted to ask how were you storing different content for different stores?

We have a couple of sites that had two stores in one database and they did it by having the products in two different parent categories(with subcategories) and then filtered page code based on the top category id.

Judy- was that in Gold? This is what we did in v7, but v7 also gave us scriptlets to control the code for the home page and contact us page. Gold puts the home page and contact us page information into the DB, so we were not able to pull different home page and contact us page information for the two sites.

No, it was in 7. That site hasn't upgraded to Gold yet.

I believe that I was the one that first moved two AC7 sites onto one DB, when we first moved to AC. Unfortunately, Gold has a couple of changes that make it much more difficult to do.

Now that one site is upgraded to Gold and we have moved to separate DBs (unfortunately), we need to create an import routine to update the stock qty for items sold on one site, but offered on both sites. I expect that the simplest option for pulling the inventory from DB1 would be to just open the table and copy the information. However, from there I am a bit unsure of the best way to proceed, and what the SQL query needs to be to use that information to update the same products in DB2. Can anyone help with this?