jerseyjoe

Go to: www.yourstore.com/admin It will want the user and pw you assigned when you installed. Be sure to check out th tutorials at www.cubecart.com/support Good luck

I'm kinda olde-fashioned. I would put up two different stores at two totally different domain names. The comedian Bob Newhart made an insightful comment on his first album. He spoke of a really low fare airline called "The Grace L. Ferguson Airline and Storm Door Company." His point was, you would not put much faith in either because they were trying to do too many things on the same dime. But that's your call. One of the pleasures of running your own business is you can make your own decisions. If you do want to go the route of one domain, a splash page and links to two businesses, there is a way to install two CC stores that run off the single common database. I've seen discussion of it and as I recall it is something that would have to be prepared for at the time you create the database. I'd post that as a question in the installation forum and I'm sure someone there can help you. And now I am going to follow the example of the 3 year old. It's almost Midnight here in New York. I'm definitely off to bed now. No need to tuck me in. I do that quite well myself without help, thank you. The tutorials are pretty good. Also, do searches on keywords here in the forums. If someone else doesn't pick up this thread before I'm up again, I'll see it then. G'nite and best of luck to you . . .

The best FTP porgram is WS_FTP.com from www.ipswitch.com. It will expire after 30 days unless you pay for it. Second best, IMHO, is from www.smartftp.com. It will not expire at the end of 30 days but will therafter nag you when you use it in unpaid mode. I switched to and paid up for WS_FTP because it holds and/or reestablishes connections better than any. After you get your cart up and want to do some skin customizing, you'll want an excellent free editor called PHPdesigner. It can be configured to edit PHP, HTML, XHTML, TPL and other common file types. It's not hard to learn. I just celebrated my 73rd birthday yesterday and figured out a lot of it myself - and the folks here in the CC forums are generally very supportive and tolerant of my dumb questions. Joe

Before doing anything else, think about this question. There is no wrong answer but you may be happier with your store if you make an informed decision: Question Why are you installing the store in a separate directory? Putting it in a directory called peastore means that you must either have a splash page - which is not always the right thing - or your customers must know that full address including th directory (www.peabodysairbrush.com/peastore). If you want a splash page for some valid, well-considered reason, that's great. But I have yet to see a successful online store that uses one. So if you decide you want that structure, let me know and we'll go ahead from there. But if you decide you want customers to "walk right in" to your store, you should delete the upload files and then re-up them to the root of the server. Once you are back at that point, there are excellent tutorials on the CC web site at: http://www.cubecart.com/site/tutorials/ You can also get there and see all the tutorials by clicking on Support in the upper part of thew CC forum screen. Basically, that first one will tell you to upload to the directory or choice (root or your peastore) and then they take you through the installation. Have sound turned on. I didn't actually go to bed. I staretd flipping tv channels between reruns, from Sinefeld to Sex and the City, then back again. They blend together quite well. I'll be up for another little while but I think you'll be ok. If I don't answer you, there are those more expert than me lurking in the pixel-bushes. Best of luck . . . and a hug to the 3 year old.

I see you are no longer online in the forums so I guess you've gone ahead. I'm off to bed. Best of luck . . .

OK, stop right here and we'll do a few sanity checks before you proceed, OK?

That's info overload for me. I can only take one step at a time. Let's do the next step. Have you gone to htp://peabodysairbrush.com/peastore/install/ ? I just did, and as far as I can see, you have not done that step. Tell if you have, yes or no?

OK, let's go to the basics. Have you uploaded the CubeCart files to the root directory of your web site?

That'll work, but really, why have a splash page? Visitors are really the most difficult and expensive element in a successful online business. Why delay actual purchases? I've yet to see anything on a splash page that could not be easily integrated into the store. Often splash pages are pure vanity - and a seller who wants to be successful needs to avoid that trap.

