Padding Around Variant Pull Down Menus June 4, 2008
Posted by engjake in Americommerce.Tags: Americommerce, css styles, custom product details page, variant pull down padding
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For the longest time I have been trying to figure out how to add some padding around my pull down menus to get a cleaner more organized look. I’m using a custom product details page which means I have modified the existing product details code and had different styles applied to the text on that page. I’m not sure why Americommerce doesn’t already apply a padding to variants on their default Product Details page – it would look a lot nicer, but they don’t. Perhaps most of their customers have products with single pull downs and in that case it looks great as they have designed it.
So the trick is to make sure that the CSS style “ProductDetailsVariations” is applied to your variant merge code on that product details page. Your Variant merge code should look like $$VARIATIONS$$. Once you have verified this, in your admin panel go to: Theme Manager>Product Details (on the left hand side). Then scroll down to Colors, Fonts, Layout. Click on that and all of the font controls will show up. Find Variants and open it. Below the font style is a width and height for that section of the product details page. I changed mine to be 27 pixels high (just enter 27) which gave me just a bit of spacing between the pull downs and gave me the look I wanted. There is a padding field there, but it is in reference to the padding bewteen the text of the variant group name and the pull down. I put mine at 2 or 3. Once this spacing was acheived how I wanted it, I then had to change the text of the variant groups so that it was centered on the 27 pixel high setting I just made. To do this, there is a CSS field at the bottom of the variant section (under colors, fonts, layout). In that field I entered: [ vertical-align: middle; ] without the brackets of course. This fixed me up just how I wanted. You can see the results here on this Emtek Arts and Crafts Lever. To truley appreciate it you would have had to have seen it before. The pull downs were stacked on top of each other with no spacing between them.
Thanks to the Americommerce guys that helped me out on this one. It was David and Eric that helped me out I think. Or was it David and Chris? I can’t remember but thanks to all of them for getting me on the right track to figuring this one out.
Batch Update Images in Americommerce May 8, 2008
Posted by engjake in Americommerce.Tags: Americommerce, batch update, export products, import products, shopping cart
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I’ve decided i’m going to blog here about how to use Americommerce from time to time. More for my own benefit than anyone elses. I’ve been using Americommerce for a little over a year and the software is capable of all kinds of things that i don’t even know how to use yet. And since they are growing, i sometimes can’t find answers to my questions in the help section or knowledgebase. And honestly sometimes, I just need it in laymans terms to understand it. Since i use their system for several websites I am sure I will be trying to fix something on one site that have already fixed on another – but i guaruntee there will be times that I forget what I did to fix the issue. So, I’m blogging about it so when that happens i can search my own blog and find the answer to my own question. Maybe someone else can benefit as well.
So here is the first thing I figured out after monkeying with it and finally speaking to Eric at Americommerce about it.
I’ve been wanting to update a whole category with thumbnails to see if the page loads any faster. Right now, I use one large image on the admin of Americommerce and specify the thumb size in the site template. This works very well, but I was curious if the generation of thumbs slows down the speed since as the page loads it is stretched out and then shrinks to the right size as it generates (as if it’s starting out with huge images so the page is really wide). Actually I know that is the issue because I spoke to Stefan about it and he explained that is why it starts out wide.
So i exported the products, added the file names to the thumb image field and uploaded the file. Then I uploaded the thumb images. I could not get the site to update and start using the new file names for the thumbs. So i exported again and noticed that my thumb file names had been change from [for example] k-1005sm.jpg, to smk-1005.jpg. I was baffled so I tried multiple times. Still the site was using the large images to generate the thumbs and my file names kept getting changes. I spoke with Eric and he explained the problem. Apparently as the images are processed and cached a field is created in the database called ItemImage. In that field is the file names for main image and thumb, as well as their alt tags. Since this column had already been populated it was overwriting my new file names I had imported. So, i deleted this field, imported the file again with my correct file names and now it works like a charm. Thanks Eric.
You can see the results here: Dynasty Cabinet Knobs
The end result however is that so far the pages do not seem to load any faster with thumbs rather than the auto-gen images. So I’m not going to go through 5k products and add thumbs to them all for no speed gain. But I’m glad to know that if I update a bunch of images at once, that ItemImage column in the export file could be the culprit if I’m having issues. This is not a bad thing, it’s just understanding the system.
Quick Fix. Happy Camper. April 18, 2008
Posted by engjake in business.Tags: Americommerce, mals-e, patience, shopping carts
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Funny this happened today after my last post about patience. One of my websites has used a shopping cart called Mals-e for years. The cart is real simple, but it’s very dependable and works. I have looked at many, many carts because I would like something fancier. I even found a great cart called Americommerce and have a few sites hosted there. The guys over there have helped me customize it so that i can make the switch pretty easy. I just haven’t convinced myself to try and fix something that isn’t broken.. even though it is lacking a lot of cool features that Americommerce has. So for now I’m trying to get my Americommerce websites working well enough that they can be a significant source of income before I risk making the change. Mals has worked great but we have kind of outgrown it as it’s lacking a lot of features that would make our day to day a lot easier – Americommerce has it.
Anyway, after more than 5 years, I had my first issue with Mals-e today. Suddenly if you added a product to the shopping cart, continued shopping and then added another item to the cart, the second item would overwrite the first. Not a great situation. Without thinking about it I picked up the phone and called the number on Mals-e’s website. You’d think I would have thought about the time difference as I dialed the overseas number, but I didn’t. Daytime is the busiest so I was just real concerned about getting the issue fixed for our customers. Just as my call was answered I realized it was about 9:30 at night for them. As luck would have it Mal himself answered the phone and had the issue fixed within minutes. Thanks Mal. The planets were aligned to make all of that happen so quickly, I’m sure.
