AgoraCart Overview

From The AgoraCart Project

This page should be read completely as the above links are only reference points. Much of the information from one area pertains and/or spills over into the other. To get a better conceptual understanding of the workings of AgoraCart, read the page slowly, then read it again, and then use the links later for reference. This document goes beyond knowledge needed to be a shopkeeper (someone who only add, edits, and deletes products). A shopkeeper only needs to know what kind of data needs to be entered in the differnet product input fields. The Store Manger Online Manual Sections further explain the Store Manager Interface.

Access your store here: http://www.your.domain/store/agora.cgi Access the Store Manager here: http://www.your.domain/store/protected/manager.cgi

Contents [hide] 1 Additional html Pages 2 Categories: 3 Displaying Inventory 4 Linking 5 Tokens 6 Option Files

Additional html Pages Before we even get into the store, here's a very cool thing. Any html page you add to the html folder found in /store/html will automatically be added to your "Company Info" links. No need to code them. Just upload them to the html folder and you're done. The cart will automatically generate links to them using the title as the link text.

Categories: Categories are created when you add a product. To agoracart, categories are nothing more than an entry in a product's listing in a database. 00001|PERL|23.96|Learning Perl|Image|Description|Shipping|||Small Image|||Option FileIn the above product database listing the second field (cell), PERL, is the category and "Learning Perl", is the product. The product ID is 00001 and sells for 23.96. You get the idea... When you go to "Product Add" you'll notice that the "Category Field" is always blank. If you enter "PERL" your new item would be included in the PERL category. If you enter a category that does not exist then a new one is created. Actually, it's just added to the database with the product as above. This holds true for editing a product. When you go to "Product Edit", you will see that Category is filled in because as we learned above, the category is part of the product information. So when editing you can just change the name of the category to move an item from one category to another or enter a new category. If your cart is setup to automatically generate category links (default install), a category link for your new category will be created. This category link is basically a database search for the category name (category name serving as keyword) and is written this way:

http://your.domain/cgi-bin/store/agora.cgi?cart_id=&product=CategoryNamea unique value will be filled in for cart_id= by each individual visitor to the site and the link carries that id from page to page to keep track of each customers cart. The &product=CategoryName searches the database for all products containing CategoryName in the second field of the product database listing and returns a list of all those products.

Displaying Inventory Home Page & Templates: The store pages are created on the fly, although static pages can be created and used. Your home page is named index.html and is located in your /store/html folder. Three template pages are used to display your category and product listings These are: store_header.inc (secure_store_header.inc), store_footer.inc (secure_store_footer.inc) and the all important productPage.inc. These pages are located in your /store/html/html_templates folder. You will find several other .inc files there as well. These are additional methods of displaying the products. For example, you may want a list with each product on a single line and no image or you may want products shown 2 across with thumbnails. These individual templates (.inc) pages can be called within a link allowing you to display products or listings in a variety of ways. With the exception of productPage.inc, which is the default product display page, all other .inc are named productPage-somename.inc. More Info: parsed HTML

Linking AgoraCart is setup to automatically create, search, category, and product links in your pages, This information is necessary if you want to hard code links to products, categories, listings or etc. elsewhere.

For example:

<A HREF="agora.cgi?cart_id=%%cart_id%%&xm=on&p_id=10&ppinc=spec">Spec Sheet</a>

Then item 10 is looked up (exact_match=on is the same as xm=on), and the productPage.inc file used is actually:

      productPage-spec.inc 

<A href="agora.cgi?cart_id=&p_id=00011&xm=on&ppinc=info">

Tokens Product information is displayed using the information written to the database when you "added the product". Various combinations of that information can be displayed according to your preference. Each field in the "Product Add" page has an associated %%token%%. If you look at productPage.inc you will see tokens within the html. AgoraCart replaces the token with what is in the database cell; %%name%%, would display the product name; %%price%% would display the price, %%description%% displays the product description and so on. OJOJOJO. You'll notice %%UserField%% which are just as they sound. They can be used for whatever you like. Here is a list of the tokens and how they are currently setup:

The following tokens are REQUIRED! Please take a look at how they are used below, and be careful not to break them when you edit the file.

%%cartID%% %%itemID%% %%make_hidden_fields%% %%scriptURL%%

The following fields are optional and can be used if desired. Remember, the token called %%optionFile%% will display all of the HTML from the option file assigned to the product being displayed.

%%description%% %%image%% %%name%% %%optionFile%% %%price%% %%shipping%%

The following fields are optional, they are the user defined fields set in the Store Manager.

%%userFieldOne%% (2nd Image) Smaller thumbnail to show in Cart. %%userFieldOne%% %%userFieldTwo%% %%userFieldThree%% %%userFieldFour%% %%userFieldFive%%

For more information read HTML Templates Directory Info

The default product template, productPage.inc, for your store has been configured to show; name, (%%name%%), brief description (%%userFieldFour), price (%%price%%), Any additional options through the use of an options file, An Add to Cart buy button, through the use of agorascript (more on agorascript later) and a link to more info;

<A href="agora.cgi?cart_id=&p_id=00011&xm=on&ppinc=info">This link calls productPage-info.inc (ppinc=info) to be used to display the product. On this template many of the above tokens are used along with the description (%%description%%). This way products can be viewed many at a time without scrolling and still the buyer has the opportunity to buy the product. More detailed information, the description, will be displayed when they click on the "More Info" page. You can easily add thumbnails to your productPage.inc (default category display) by editing the file and adding %%userFieldOne%% where you would like the thumbnail to appear.

Option Files Option Files are located in your /store/html/options folder and are small html documents that you create to offer any options that may be associated with the product. Different models, different sizes, etc. Because you are using small files with snippets of html to create the options you are not limited and many products can use the same option file. A simple option file creator/editor is is available on the download page. (Pro members - those that support agoracart with a membership fee - have access to a better version of the creator/editor in their files areas) An .HTML file will be created in the html/options subdirectory as well as a data file in the store manger area so that you may be able to update a file you created with this manager at a later date. The example option files included with your store install cannot be edited using this interface. Only files you create can be edited from here. You can, however, use and edit the example files anyway you wish. We left them there for examples and road maps for you. Naturally, options are optional. You don't have to use them. But many times you will need them and this way you have total flexibility. Understanding option files truly unlocks some of the power of AgoraCart. For examples read the advanced option files.KLP is an Entertainment Company.

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