Don't panic. It is where Cube Cart stores all the details of your online shopping cart, such as products, prices, customers, etc. The database would have been created one of two ways: 1) if you installed CubeCart using Fantastico, a bundle of various programs together with an automatic installer provided by your hosting service, you can now simply ignore the data base. 2) if you are installing CubeCart "manually" (the better way by far) you probably created the database as part of the step-by-step installation process. You will need to know such things as the db name, your db user name and passwrod, as well as a user name and password for administrating the CubeCart. So, what is the situation now? Is your installation complete or, if not, at which step are you?

I think I have become the Simon Cowell of this board when it comes to layout and design. For our non-USA friends, Simon is the acerbic truth-telling judge on a popular talent search television programs. He serves many contestants very well by saying bluntly what they need to hear before they waste a lifetime on their misplaced fantasies of talent and fame. That said, while I am going to be negative, I expect that you trust my sincerity in answering your request for feedback. I'm not all at all impressed with your design. First, the Web Site Home Page: It is over-designed. Too busy. Aside from the general clutter, those mini-banners at the foot amount to an announcement that you have limited understanding of commercial concepts as they apply to the web. Ask yourself two questions - and you should see what I'm driving at. 1) what is the purpose, in fewer than 5 words, of your web site? 2) what is the purpose, in fewer than 5 words, of all those banners at the foot of the home page? I suspect your answers will be . . . 1) to sell stuff 2) to attract traffic Think through how, if at all, those banners serve those goals. Are you a winner or loser in the link exchange? Why do you think those directories give away the service "for free"? Those links go two ways. Are you winning more buyers (not just "page view" visitors - *buyers*) than you are sending to those directories? Learn the answers to those questions by examining your site's traffic using a Web Traffic Analysis tool such as AWSTATS, Webalizer, Urchin and Analog. (Reality check: You *are* using a host that provides a variety of WTA tools, aren't you?). Those tools will show you which directories are delivering traffic - and which links are taking it back to them. You should be able to see which sources deliver buyers and which do not. I have no doubt, based on my own experience of analyzing web logs for about 12 years, that you will discover that you are giving away more than you are getting. As for those mini-banners to show standards compliance, how many items will they sell? What does your jewelry buyer understand about those issues? If you lose one visitor as a result of those compliance tags, that is reason enough to remove them. That "index bait" text at the foot of the page is ugly and unprofessional and probably useless. Keywords alone are virtually worthless as far as Google and Yahoo and MSN are concerned. Their algorithms are more sophisticated If you want useful site promotion, consider the Froogle link on the View Products page. It's free and actually works. Also, take a look at the Search Engine Optimization mods at cubecart.org. Yikes! We are still on the site home page. That right hand menu is another amateur device. Usually, that type of placement has but one motivation - to be different. Guess what? It works - but it works *against* you. It is different with a negative result. Much of the world reads from right to left. They will not think that a menu on the right is, in any way, "different." But your web site is not in those languages. Your readership is Western. We expect menus on the left. That's why they are commonly there. By putting a menu on the right, you are starting out with dis-orienting your visitor for no reason other than wanting to be different. Different and creative are not the same thing at all. The women in the two photos are beautiful. Why two? One is sufficient; two are distracting. About all those words to explain the buttons . . . totally un-necessary. The labels are enough. The paragraphs add absolutely no meaning or value beyond what is already presented by the label. Trust your visitors to understand what those labels mean. Why slow them down on the way into the store? Light Bulb Goes on Above My Head! On further reflection, the entire home page itself is one big, un-necessary mistake. It is a distraction and a delay to entering the store. The store itself should be the first page the visitor sees. If you want to add links to those other pages (about us, healing, parties, etc.) make them Site Docs and put links to them in a box on the side of the page. One design flaw in all the CubeCart templates puts site docs at the foot of the page. Now for the Store Home Page . . . (finally) That banner is waaaay too big. Its excesses are two. 1) the dominant graphic has not been prepared for the web. At roughly 55Kb, that graphic, by itself, is bigger than the entire first page should be. The ideal home page of a web site is less than 40kb *total* - including text and graphics. Much of the world is still on 56k dialup. Some of it may even be using 28k. The gold standard for web page download time is Yahoo. As much as everything else about Yahoo repels me, I must give them props for the fact their home page usually downloads at around 6 seconds on a clean 56k connection. The true download speed of a web page (or the lack of speed) is masked because after the first download of a page, it is delivered from the visitor's computer's cache, not over the internet. Pages that are seriously slow due to excessive file size seem to download quite quickly to a less knowledgeable site designer because they are not coming from a distant server. The consequences can be deadly. Studies of user experience are consistent in reporting that visitors are impatient with pages that do not download faster than 20 seconds. At that point, they begin clicking away to some other page at the rate of 50% every five additional seconds. 40k equals that critical 20 seconds. Do the math for your store home page, which I'm estimating totals at least 70k. A quick check of your category thumbnails, as small as their dimensions are, says they run in the 18 to 25k range. That means your are generating them from huge files. Prepare them for the web before uploading them and they will be appropriately smaller files as thumbnails without loss of quality. To do that, use an image program such as Photoshop or Adobe Elements - or one of any number of similar apps that will strip away the un-needed bytes that slow down your images. 2) physically, the banner, text and logo, overwhelm every page of your design. The issue here is, What's the point? Do you think that a visitor will forget what site he is on? The top of the page is valuable real estate and you are using it to bludgeon your hard-won visitor with your identity when the focus should be on your products. Ideally, your banner height should top out at 125px high. Less, like 100px, would be better. Your products would then move up closer to the center of the screen. IMHO, there is a mis-understanding of the rich feature set of Cube Cart. Just because "Popular Products" and "Featured Product" and "New Products" are possible, that is not sufficient reason to use all of them. Consider: how does the default content of the Information box help drive sales? Is "Language" really needed on this site for your markets? A GuestBook may be a good idea for gathering feedback but its implementation here, hosting the GB on someone's else's server, is not. You are sending your hard-earned traffic to someone else's candy store where they are exposed to adverts for products other than your own. Further, any privacy promise you make on your own site is thereby made useless because the remote guestbook operator almost certainly collects those email addresses for spammers and either uses or rents them or both. You would be far better off using a guestbook that is provided by your web host, that runs from your own web site. My hosting customers have a choice of three different guestbooks, one simple flat version and two that are PHP/MySQL driven. Your web site host should be providing you with at least one. And, BTW, that big fat graphic in the first page of your Guestbook is another conceit that you should reconsider. As I said at the start, I hope you take my blunt comments as being in the spirit of your question, to improve your web site. While I do not expect you to agree with my opinions, they are sincerely intended to help. Regards . . .

