nopCommerce Tips: How to Customize the Home Page in nopCommerce

Last Updated on Tuesday, 19 March 2013 08:29 Written by Carole Bennett Wednesday, 20 March 2013 12:00

Even if you want to keep your overall theme intact for your nopCommerce project, you may need to re-arrange your default page to allow for different business needs. With nopCommerce widget support, it’s actually pretty straightforward.

For this instance, we’ll specify Visual Studio as a prerequisite, and that you’ve got your solution already open. First of all, navigate to your “Themes” folder under Nop.Web, then under your chosen theme folder, open Views>Home>index.cshtml. Open the file, and start reviewing your code.

You’ll notice a lot of HTML, interspaced with C# actions. The actions you’re most interested in are the following:

• Widgets: @Html.Action(“WidgetsByZone”, “Widget”, new { widgetZone = “home_page_top” })
• Topics: @Html.Action(“TopicBlock”, “Topic”, new { systemName = “fpHatshape” })
• News: @Html.Action(“HomePageNews”, “News”)

WidgetsByZone are zones where widgets can be assigned in the Admin area of nopCommerce. Move the action for the widgetZone, and you’ll move where those widgets will appear.

Topics: You can create your topics in the Administration section of the site, then use this line of code to define where the topic will appear on the page.

News: this is fairly self-explanatory, but it’s a great way to define how the latest news for your e-commerce site is displayed to your customers.

Take note of the code around these lines; open up your style sheet under your theme’s Content/CSS folder, and look at how the code and the CSS match up.  You can use these files in combination to create a completely original layout for your nopCommerce-based store. Experiment with your results to get to know what you’re doing, and to get more comfortable with the technique.

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nopCommerce Tips: nopCommerce New Products Roundup

Last Updated on Saturday, 23 February 2013 02:09 Written by Carole Bennett Sunday, 24 February 2013 12:00

One of the best things about nopCommerce is that in addition to the great features that are already built into the application, there’s a vibrant, prolific third-party product community to provide great add-ons to make your nopCommerce-driven e-commerce site an even more effective solution for your business.

First, we’ll start out with one of my favorite vendors: Nop-Templates. In addition to their excellent themes, they provide a terrific bundle of plugins that improve navigation, search features, shopping cart, and overall provide a terrific benefit to your customer’s shopping experience.

nopCommerce Tips: How to Remove “Powered by nopCommerce”

Last Updated on Saturday, 16 February 2013 11:36 Written by Carole Bennett Saturday, 16 February 2013 12:00

The nopCommerce team has put thousands of hours into this flexible, extensible and robust application; feature for feature, it’s the best open-source .Net e-commerce application I’ve ever found. However, it’s not got the same name recognition as some other open-source e-commerce solutions; the way the developers have chosen to overcome this issue is to add “Powered by nopCommerce” as a part of their UI content. They have however, provided a way to remove this for those who wish to keep their branding consistent. We’ll cover how to do that today.

nopCommerce Tips: Review of Nop-Templates Jewelry Template

Last Updated on Wednesday, 13 February 2013 08:29 Written by Carole Bennett Wednesday, 13 February 2013 12:00

The lovely people over at Nop-Templates have been kind enough to let me have access to their new Jewelry Template for nopCommerce; today I’ll put it through its paces, and see if it lives up to the quality of the other templates they’ve released for nopCommerce.

I’ll be reviewing the Jewelry template by Nop-Templates using the latest version of nopCommerce at this time, 2.81.  Upon opening the .zip file I’ve downloaded, I see that theme versions are also available for 2.65 and 2.7 – brilliant!

I’m leveraging Visual Studio 2012 and MSSQL 2012, downloaded from the Microsoft site as a part of my Website Spark membership. I’ve followed the usual steps to set up a new instance of nopCommerce on my local server, and copied the Jewelry theme files into the Presentation/Nop.Web folder.

nopCommerce Tips: How to Access Your Live nopCommerce Database

Last Updated on Friday, 8 February 2013 04:26 Written by Carole Bennett Saturday, 9 February 2013 12:00

nopCommerce has a very robust and extensive administration panel, but every now and again, you’ll find that data needs to be updated or corrected in a way that’s not supported by nopCommerce directly. It’s at those times that you may find it preferable to edit the database directly – today, we’ll talk about how to do just that.