Manage Content Pages

Manage Content Pages

A built-in content management system

ProductCart allows you to create and manage your own Content Pages - such as “About Us” , “Customer Service”, etc. - directly from the Control Panel. In other words, ProductCart includes a basic content management system that allows you to create and manage any number of Web pages, without using an external HTML editor.

For example, one of the demo stores on the Early Impact Web site contains a page that provides potential customers with information on the demo store that they are using to test ProductCart.

Adding and editing Content Pages

To access this feature, select Settings > Manage Content Pages from the Control Panel navigation menu. Click on Add New Content Page to add a new page.

Built-in HTML editor

Use the built-in HTML editor to create the page or copy text or HTML code from another program. ProductCart uses a Web-based HTML editor published by InnovaStudio (http://www.innovastudio.com/editor.asp). To learn how to best take advantage of this powerful tool, see the tutorials listed on the following page: http://www.innovastudio.com/editor_tutorial.asp

Active and inactive pages

Check the Active option unless you want this page to remain inactive. Inactive pages cannot be accessed by your customers. If you are still working on a page (or do not want to show it in the storefront for any other reason), set it to be inactive.

Meta tags

ProductCart v3.51 and above support page-specific TITLE, DESCRIPTION, and KEYWORDS meta tags for Content Pages. The page name is used as the title shown to the visitor and printed to the page using a H1 HTML tag (headline tag). The page title is instead used as the TITLE meta tag on the page.

Display options

Check the Include store header & footer option if you would like ProductCart to create a page that includes the store's graphical interface. If this is the case, and if you decide to copy HTML code that you have created in another HTML editor (e.g. MS FrontPage, Macromedia Dreamweaver, etc.), make sure to include only code that is in between the <body> and </body> tag.

For example, you can certainly copy and paste an HTML table that you have created in your favorite HTML editor, but you should not copy an entire HTML page.

Remember: if you wish to copy an entire HTML page into the Page Description field, then make sure NOT to select the Include store header & footer feature.

In other words:

If you are creating your pages elsewhere (e.g. using Adobe® Dreamweaver® or Microsoft® Expression® Web), and copying an entire HTML page into the Page Description field, do not select the Include store header & footer option.
If you are using the built-in HTML editor or are copying only a portion of an HTML page created with an external HTML editor, then you must select the Include store header & footer option.

Click on Add Content Page to save your new content page to the ProductCart database. All of the content pages that you have created are listed on the Manage Content Pages page. At any time you can edit a page using ProductCart’s built-in HTML editor.

Showing Content Pages in the Storefront

To allow customers to find the content pages that you have created, link to them from other pages on your Web site, and/or from your store’s navigation. You can copy the location of the page to your clipboard by using the button situated on the right side of the page URL.

Technical Note: content pages and navigation

The default version of header.asp contains some ASP code that dynamically loads content page titles and corresponding links from the store database. This allows you to create a list of links to these pages that is automatically updated every time you add a new page and remove/edit an existing page.

You could place the code below anywhere in your custom version of header.asp or footer.asp (or another ASP file set up to query the ProductCart database) to load such list. This also means that you could load your content pages in another navigation script that you might want to place somewhere on your store interface.

The SQL query is designed to filter out inactive Content Pages and order the active pages by name.

Default Header.asp Code

The following code is slightly different from the one found in the default version of header.asp. The main difference is that here we are not assuming that there is already an unordered list that the list items are added to, and therefore we are adding <ul> and </ul> to the beginning and the end of the code, to respectively open and close the unordered list.

<ul>
<% 
  '// START CONTENT PAGES
  '// Load a list of links to content pages
   query="SELECT pcCont_IDPage, pcCont_PageName FROM pcContents "
   query=query&"WHERE pcCont_InActive=0 ORDER BY pcCont_PageName ASC;"
   set rsCP=Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset")
   set rsCP=conlayout.execute(query)
    do while not rsCP.eof
%>
     <li><a href="viewContent.asp?idpage=<%=rsCP("pcCont_IDPage")%>"><%=rsCP("pcCont_PageName")%></a></li>
<%
     rsCP.MoveNext
    loop
    set rsCP=nothing
  '// END CONTENT PAGES
%>
</ul>

Same Code Edited for SEO URLs

Version 3.51 and above of the search engine friendly URLs (what we sometimes call the “SEO files”), contain a method for rewriting the URL of content pages using the content page name, and for correctly interpreting that new name.

ProductCart v3.51 and above also support page-specific meta tags, and mentioned above. The combination of the two feature allows for more search engine friendly meta tags in version 3.51 and above.

<ul>
<% 
  '// START CONTENT PAGES
  '// Load a list of links to content pages
   query="SELECT pcCont_IDPage, pcCont_PageName FROM pcContents "
   query=query&"WHERE pcCont_InActive=0 ORDER BY pcCont_PageName ASC;"
   set rsCP=Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset")
   set rsCP=conlayout.execute(query)
    do while not rsCP.eof
     pcIntContentPageID=rsCP("pcCont_IDPage")
     pcvContentPageName=rsCP("pcCont_PageName")
%>
    <li><a href="<%=pcStrCntPageLink%>"><%=pcvContentPageName%></a></li>
<%
     rsCP.MoveNext
    loop
    set rsCP=nothing
  '// END CONTENT PAGES
%>
</ul>

Unordered Lists and Navigation

The code above creates an unordered list of content pages. You can use CSS to change the display of an unordered list to create all sorts of nice navigation menus (run a Google search on this topic).

When using CSS, you will typically add a class to your unordered list, so that you can style that specific unordered lists (versus other lists that might exist on the same page). For example, assuming the class were called “contentPageNavigation”, it would look as follows:

<ul class="contentPageNavigation">
 ... code that generates the list of content pages ...
</ul>