OK, I had to put the project on hold for a few days while the Harkins Clan gathered in Washingtonn, DC for our annual combined birthday party. For some reason best not investigated too closely, almost all Harkins conceptions in the three curent generations seem to have happened in July, resulting in March births. Speaking as the Patriarch, and quoting Satchel Paige, the greatest baseball pitcher ever to have lived, had I only known I was going to live this long, I would have take better care of myself when I was younger. The Project: I am definitely outside my comfort range on importing tables. After this project is done, I'll make time to play using a test store until I know what I'm doing. But for now, I need to get this thing working. I have three files updated from the old database, ready to import (_customers, _category and _inventory). Those three files are in a folder "CSVupload" and the files need to be renamed which I'm sure you will realize. You already have the access codes to the server. Ignore the /store/ folder. The new store is in the root. If you would please do them at your earliest opportunity, I'll PayPal your fee. Just PM me what you need. It's now 6:20am here in NYC. I have to leave at 9am for an appointment. I'll check the email before I go and I will be back around 3pm. As soon as I know what to send you, I will. Ragrds, Joe

Choose one of the three provided skins. You can preview them in yourstore.com/admin > general settings > skin Then go to My Computer > the folder where you have the source CC files and use an editor like PHPdesigner (www.mpsoftwareweb.com) to open the folder: Skins > yourchosenskin > Styles Sheets > layout.css. You'll find code for the boxes clearly noted as controlling the boxes on the left and boxes on the right. You can move them and reroder them as you want them or even delete them. You can have a many boxes as you want on the left and in the order you choose in that code. Delete all those on the right that you don't want. The center column can fill the space where the right columns were if you configure the center column to do that. Then save the file and use an FTP prog to upload and overwrite the original. OK?

