Editing Text in your Storefront & selected E-mails

Where text strings are stored

Where does the text “Product of the Month!” that appears on the home page (home.asp) come from? And how can you change it? Most of the text messages, links, form field descriptions and other text strings that you see in your storefront are not hard-coded in the ASP source code of the shopping cart pages, but rather “fed” to these pages by a few, external files.

This allows you to easily edit them without touching the ASP source code. The files are all located in the includes folder:

languages.asp contains most of the text strings.
languages_ship.asp contains text strings that are related to the shipping component
bto_language.asp contains text strings that are specific to the Build To Order version of ProductCart

How to edit these files

Download them from your Web server to your desktop to edit them. You can do so using Windows Notepad or your favorite HTML editor. Before you begin, make sure to save a backup copy of the existing file(s) so that you can go back to it if you needed to.

Download the file from your Web server using an FTP program (e.g. FileZilla is a popular, free FTP utility)
Make a back-up copy of the file so that you can quickly restore the original version, if needed
Open the file in Notepad or your favorite HTML editor
Search for the text you wish to change, checking to see if there is more than one copy of that same text.
- If there is more than one copy you can either look at the asp code to determine which one it is, or try changing each occurrence in turn to see which is the correct one.
Save the edited file and upload it back to the Web server via FTP

Do not use double quotes in your text strings: they will break the file as double quotes are used to enclose the text strings themselves. Instead of double quotes, use single quotes or the HTML equivalent for a double quote, which is "

The best way to style text strings, in case you need to change the way specific text strings look, is to use cascading style sheets. See styling text strings.

Synchronizing files after an update or upgrade

When a new version of ProductCart is released, new strings are sometimes added to these files. The process of updating or upgrading your version of ProductCart should include these steps:

Compare the new versions of the language files with your edited versions. There are many file comparison utilities that can help you with this task. A good one, for example, is ExamDiff.
Synchronize the two files. That is: add the new text strings to your edited version of the corresponding file.
Upload the edited file to the include folder, instead of the one included in the ProductCart upgrade or update.