Control Of our Site....Help.

[jimjapper]

Thanks for reading our post.

 

Please bear with us as we are new to cubecart etc etc.

 

Here is the issue. We have employed a web designer for the last 2 years and in reality we want to have complete control of our site as we do keep having to pay for any adjustments to the site. Furthermore we have issues that we know we could fix if we had an inkling of how this software works.

 

Whilst we are good with web based ecommerce software i'm afraid the cubecart mechanics is a little difficult to understand  and we need a good simple instruction on how this works.  Namely:

 

1. Do we use a web editing software i.e. Dreamweaver etc.

2  How do we upload to our web hosting company.

 

 

I appreciate there is a whole host of information regards this however, none seems to cover these points.

 

Thanks for your help.

 

jim

[Toucan Web Design]

Dreamweaver is a relatively solid editor for working with cubecart, but you'll still need knowledge of php and html to work directly on it, so unless you know how to do that, might struggle still. It will also be all you need to upload to the hosting, you just need to set up the ftp details when creating a new site to work with, your hosting should provide those if you have access to them.

 

Most of what you should need to do to manage the store itself should just all be available via the admin, on occasion you might need to alter the template files a little. Those are located in the skins folder of your store, and are .tpl files. For those you mostly just need a bit of knowledge of html and an idea of how the templating system works.

 

Do you know what version of cubecart you're on? It should say on the home page of your admin. If it's been updated to 5, then it'll be using the smarty template system, there should be a few guides for that if you have a look around on the net. If it's 3 or 4, you'll want to switch your queries over to the other forum as this one is only for version 5 of CubeCart. Those ones use a different templating system that I'm not sure if there ok online guides

[bsmither]

"Dreamweaver is a relatively solid editor for working with CubeCart."

 

But if you go that route, particularly if you have experience with Dreamweaver, we recommend a version no older than CS5. Earlier versions had problems (my experience) working with partial pages -- of which all the templates (except one) are not complete pages.

 

But if you are mentioning Dreamweaver strictly as an example of a WYSIWYG web page editor and questioning whether using such an editor would be the best approach, my answer would be no. If you have a choice of learning the minimal fundamentals of understanding PHP and HTML/CSS code or learning Dreamweaver, I strongly urge you to expend the energy at understanding the coding.

 

Your web hosting company may have available to you a collection of tools in your hosted account's Control Panel. One of those tools would be labeled as "FTP" - a file transfer program. This tool is of the type that would allow you to transfer a file to/from your site from/to your computer. The ability to FTP may also be a feature of a more comprehensive application, like a WYSIWYG editor, a full-featured text file editor (Notepad++), or a web browser add-on (FireFTP for Firefox).

 

Another common tool in a hosted account's control panel is a basic programmer's text editor. "Programmer's" because it will display line numbers and have other aspects needed for ease of writing code.

[jimjapper]

Thanks for your help.

 

We are using 4.3.3...so i guess i'm in the wrong forum:)

 

We do understand HTML....no problem at all. I guess where the confusion begins is what software we use....and how we upload. With a web based ecommerce software ie Magento it is really simple. Therefore, we are quickly coming to the point that it may be better to switch......that said....we have spent months loading products and its now bearing some good orders.

 

Thoughts?

[Dirty Butter]

Good luck with your efforts. Since this is a v4 site I'm locking this thread. You'll need to start a new conversation on cubecartforums.org in the v4 section, but you can refer to this thread if you want to.