No fair! I promise next time I'll come up with something to test your skills. Now, why the hell did I think that the upload had worked - but it hadn't? I may have to stop taking these little blue pills that make my eyes blurry and . . . and . . . hmmm, never mind. I'll get glasses. Thanks for the beautiful fix. It's the perfect thing for products whose aspect ratio requires a tall vertical photo as did those.

Thanks, It's too late here in the NYC area and I have an early appointment in Manhattan in the morning. I'll check out your site when I return. I've written to Sir William but haven't had a response. He must be away rescuing a damsel or doing something very Monty Python to a dragon. Nite . . .

Thanks for your patience and empathy. At a quck scan, the new info looks like the kind of dumbing down that's my level. It's after 12:30 here and I have an early appotiment in Manhattan.o I'll have to go to bed now and try those instructions when I return. Again, thanks . . .

Thanks for the prompt response. I am lost. The problem is my newbie status in learning myPHPadmin, combined with a limited ability to follow anything but explicit instructions. The late comedian Jonathan Winters used to tell about asking driving directions from a farmer who said, "Go down the road a ways and turn left where the old school house used to be." I have the same problem. May I impose further on your generosity and ask for clarification? You say: "go to the table you are attempting to update. " What, exactly do you mean by "go to the table you are attempting to update" I opened the db and I'm looking at a list of tables. Across the top the column labels are: Table Action RecordsTip Type Size Overhead I scroll down and see the table CubeCart_inventory. I put a check mark in the box. Is that what I should do? Or does "go to" mean something else? You say, "Then select SQL, at the bottom of the page you should see (Insert data from a text file into the table)." There is no SQL at the bottom of this page and nothing at the bottom that says "(Insert data from a text file into the table)." So at this point onward, I'm only guessing and I've learned that computers are even dumber than me, having even less ability make assumptions. May I ask for some step by steps, please? You help is greatly appreciated.

I mis-spoke when I said "Killer Skin". I'm actually using Legend but I think that's not an issue. However I am having a nasty problem with this. I downloaded your file, renamed it to remove the txt extension and FTPed it, overwriting the existing file in Legend. After a few futile tries, I deleted the original and then uploaded your version. As a result, the product page is blank. http://www.vikolya.com/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=1 I'm not worrried about the lost display. I know that my bottom line is I can simply restore the original TPL from the CC 3.0.10 download zip. But if I could install your mod, I really wish to do that. May I send you the admin codes for the store - and for the FTP and ask that you take a look at what might be wrong? TIA

Excellent tutorial. I learned a great deal of useful info. I have a related question. For background, please see: http://www.cubecart.com/site/forums/index....showtopic=17524 No one has responded to me there but perhaps you can guide me? After posting the above, I've finished the edits of the CSV file of the store_inventory table and I want to import it back into the database and overwrite the table that is there. But I have not seen anything that explains how to import that edited table. To complicate matters, when I tried to save my work, the "save" dialog delivered ominous warnings that I was about to lose formatting or data or whatever but, in typical Mocrosoft fashion gave no useful information on exactly what would be lost or any of getting around the problem. So I saved it as an Excel file with the extension .XLS. Anyway, can you advise me how to get this table back into the CC data base? TIA The save dialog that

I'm gpoing to try it your way. I'm not in the mood for an adventure today. Thanks for the help. Joe Does it matter which is done first, uploading images or creating product?

