Customizing your store
Embellishing the defaults
Many of our users have asked if they can change the default wording in the templates and snippits. For example, the wording priced from only to simply price in the department pages. The answer is Yes, quite easily. You can use the following technique to find ANY text in ANY of the templates. To find where in the templates this verbiage appears do the following.
- Click the Cart Start button on RealCart’s Large Toolbar.
- Click the Template Theme link: (this is down in the browser window, not on the RealCart toolbar)
- When your template folder opens up press the F3 on your keyboard.
- In the Find files Containing text field type:
“priced from only” without the quotes
(or “from:” or whatever you are looking for)
- Click the Search Now button.
- Any files that contain the phrase “priced from only”
- If you do not get any results then you might want to bump up a folder. (Click the folder with the up arrow on your windows toolbar)
- Now try the above steps again this time searching in the main template folder that contains all of the template folders including common.
- This time you should find at least one result.
Double-click the page you want to edit. It should appear in your browser or in your default text editor. If the file ends in “.html” open it in your browser if it does not open automatically. Now select View / Source... from your browser menu. Notepad.exe should open up. If the file ends in “.snp” open it in Notepad.exe if it does not open automatically.
Refining your search
If you do not find any pages that contain the wording you are looking for. For example, if you were trying to change the default email text you might search for the phrase: “Thank you for your order” instead of “Thank you for your order John Doe” (as the customer name is dynamically generated and is not present in the actual RealCart templates or snippits.) Currently a search for “Thank you for your order” would result in almost 20 odd pages. To narrow your results try searching for a different phrase in the auto-generated email.
For example, searching for “Your order will be processed as follows” will narrow your results down to the following files:
- jsmakemail.snp
- jsmakemail-nocc.snp
- jsmakemailunix.snp
- jsmakemailunix-nocc.snp
Now obviously if you are using NT instead of UNIX then you would NOT look in the two UNIX files. Instead you would open the top two files to determine which one to edit. Before editing them you should clone them. (Cloning is explained at RealCart University.)
Making the changes
To change the text just do the following:
- Press the F3 on your keyboard.
- Notepad will ask you what you want to find.
- Type
“priced from only” without the quotes
(or “from:” or whatever you are looking for)
- Press enter on your keyboard.
- Notepad will immediately find where these words appear in the file.
- Change the words to something else. In this case change it to just plain:
“price” without the quotes
- Save the file and exit Notepad.
- Click the rebuild page button in RealCart’s Small Toolbar to see what your change looks like.
Rebuild Page button — 
Keep in mind that our tech support department does not support your customizations. RealCart technical support only assists you with unmodified templates. For this reason you should make frequent backups of your theme folder as you modify in the event your store stops functioning. For more information read the first page of this chapter.
Change the color of the shopping cart itself
With RealCart’s HTML based templates you are free to modify the background colors, background images, fonts, colors, style sheets, ANYTHING. You can even change the color of the shopping cart applet itself. To make the shopping cart the same color as the one at our own on-line store just edit the template file called “cart.html”.
Locate the cart.html file in your current theme folder and open it with a text editor like notepad.exe or EditPad. Locate the following lines, then change their values to something else. For convenience we included a “Color Picker” in RealCart’s Tools menu that can help you determine what these values should be. “AppletBackR” is the RED component, “AppletBackG” is the GREEN component and “AppletBackB” is the BLUE component. Here are the color values of the color of our own shopping cart:
<param name=AppletBackR value="162">
<param name=AppletBackG value="152">
<param name=AppletBackB value="102">
<param name=ListBackR value="218">
<param name=ListBackG value="218">
<param name=ListBackB value="196">
Change the size of the shopping cart itself
The <applet...> tag also controls the size of the shopping cart applet. The default size of the cart is 208 wide by 172 tall. To change the cart.html file so that the shopping cart is 175 wide by 150 tall you would locate and edit the <applet...> tag as follows: (changes are indicated in red)
<applet codebase="[Settings_CodeBase]"
code="JShoppingCart.class"
NAME="cart" width=175 height=150>
Remember to edit the cart.html file in your template folder NOT the finished pages in your cart folder. If the applet tag looks like this:
<applet codebase="js206"
code="JShoppingCart.class"
NAME="cart" width=208 height=172>
instead of this:
<applet codebase="[Settings_CodeBase]"
code="JShoppingCart.class"
NAME="cart" width=208 height=172>
then you are editing the wrong file. The tag “[Settings_CodeBase]” will change dynamically each time you upgrade to a newer version of RealCart. If the file you are editing already has a jsXXX value in it instead of the “[Settings_CodeBase]” tag you will want to EXIT the file without saving your changes and locate the cart.html template and make your changes to the template file. Save the template, open RealCart, click the Rebuild all pages button and click the View store button in RealCart to see your changes.
Change the size of the shopping cart frameset
In the common theme folder (Usually located in C:\Program Files\RealCart.com\RealCart\Themes\Common) you will find the index.tem file. This is the template that creates the following files in your cart folder:
- index.asp
- index.htm
- index.html
- default.asp
- default.htm
- default.html
- home.html
- home.htm
Editing this one file, “index.tem” will make the same change to ALL of the above files when RealCart regenerates your pages. To change the size of the cart frame you will need to locate the following lines in index.tem and edit them.
Look for:
<frameset cols="234,*" border=0 frameborder=no framespacing=0>
<frameset rows="263,*" border=0 frameborder=no framespacing=0>
Let’s say that you wanted to make the cart frame narrower than its current 234 setting. If you wanted to use RealCart without the cart graphics and set this value to 185 you would make the following change to the frameset code: (indicated with red)
<frameset cols="185,*" border=0 frameborder=no framespacing=0>
<frameset rows="263,*" border=0 frameborder=no framespacing=0>
Save the template, open RealCart, click the Rebuild all pages button and click the View store button in RealCart to see your changes.
If you get stuck or “mess up”
Since RealCart technical support does not extend to helping our users experiment with customization you will need to make sure that you are making frequent backups of your theme as you customize it. This is explained on the next page of this manual.
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