Need page for Ecwid shopping cart

[smalldairy]

I've signed up for an Ecwid shopping cart and loaded some of my products into it. When I import the Ecwid widget into my site, it's really too big for the theme page. Only a few items can be seen, and the rest are hidden. I'd like to use a page that is blank or has different background on it for the online store, but I can't find out how to do this.

[Acorn]

Never used it, but I found this under their Ecwid101 section:
Customize Your Store’s Look
By default, Ecwid is designed to display optimally in most website browsers and versions. However, you can easily change the appearance of your online store using CSS (cascading style sheets). Simply open the Ecwid control panel and proceed to: System Settings → Design → CSS Themes. There, you can choose from several pre-defined templates or create your own custom version.
For more information on customizing Ecwid elements, visit our CSS FAQ and knowledge base. Not familiar with CSS? Get the basics on the W3School site or contact our design team for assistance.

Acorn

[smalldairy]

The problem is the Xara theme, not the Ecwid theme. I need a blank page on Xara.

[Richie1027]

I just set up a page with Ecwid. In xara, I just clicked on a new page in the design gallery flip out and inserted the widget right on a blank page.

[smalldairy]

Yes, if you don't have a theme on Xara, I'm sure you can get a blank page with no problem, but I already have a theme, so each new page comes up with repeating objects. I have sort-of solved the problem by deleting all the repeating objects on that page. Now I have a lot of work to do on Ecwid to change the fonts and other issues (number of products on the page, etc.). The only option appears to be to change these things within the source code. In other words, it's like using a word processor back in the days when you had to insert <b> before and after a word to bold it. Maybe someday they'll catch up. Unfortunately Ecwid does not offer refunds so I'm stuck with it for a year. Should have tried it for a month first, but that would have meant entering my products and then having to do it again in another shopping cart.

[Acorn]

So you actually have two problems.
The first is getting a blank page when you are using a theme. You solved this yourself in essentially five clicks or presses:
All you do is click New page, select all (Ctrl-A) and press the Delete key.
You then have the option to delete Repeating objects from just that page.
I optionally dragged a colour onto the Page background.

The second can not be solved with changing the source, that's wrong-hatted.
Ecwid must have help on CSS to globally change the Font, resize and lots of other aspects - that is not word processing, it equates to Xara's theming.
There has to be a lot of examples otherwise Ecwid would not be so popular.

I, again, am talking from not having used Ecwid itself but know a number of similarly purposed products.

To make the page "integrate" into your Xara theme, you can use the Colour editor to identify the RGB colour of an element and paste that value into the Ecwid CSS.

Acorn

[smalldairy]

Thank you for your patience, Acorn. Obviously I'm a novice at this and just kind-of feeling my way along. I don't have a lot of time to read manuals and watch tutorials.

Thanks for the instructions on getting the blank page more efficiently.

You are correct about changing CSS as opposed to changing source code - it looks like source code to me. I'm working through the CSS changes now. I guess it's a good thing that I'm learning new stuff, but -- as I said -- my time is limited.

[slavelle]

Just out of curiosity, why do you want to remove all of your Xara theme info on the Ecwid page? Why not intergrate the cart into a page that looks like the rest of your pages from a design perspective to get the headers, footers, etc and them put in the ecwid within that?

The only issue I've had with any of these dynamic systems is that they don't auto grow the page. I haven't tried yet with ecwid on the new Xara stuff, but I have with WordPress and the idea of the auto moving parts, like the footer mode, growing containers, etc, but in the case of the code that is pulled for the Wordpress sites, it doesn't auto grow the page, just falls out of its boundaries. However, it would do the same with a full blank page as well, right?

I have used Ecwid a number of times on my Joomla! sites and it really gives a great deal of flexibility from a templating perspective. In many cases, the inherited css works on its own. It seems that now Xara (at least in DPX9, maybe other versions) is writing css to a separate file for the Heading1, etc and then using the H! directly in the HTML. Good news there. As I said, in many cases, Ecwid will pick on on the stylesheet info, so there's less to muck around in on the styles for the Ecwid site itself.

I have actually created a Xara file full of the multipart buttons, bags, and such that I can pretty easily recolor to match whatever site I'm working on and I have a base css overrides files that I use in each new Ecwid implementation. So my process for this is to:

1. Embed the Ecwid store
2. Change my button colors, export each, and upload to my hosting
3. Modify the css where there are colors specified and change all of the relevant paths to the right server/folder.
4. Copy/paste my base css code to the Ecwid configuration


From here, everything just works. It's a bit of work to dig up the graphics for all the UI parts, but they are available from the Ecwid site, so you can just replicate them (or slightly change their design if needed), recolor them, etc. It's also a bit of work to find all of the various styles in use for the parts of the cart, but Firebug (in firefox) or your friend F12 in IE or Chrome (no addons needed) will help you identify those. Definitely worth the effort to create all these, especially if you are going to use Ecwid for more than one site.

Is this helpful info?

[smalldairy]

I don't want my shopping cart to look like the rest of my pages because there isn't enough room on the themed pages. Part of the shopping cart is hidden under the colored bar on the right side. Also, customers would only see 3-4 items on each page, so they would have to browse through 8-10 pages to look at all the products (newsletters containing different titles of articles). My great preference would be to have two pages with about 15 newsletters in list form (so the article titles show) on each page, but when I try to get 15 items/page the result is a second scrolling section within the scrolling section on the template. That's obnoxious.

The CSS fonts that come with Ecwid are WAY too big for my purposes so I have to change all of those. This is not an easy process and requires a lot of time to learn how to change them, not to mention sorting out the confusing and conflicting instructions in Ecwid's support files.

[Acorn]

A small question. Is it a full-blown shopping cart you need or a list of products that can be bought one at a time?

Acorn