Does it matter which is done first, uploading images or creating product?

The CC image Manager is fine for adding just a few images but I need to add about 100 product images. Can I simply FTP them to the images/upload folder?

I am about to try something that will be either very satisfying or so disastrous that it will entertain this forum an example of incredible stupidity. The store (licensed of course - I may be stupid but I'm not crazy) right now is installed as v3.0.8 at www.domainname.com/store/. I've done a fresh installation, using 3.0.10 with a new data base, at www.domainname.com/. Please don't ask why unless you enjoy tedious explanations that rival the plots of Henry James novels for dullness. I'd like to export the product list from the /store/ to an Excel spreadsheet so I can edit the products and assign images to them and then import that to the fresh installation. I know Sir William has a highly regarded CSV mod, but in reading the description, it seems it only goes one way, import into a store, not export from a store. I will PM him a link to this this posting and ask his attention. But I'm posting the message here in the forum because someone may have already tried this same stunt and can spare me from suicide, the only option left if I screw up. UPDATE 30 minutes later OK, I got bold. I went into myPHPadmin and exported a copy of the products (inventory) and customers tables. I guess I should do the same for the order related tables, too, right? (advice hoped for). Are there any other tables I would want to bring over? I've looked at the Excel sheets and they look good. I do not see an "import" function in the myPHPadmin and I'm guessing this is where I need Sir Willliam's mod. Right?

Well, I know at least a few more things that don't work either, so I've narrowed the possibilities. Given a stable universe where God does not play jokes and nothing is truly random, I'm gessing there are only somewhere above 3 googleplex cubed possibilities that remain to try. Here's what does not work: I figured maybe I could undo the damage done when I batch-deleted the images. So I FTPd them back. That does nothing but put the images back on the server. The CC Image Manager still declines to remove them. So I removed them again and returned to the Image Manager "Upload Images" system and tried restore one of the deleted images. IM dutifully responds that it can't (won't?) upload that image because it already exists. FWIW - trying to use IM to delete an image returns the following error message: "Warning: unlink(/home/STORENAME/public_html/store/images/uploads/_vti_cnf/weddingdress_350_5300C.jpg): Permission denied in /home/STORENAME/public_html/store/admin/filemanager/index.php on line 109" Line 109 doesn't speak to me but perhaps someone else knows what it is bleating about and how to stuff a sock in it . . . $query = "SELECT doc_id FROM ".$glob['dbprefix']."CubeCart_docs WHERE doc_content LIKE '%".$imageName."%'"; What that has to do with images that don't exist is totally lost on me. Add to the list of other things that does not work is to take a clue from "permission denied" and CHMODing all those folders to 777. After doing that, trying again to delete an image returns the same error. ANYONE?

First of all, thank you for the detailed instructions. That's exactly the kind of response I asked for. Unfortunately, I may have asked for the wrong question - or not been very clear about the issue - because after having had no problem carrying out your lucid advice, I still have the situiation that launched the question. Here's how I followed your instructions and the results . . . I focused on some specific products where the image had been bulk-deleted using FTP but still ghosts, undeletable, in the CC Image Manager. I went step by step, just as you described and removed the image value just as you suggested for each of 1/2 dozen items. Then I went back to the CC Image Manager, refreshed, and the images are still listed there and when I try to delete them, I still get an error message. Further, there are many images - listed in the Image Manager - for which the product itself was long ago deleted - yet the image related to it, after bulk removal (ftp), is still listed in the Image Manager. Yet those do not appear at all in the _inventory table - and why should they? If I understand what I accomplished using the process you described, all I did was remove the relationship betweensome existing products and an image. It did not remove the image from the Image Manager. The steps I went through have nothing to do with the Image Manager listings. So, if simple logic applies, I should not be editing the _inventory table, I should be editing some place in the data base where the images are listed. Any idea where that is? Thanks again for your help. I just need to go further if you have the patience for me. Does that make sense, or am I missing something?