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Customize Product Summary Grid
DotShoppingCart allows you to customize the product summary easily. To do that just go to any product summary page and enable the page editor. Click "Edit" in the dropdown menu of the product summary block. See the image below.
 
 
Update the html code in "Product Summary Template". Notice there are tokens wrapped by %% e.g. %%ProductName%%. These tokens will be replaced by the product properties during the runtime.
 
 
Migrate DotShoppingCart Suite V2.1 to V2.5
Before you apply these migration steps please make sure you back up your database and files web\web.config & DSC.config.
 
Here are the manual steps to migrate DotShoppingCart Suite V2.1 to V2.5.
 
1) Migrate database 
Download migration SQL script and apply it to your V2.1 database.
 
2) Update web.config and DSC.config
    a) Replace string "OpenSource" to "Commercial" in web.config and DSC.config
    b) Remove table based shipping and table based tax configuration (see yellow background below) in DSC.config
<shippingServiceConfiguration defaultProvider="">
        <providers>
            <clear />
             <addenabled="True" sortOrder="0" name="Table Based Shipping" type="DotShoppingCart.Commercial.Shipping.TableBasedShippingProvider" />
        </providers>
</shippingServiceConfiguration>
 
 
<taxServiceConfiguration defaultProvider="">
 <providers>
    <clear />
    <add name="Table Based Tax" type="DotShoppingCart.Commercial.Tax.TableBasedTaxProvider, DotShoppingCart.Commercial.Tax, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null" />
 </providers>
</taxServiceConfiguration>
 
    c) Compare web.config and DSC.config in V2.5 to the existing ones and bring the new changes in V2.5 to the existing ones.
    d) Go to Store admin and configure table based shipping and table based tax again
Replace Dynamic Block Header Background With the Customized Static Image
In DotShoppingCart themes and skins are dynamic. When you change the colors in site admin, all the images in the themes are created again by using GDI+ API.
 
Check the areas surrounded by the red rectangles below. These background images are created dynamically.
 
and
 
 
The bottom ones are called block headers. This article describes how you can replace the block headers with your customized static images.
 
The css class for the block headers is "blockHeader". If you search the "blockHeader" against your entire solution, you will find one in Default.css
 
div.blockHeader {
    text-align:center;
      font-weight: bold;
}
 
div.blockHeader a {
      text-decoration: none;
}
 
and the other one in web/controls/blocks/BlockContainer.ascx.cs.
 
header.Attributes.Add("class", "blockHeader");
header.Attributes.Add("style", string.Format(BlockHeaderFormat, buc.HeaderData.Height - 6, buc.HeaderData.Width, buc.HeaderData.Height));
header.InnerText = buc.HeaderData.Title;
blockDiv.Controls.Add(header);
 
To use your customized static image as the block header background, please do
 
1) Add your background image to the div.blockHeader css style e.g. background-image:url(<your image url>);
2) Remove the code adding the inline style
header.Attributes.Add("style", string.Format(BlockHeaderFormat, buc.HeaderData.Height - 6, buc.HeaderData.Width, buc.HeaderData.Height));
 
Here is an example of the customzed header blocker.
 
 
Create FAQ Page By Using Hierarchy View
For things like FAQ, knowledge base or online documentations DotShoppingCart has a built-in module "Hierarchy View" for these. In this article I am going to describe how easy to create a FAQ page.
 
In your site admin, go to Content -> Content and click "Add" button to create a content group.
 
 
Make sure you change the Default View to "Hierarchy". See the arrow sign above.
 
After you create the FAQ content group, click "View" button and you will be brought to the FAQ page. Check the URL of the FAQ page. It will be something like <your site>/View/Hierarchy/FAQ.aspx. You could use the relative link "/View/Hierarchy/FAQ.aspx" in any page or menu.
 
You can see the FAQ page that was just created.
 
 
Then you can use the highlighted the icons above to start creating the entries in FAQ.
 
If you need a live example of FAQ page, check DotShoppingCart FAQ.
Bulk Import Tax Regions
Many people asked if there is a tool which can do bulk import tax table since tax table could be hundreds of tax regions. We have implemented the bulk tax import feature in the next version.
 
In Site Admin -> Store -> Tax, you will see the "Import Tax Regions" button.
 
After clicking the button you will see this.
 
 
You can point it to a text format tax file to import the tax regions defined in the tax file. Check online document for the format of the tax file.
 
For people want to use this feature now, you could download from here. And then copy the files to the web directory that your store was installed to.
DotShoppingCart Suite V2.5 is released
DotShoppingCart Suite V2.5 has been released. The last version of DotShoppingCart Suite V2.1 was about 6 months ago. Now DotShoppingCart Suite has been kept up with its On Demand service sibling enjoying the new features.
 
Here are the links to the new features included in this release.
 
Use Advanced Menu in Block Container to Achieve Another Layer of Customization
After you enable page editor, you will find a special menu item "Adavanced" in the dropdown menu of any block container. After you click it, you will see a warning sign "Note: please stop if you don't know HTML! Do not touch anything inside %% or you will get your site screwed up." As the general rule, if you are not familar with the raw HTML editing then please don't use this feature. Also you don't want to touch anything wrap around %%.
New features in V2.5

There are a lot of improvements made into V2.5. The page editor has been completely rewritten in JQuery. As a result you will notice a significant performance improvement when using page editor. Blog module has been enhanced as well. We added new blocks such as Tag Cloud, Article Archive, Recent Comments etc.

Recent Comments
danny jones said ...
Hi... I am inexperiance to build up ECommenrce type sites.I have a little bits knowladge ...
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jane said ...
Thank you for this useful information.
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Congrats on V4.0.....It is so easy to use  
Travis said ...
I just bought DSC Suite V4.5 and it is more solid then ever. I hope I am #1 buyer of this ...