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Three questions about CubeCart's capabilities


Ally007

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I'm totally new to CubeCart, but am on the point of opting for it, because my first impressions are very good. And after much hunting around, it seems to be one program that does what I want, out of the box. In particular, I want to display my products one per row as in the demo site view at: https://demo.cubecart.com/cc6/accessories.html I also needed to be able to import my 5,000 unique products from a spreadsheet (e.g., as a csv file). However, I have a few questions:

1) Is it possible to change the product 'Condition' options? (I need to use 25 different variants of 'Condition', none of which are 'New', 'Used' or 'Refurbished'.)

2) If I import my product list as a csv file, is there any way to get CubeCart to automatically allocate the required 'category codes' to each of my 250 product categories? (In my inventory spreadsheet, I have the category of each product spelled out in the cell adjacent to each product description.) Alternatively, I could easily allocate my own numerical code to each product category in my spreadsheet. Is this a valid way of bypassing the need to manually enter a category code for each individual product, from within CubeCart's control panel? (I imagine this would be extremely laborious, due to the number of products and the number of categories I have.)

3) Is it possible to set up CubeCart so that my 250 product categories are listed as clickable links in an alphabetically-ordered column, in a left side bar, with fairly tight line-spacing, rather than in the horizontal top bar seen in the demo site?

Many thanks...

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6 minutes ago, Ally007 said:

I want to display my products one per row as in the demo site view at: https://demo.cubecart.com/cc6/accessories.html

That is the default row format on category pages - to the left of the featured product, you have two icons.  The "by row" is highlighted and visitors can click the "by grid" if they wish

7 minutes ago, Ally007 said:

1) Is it possible to add additional product 'conditions'  (I need to use 25 different variants of 'condition', none of which include 'new', 'used' or 'refurbished'.)

Conditions are hard coded so you could add additional ones by changing core code (which I would strongly recommend against) or by writing a snippet or plugin.  However, I cant imagine what 25 different conditions could be and there would almost certainly be a better way to store that information against each product.

7 minutes ago, Ally007 said:

If I import my product list as a csv file, is there any way to get CubeCart to automatically allocate the required 'category codes' to each of my 250 product categories? (In my stock spreadsheet, I have the category of each product spelled out in the cell adjacent to each product description.)

You would need to manually create the categories first and then substitute the assigned category ID instead of the category name in your csv.  It is possible to write a script to process the csv file, check for the category and if it doesnt exist, then create it - writing a custom would enable you to do almost anything you want and we have done complex imports before this way. 

11 minutes ago, Ally007 said:

3) Is it possible to set up CubeCart so that my 250 product categories are listed as clickable links in a column, in a left side bar, with fairly tight line-spacing, rather than in the horizontal top bar seen in the demo site?

The free Foundation skin only uses the top bar horizontal menu.  There is a plugin that allows you to switch to a side bar menu and would do want you want and you would need all 250 to be top level categories - I would imagine the result would look horrible and would be complex for users to use though

 

Ian

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Thank you for the helpful response, Ian.

3 hours ago, havenswift-hosting said:

The free Foundation skin only uses the top bar horizontal menu.  There is a plugin that allows you to switch to a side bar menu and would do want you want and you would need all 250 to be top level categories

Would that plugin be this one:  https://www.cubecart.com/extensions/plugins/vertical-navigation-box
...or were you referring to something else?

Thanks..

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On 10/14/2018 at 7:11 AM, havenswift-hosting said:

Yes that is the one but again would say that your best solution would not involve using it to have that many top level categories - look at how all modern looking websites organise their categories and products

Thank you. Yes - I came to the same conclusion. I have now turned my 250 categories into six main categories, each of which now has multiple sub-categories. However, after I created the categories and their sub-categories in the CubeCart dashboard, and saved it all, I switched to my store front, but don't see any of the categories showing in the horizontal top bar. Also, the 'Test Category' is still showing there, even though I disabled it. Am I missing a 'Publish' button or something? (I did try refreshing the page.)

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It will be the "Clear Cache" turning Orange that you are missing.  Backend changes done by admin users are not immediately reflected on the front end as they used to be as that required the cache to be continually cleared which made the cache system effectively useless.  Now admin users can make a number of changes and then manually clear cache when they are ready to "Publish"

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4 minutes ago, havenswift-hosting said:

It will be the "Clear Cache" turning Orange that you are missing.  Backend changes done by admin users are not immediately reflected on the front end as they used to be as that required the cache to be continually cleared which made the cache system effectively useless.  Now admin users can make a number of changes and then manually clear cache when they are ready to "Publish"

Ah yes; that was it! Thank you!

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