AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

I upgrade to Gold R8 last night and must say I am disappointed at the Whats New module, compared to what it once was in Able Commerce 5.5. So many of our customers come to our site daily to see Whats New and have been disappointed without this feature on our site since we upgraded to Gold a few months ago now.

Unless I am missing something, it looks like it's only possible to add the module in either the left side pane or the right side pane, which presents very restrictive. Is there any way to add it in the main content pane? Or am I going to have to hire a developer to perform a customization on our site? I really need the module to display products in a row style format going down the center of the website / page. We typically have between 50 - 100 new products a month which our customers cannot wait to see and it has been very difficult for them to find with AC Gold.

Any assistance / direction would be greatly appreciated here as this is probably the single most important feature we need, above and beyond any shopping cart feature (especially since we process all of our orders manually by phone due to fraud and identity verification).

Thank you!

Attached is an example (capture from a Wayback Machine archive) of what our What's New section used to look like before we upgraded to Gold. This is what we need more than any other feature Able Commcerce provides, bar none, including the shopping cart itself:

http://web.archive.org/web/201204121843 ... prods.aspx?

Note there will be missing images since this is from an old screen capture, but you'll get the idea.

You can add it to the center of the page via editing an existing category conlib or creating a new category page. I haven't followed this thread to pick up the name of the conlib, but if you make a new category page under Website-->Category Pages-->Add Category page, you can add it in the big box like one for an existing categorypage
[[ConLib:CategoryGridPage]]
If you want to add it as a component to an existing category page, you can open that conlib file and follow one of the componets like the breadcrumbs

Thanks for the reply and input Judy! The name of the new conlib is WhatsNewDialog. I created a new Category page as you suggested and added:

[[ConLib:WhatsNewDialog]]

in the big box. Then, I associated the new category page with a new category. Its working fine, except I cannot figure out how to change any of the parameters, like how many products to display. Any ideas? I'm going to try to attach a screenshot of the possible parameters if you just add this to a layout page so you can see. Maybe I can pass a parameter or two via the [[ConLib:WhatsNewDialog]] code?

There is a handy control reference if you navigate to the Help > ConLib Reference page. Scroll down the list until you see WhatsNewDialog and select it. Then you will see the parameters available.

[[ConLib:WhatNewDialog Columns="1" Caption="What's New" MaxItems="3" Days="30" UseDays="True"]]

When you add this control into a main webpage or category page, you can change the above parameters. The ConLib reference gives a short summary of each one.

Ahah!!! That helps immensely Katie. I did not know that. Now I do. We're getting closer! Thanks so much both of you!

Hello Viper, does the control work for you at this point? Or do you still want a customized one?