Working with ShopSite

ShopSite Custom Pages FAQs

Here is a list of questions and answers about using Custom Pages in your ShopSite store.

• What are custom pages?
• What are the differences between custom pages and custom templates?
• How do I link custom pages and ShopSite pages?

What are custom pages?

Custom Pages are HTML pages that contain special ShopSite tags to link to the ShopSite databases. You can create Custom Pages in your favorite HTML authoring program and upload them to a special directory in your ShopSite store. When you publish your store, ShopSite replaces the special tags with information from the databases. You have complete control over your store’s page layouts while using ShopSite’s databases, shopping cart, and order processing features. (You cannot use custom pages to customize the shopping cart.)

What are the differences between custom pages and custom templates?

A Custom Page is just one page, though you can use as many as you want in your store. ShopSite will only do minimal processing on your custom page to replace the special ShopSite database tags with information from the databases; the rest of your page will not be changed. Custom Pages are separate from any regular pages that you create in ShopSite, though you can link them together. Custom Pages use very little information from the ShopSite pages database.

A custom page template is a template that you can apply to any page in your store. It includes HTML tags and a different set of special tags than Custom Pages use. Custom page templates apply formatting to your regular ShopSite pages, while Custom Page are complete pages that are separate from any regular ShopSite pages.

How do I link custom pages and ShopSite pages?

If you know the page file names of both the regular ShopSite pages and the custom pages, you can use HTML to insert links between the two. After you publish your store, ShopSite puts the processed custom pages in your store's output directory, along with any normal ShopSite pages. Thus, links to custom pages from normal ShopSite pages should have this form:

<a href="custompagename.html">Link to custom page</a>

It is also possible to link from standard pages to custom pages by using extra standard pages as placeholders.

1. For every custom page that you want to link to from standard pages, create a standard page and give it the same file name as the custom page. For example, if you have a custom page with sporting goods on it and you name that page sports.html, create a standard page and enter sports.html in the File Name field. You can name the page (with the Page Name field) anything that you like, but it is best to use a name that describes the contents of the custom page.
2. In the Link Location field of the Add a Page screen, check the box next to the standard pages that you want to have links to the custom page. Don’t fill in any other fields for the standard page; it is only a placeholder and will never be seen.
3. Repeat the above steps to create placeholder standard pages for each custom page that you want to link to.
4. Publish your store. ShopSite replaces the links to the standard pages with links to the custom pages of the same name.

ShopSite Help and Resource Center February 13, 2004 Give Feedback

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