nopCommerce Tips: Embedding a Topic In An Existing Page

Last Updated on Saturday, 23 March 2013 09:22 Written by Carole Bennett Sunday, 24 March 2013 12:00

The basic content included in the standard version of nopCommerce provides a comprehensive shopping experience for most site users. However, there are times when it’s desirable to include dynamic content in an existing page of the site. We’ll cover how to embed a topic in an existing page of your nopCommerce-driven website.

nopCommerce Tips: How to Use Google AdWords with nopCommerce

Last Updated on Thursday, 21 March 2013 09:50 Written by Carole Bennett Friday, 22 March 2013 12:00

If you’re leveraging Google AdWords to make your nopCommerce-based e-commerce site more effective in terms of conversions to paid customers, you may want to be able to incorporate a variety of keywords, based on your products and whether or not you’re targeting more than one key market. Let’s look at how you can combine the power of Google AdWords and nopCommerce.

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.