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Tag: DotShoppingCart Suite
Add a custom ASP.NET UserControl into the DotShoppingCart (V2.5+)
There was an old blog entry talking about adding custom ASP.Net user control to DotShoppingCart. From DotShoppingCart V2.5 the page editor has been rewritten by using JQuery. As the result the way to integrate the custom ASP.NET user control is simplified.
 
1) Create a Standard ASP.NET stardard User Control and derive it from BlockUserControl
 
Check "Web/View/Blocks/TagCloud.ascx.cs" for the example.
 
using DotShoppingCart.Commercial.Core;
public partial class View_Blocks_TagCloud : BlockUserControl {
 
2) Hook up the new block type in DB
 
    a) Insert a new entry to dbo.DSC_Block_Type_lkp table
 
e.g. INSERT INTO DSC_Block_Type_lkp (type, virtualPath) VALUES ('My Block', '/Controls/Blocks/MyBlock.ascx')
 
    b) Insert a new entry to dbo.DSC_Block_Type_Group_Block_Type_Map
 
e.g. INSERT INTO DSC_Block_Type_Group_Block_Type_Map (BlockTypeGroupId, BlockTypeId, SortOrder) VALUES (3, <id that is created in step a>, 10)
 
To add your custom user control to page, just enable page edior and click "+" sign. Find the custom block in the proper group (which you add in the step b above).
New features in V2.6
Product bulk import is the major feature in V2.6. Now you can work on the products offline and then import it into store admin easily. Several admin UI interfaces have been cleaned up and made consistent throughout the admin site. There are also several other admin improvements including File Management and user ghost feature.
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.
 
 
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.
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.