Welcome to Internet Image's
Internet Shopping Mall OnLine Creator.
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The Shopping OnLine Creator greatly simplifies the creation and maintainence
of your product database that you will use will with your online shopping
cart. It also outputs the necessary HTML pages automatically after the
creation of your product database. All that you have to do to get it up
and running with your products is fill in the form fields for each product.
After you have entered your products click Save Shop button and
the database file (products.t) will be created along with the HTML pages.
Use the frame to the left to get more information about each step of building your Catalog and database as well as how to maintain and modify your product database. If
you have a suggestion or comment please feel free to let me know. You can
email us at Technical Support
Mail. |
Getting
Started
The interface to the Shopping OnLine
Creator is pretty straight forward. There are seven form fields.
The first four each represent a product
field.
Product name:
The product name can be up to 30 characters. It cannot contain single quotes
or double quotes.
Product price:
Enter the price without a dollar sign, it will be provided by the javascript.
Product description:
This field can contain up to 100 characters but cannot contain single quotes
or double quotes.
Product category
field: The product type field is intregal and it is important that
you keep track of the types you enter here because the product types will
make up each entry in the Table of Contents page which resemble catalog
sections.
The remaining fields are optional and they allow you to add an image and/or link if you wish.
Image file: If you want to add an image, type in the image file name in GIF or JPG format located at the same directory of all files (To add an image that image must be in the directory of the Shopping OnLine Creator application). If you are not adding an image it will be blank and no image will display for that product when that product is displayed on the online catalog. If you did add an image that image will display with the product on the online catalog.
The last two fields are for the optional
link you may wish to include.
Link Text field:
Is for the text you want to display as the link. A user to your catalog
can click on this link you want to offer more information about the product.
Link URL field:
Is for thepage that the link to display. If the page is in the same directory
as the catalog just input the page name, for example moreinfo.htm..
Creating
your Product Database
When you first start the Shopping
OnLine Creator the form fields will have 8 pre-built records. You fill
in each field with information on that product and any of the optional
fields. Then click on "Next Record" button for the following records. To
enter 10th product click the Add New button. This will move you to new
record. You can continue in this manner to create the database of your
products. You can browse forward and backwards through the database by
clicking the Next and Previous buttons. When you click the Next or Previous
button the data in the fields is rewritten to the database. Therefore to
do modifications or updates simply change the product fields and press
Next or Previous. The new data will be rewritten to the database file,
overwriting the old data.
Viewing
your Catalog.
Once you have entered all of your
products you can create the database file by clicking the Create button
or by selecting File and and clicking Output Database File. This will write
the product database to a file called products.t. It will also output index.htm,
this is the main page that draws up the frameset and where the javascript
code resides. Lastly it outputs the cat_toc.htm page, this is the Table
of Contents page that users will use to peruse sections of your catalog.After
creating the database file you can view the Catalog by selecting the File
menu and then clicking View Catalog, this will open your browser to the
Catalog page. *You must have the .htm files installed in the same directory
as the HTML/Database Creator application. The readme.txt file tells of
the files that should be transferred to this file.*
Maintaining
& Modifying your Database and Catalog
You can maintain the database simply
by moving to the product record you want to modify. You can do any modifcations
to the record and then click the Previous or Next button which will write
the modification to the database file. You can delete a product record
by browsing to that record and pressing Delete. You may search for products
in the product database by clicking Search and entering the product name
of the product you want to view.
Uploading
your Catalog
After you have created your product
database you have to change the email address that the order form will
be mailed to (Otherwise it will be mailed to me!). Open up cat_index.htm
and locate the function called checkOut (use the Search * Find function
that most text editors have). It is about 2/3 of the way down the page.About
30 lines below that is this line:
cWin.write("<FORM NAME = 'orderform' METHOD = 'POST' ACTION = '***************'>");
Change the assignment to ACTION to "mailto:yourEmailAddress.somewhere.com" and
include this after it: ENCTYPE="text/plain". It should look like this with your email address in place of mine:
cWin.write("<FORM NAME='orderForm' ACTION = 'mailto:yourEmailAddress.somewhere.com' METHOD='POST'
ENCTYPE='text/plain'>");
Now you are ready to upload your catalog to your ISP's Web server. The files you need to upload are: