Content Managed Websites Tips and Advice

Please post in this forum topics that contain tips or advice that is related to existing content managed website functionality within the TOTECS Ecommerce Platform. If you wish to post more broader topics related to the TOTECS platform then please do so in General Tips and Advice

If you have found a bug in the platform please post it in the Bugs forum.

If you wish to discuss about an improvement or new feature you would like to see in the platform then please post in the New Features/Improvements Wish List forum.

 

Please ensure that you do not post any information containing user names, passwords, or any other sensitive information that could compromise the security of a project or website relating to an organisation or person.

A question was asked, for a website hosted on the TOTECS Ecommerce Platform, is there the ability to limit how often Google's crawler visits the website? This may be needed if there's a large spike in traffic coming from Google, either because more web pages exist on the website, or Google's crawlers have become more interested in the website.

A question was asked how can the sitemaps.xml files be updated for a content managed website hosted on the TOTECS Ecommerce platform?

On a content managed web page that is left open for an extended period of time (such as an hour or more), if the user then tries to use in page elements still displayed, such as a product search, then the alert box may display with the error "Request has failed whilst trying to connect to the server, please try again later". What may be causing this?

If you have a content managed website hosted on the TOTECS platform, how can you tell if automated software is crawling each of your websites, looking to grab/scrape data that has been made accessible?

For a content managed website hosted on the TOTECS platform, besides adding sitemap page to the public footer, should a ROBOTS.txt file be added to the website to help with SEO? Do you think a ROBOTS.txt file worth doing and what is involved?

In a clients Admin Centre, under Statistics, Project Traffic Statistics, Monthly Project Traffic, if you change 'Search All Traffic' to 'Content Managed Webpage ID', add the project webpage ID and click refresh, a new page loads. Then under Requests By Search Engines, Crawlers and Software, it shows several hundred requests for Facebook and another several hundred requests for Google. What do these requests actually mean, how are the requests generated for Facebook and Google and what triggers them to be counted?

When someone tries to checkout from a bakset product listing area, and the value of their basket is less than the minimum order, there is a message that displays to let them know that they are below the minimum order value. Where is that message set?

On a content managed web page that contains an Enquiry Form area, after a user has filled out the form in the area and submitted it, how can an administrator user set the email address where the enquiry form email notification is submitted to?

One of our new customers would like to import Favorites and Shopping lists from their old website using CSV. Is there a way to do this?

On a content managed website hosted on the TOTECS platform, is it possible to have a pop-up dialog box appear when logged in users go to log out or end their current session, that reminds users that there are products in their basket and to complete the checkout process before logging out. This in part is due to some users believing that adding items to the cart is all that is required to place an order, and are not completing the order by going through the checkout process. Can it be done and what options are available?

On a content manage web page displaying a Basket Products Listing area, the area contains a hook that allows the user to clear all products in the basket. How can a confirmation dialog display initially when the user clicks on the Clear Basket button, and only once they clicked Ok in the confirmation dialog allow all products to be removed from the basket?

On a content managed web page that contains a Product Detail area, if the area is displaying a combination product, once all combination options have been selected and a child product is loaded, is it possible to show any deals available to the child product on the page?

Customers have been experiencing caching issues with their websites, especially when they are making changes to images from the Admin Centre and attempting to view the changes in a browser. The browser is caching the old pages and any changes cannot being seen until the cache is cleared manually or they open a separate browser. The same issue also extends to their customers who have an old cached version of the website and don't know the website has been updated. What options do customers have in regards to Caching?

Is there a way to change the order that categories appear in in a web area?

We've seen some product attachements start showing up in Google search results despite not being linked on public pages. Why would this be happening and is there a way to prevent it from happening?

A question was asked if the barcode product field can be selected within the drop down that displays on the Product Quick Add Form content managed web page, allowing users to search for products by barcode?

What needs to be set up for a customers to be able to see the contracts and contracted products that that have been created for them in the administration centre?

Is there a way, in a content managed website, to allow customers whose login was created via the customer accounts import to see prices that exclude tax, while customers who have registered for the website can see prices that include tax?

A question has been asked by a TOTECS customer if we could add a sitemap.xml page to their website. This was prompted by a third party website audit. The format of the recommended page URL is: - https://www.customerswebsite.com.au/sitemap.xml The reason given was: "Having an XML sitemap to a wesite makes it easy for crawler to get al lthe urls at a single place to crawl and index. It's really important to have an XML sitemap as far as search engine visibility is concerned."

A question was asked where a content managed web page could be set up for a competition being run, where the URL of the web page is placed in a magazine (or any other printed/historical media), and while the competition is on users will be taken to the competition web page, but once it's over then users will be taken to a different web page?

What needs to be set up in order to display the stock level for a product from multiple locations? (eg show the stock available in each of a businesses warehouses)

When a customer goes through guest checkout. Does TOTECS platform check if the user email (login id) already exist?

How do you change the Order Surcharge Labels that appear on an order confirmation email's pdf attachment? As an example how would you change the 'Freight' surcharge to read 'Shipping' instead?

We've had a customer approach us wanting to change the order that the products are displayed in on their category pages, how can we change the field that the products are ordered by?

In a Product details format when using the $_P_StockLevel$ hook, the value displays the stock level assigned to the parent product but does not change the stock level when a combination product is displayed. Is there a way to update the stock level when a child product has been selected?

If a website is hosted on the TOTECS platform, and all of its web pages are secured with a TLS/SSL certificate signed by Synmantec, GeoTrust or Verisign, when version M70 of the Chrome Web Browser is released 13th September 2018 Google is advising that our security certificate will no longer be valid and display warnings to the users. What should website admin's do to ensure this doesn't happen?

If your business is hosting your website on the TOTECS platform you will be concerned with the amount of traffic that is hitting your website, since the platform calculates your monthly hosting fee based on the total amount of server requests being made. If your website is made publicly available then any person can access it across the world, as well as any automated software, also known as "crawlers" or "bots". These crawlers and bots freely navigate the web looking for content, and if they find out that your website exists then they will try to access every page and find all content that you are publicly sharing. There are several ways that these crawlers and bots can find your website, the easiest is if they find a link to your website from a different website that they have already accessed (also known as crawling), or are otherwise directly notified by you that your website exists. Crawlers and bots will periodically come back to your website to see if any new content has been added, updated or removed since it last crawled your web pages. There are many different crawlers and bots run by a myriad of companies and people. The most well known is Google, Bing (Microsoft), and Yahoo search engines. But there are many other bots run by others such as Russian and Chinese search engines, marketing companies, Facebook, your competitors, and even your customers wishing to extract details from your website. With all these crawlers and bots chewing up precious server traffic when trawling your website, the natural thing to do is to just block them all. Unfortunately it's not as simple as that. Whilst TOTECS can block a great proportion of known bots if asked to do so, some of these bots are actually helpful to your business. For instance Google's crawler will go through and find out all the web pages and content you have publicly provided. Then it will index/store this information in its search engine so that when a person uses Google's search to find specific information that match what your website has, there's a good chance they will find and be directed to your website. In this example Google is actually a sales lead generator. If you block Google's crawler from accessing your content, you could stop Google referring people to find out about your website, as well as its analytics software if embedded in your website. The same applies for the Bing and Yahoo bots. Within the Administration Centre of websites hosted on the TOTECS platform, under the Statistics menu, in the Project Website Statistics interface you can see a list of the crawlers and bots known to TOTECS that are hitting your hosted websites. Using this list you can start to work out which bots are hitting your websites, how often and how much. Before telling the TOTECS team to block all crawlers and bots from accessing your website, its worth going through the list of bots and working out which ones are helping your business, generating leads and foot traffic, and which ones are wasting your website's time. Generally it's recommended to keep allowing the major search engine crawlers accessing your website such as Google and Bing, since these search engines are used ubiquitously by western people in web browsers, and in the Windows, Android and iOS operating systems. As well as Facebook and other social media crawlers since they are used to find about content that people have linked your page to within their feeds. For all other search engines you need to determine if they are adding traffic to your website, ditto for all other crawlers. Once informed them advise the TOTECS team which crawlers and bots you would like to block. To answer the original question you typically only want to block all known crawlers if you solely want to take responsibly for the leads and people who can find and access your website. Note how I said earlier that your customers or competitors may also use or hire bots to trawl your website. This leads to another important point that the TOTECS platform can only detect crawlers and bots that identify themselves as such. The majority of legitimate companies will run crawlers and bots that identify themselves however other actors may choose to not to do this. So while we try our best here to block crawlers and bots where we can, we can't block all bots when they are not easily recognised, or change their name (known as a user-agent). For this reason it's generally advisable to only make content available on your public website that you are OK to have picked up by anyone. Though we can also place blocks on traffic from certain countries, there is always a way for crawlers, bots and people to access content using VPN's to change their country of origin.

When creating secure web pages for any content managed websites hosted on the TOTECS platform a question was asked if these web pages could be secured by TLS/SSL security certificates issued for free from letsencrypt.org. Is this possible?

The question came up whether or not it was possible to show a styled header and a footer on each individual page of an order confirmation email attachement, can this be done?

Is there a hook in the Order Confirmation Email Order Detail Format to display the Order Option/Delivery method that a customer has selected?

In the Enquiry Form Editor, there is the option to add a File Upload element which I want to use for a website where the user needs to submit product details with an image. Does the File Upload element work for the public guest user?

A question was asked whether it is possible to display a message when users performed a product search and 0 records were found in the Product Search Results Listing content managed web page area?

When using a content managed website, is there a way that customers can add a comment for each product on an order? Also, can these comments be viewed if the order is submitted to be reviewed by a purchaser manager?

It was reported that on a content managed web site that was displaying products assigned to a category in a Product Search Results Listing area, if the project was configured to sort category products based on "Most Ordered Products", when the products were displayed they were incorrectly being sorted so that least ordered products were displaying before most ordered products. The question is why is this happening?

An issue was raised where an incorrect content managed webpage was being loaded when its title matched another webpage belonging to a different website hosted in the same TOTECS project.This was occurring when both web pages belonged to HTTPS secured websites.

Is there any way to load a default combination products data when the parents product details page is loaded? As an example when the below page is loaded the barcade and product code for the parent displays, when there is already a combination product selected. http://www.frontlinesafety.com.au/Frontline-Safety-Products/FL_P_FLA313_item.html?ref_cat_id=Pants

It was reported that in an Internet Explorer 11 web browser that a user had added a product to basket from a content managed web page, then after refreshing the web page the basket was showing as being empty. What could cause this to happen?

Dear Admin, When trying to import products from shopping list listing area into the shopping cart, it works fine but when trying to change quantity from shopping list listing page and import the list in the shopping cart, it reverts back the quantity to the Last Ordered Quantity. How do i fix this issue?

Is there any way to select which product values can be sorted on when using the $product_records_sort_drop_down$ hook which is found in a Product Search Header web format area? I ask this because Product Code and Item_id use the same dataset on some websites, so there is 2 options to search on the 1 data field.

Currently we have functionality where we can display two combination option in a table grid format. I would like to find out how to display combination option in a table grid format, when we have 3 or more options. Example URL http://hi-tensilebolt.com.au/product/metric-coarse-hex-head-bolts/

I have an enquiry form that has an 'I am not a robot" ReCaptcha, however when it isn't ticked and someone clicks the button to submit the form, the message that appears is still relevant to when the older style ReCaptcha was still in use. How do I change the message that appears?

How can I display all the news / blog group items on page.I have created area "News Group Blogs/Items Listing " and set the news/blog group option as "Allow Any News/Blog Group To Display Items" but it didn't work. Thanks

It looks like 3 new feature have been added to the Web Area Formats Library in: Search -> Product Search Results Listing -> Product Search Header. $product_records_per_page_drop_down$ $product_records_sort_direction_drop_down$ $product_records_sort_drop_down$ These are an awesome addition and we are currently adding them to a product category pages. Question: Can the $product_records_sort_drop_down$ list be modified by way of editing "Search Profiles" in INVENTORY Menu or by way of another area? Would like to add "Unit Price" to the drop down list.

With the release of the Squizz.com Connector version 1.X, is it possible to set up an account enquiry content managed web page to show any invoices from the previous month? Ie for any day in May, have a page that shows any accounts invoices from April.

I am trying to make Guest Checkout Functionality .I read the totecs documentation it's saying to add The Basket Product Details area which contains a setting labelled "Checkout link to target guest order submission page" but I can't find that hook.Request to enable that hook. Thanks

I have a News/Blog Groups called "Product Vouchers" and are working on News/Blog Items within the Group that I can set to Active Yes or No. When I change the the News/Blog Item to Active = No, the item disappears so the user can't see the item. Should this "Active Yes or No" functionality for News/Blog Groups work the same way? Currently if I set Active = No... on the News/Blog Group the News/Blog Group is still visible to the user.

Hey guys, Is there any way to stop product reviews from going live until they have been approved? Cheers, Andy

An issue was reported where a on a content managed web page containing a User Details/Favourites/Order area, that if a user tried to create a new address and pressed on a the save button that contained the $addressnew_submit_onclick$, hook, nothing would happen in the browser and the new address would not be saved for the user. The question is what is going wrong?

A question was asked where in the Trade interface, and on a content managed web page containing a Product Combination area, if the fields of a combination product are displayed as drop downs how are values in the drop downs sorted?

We are receiving the following invalid string when using the $shoppinglist_view_link$ hook, from the "Shopping List Details" format library. http://[INVALID FORM VAR]/[INVALID FORM VAR].html?inp_shopping_list_id=26 Can you advise if this hook is currently working correctly or if we need to format the string differently? ----Shopping List Detail---- <div class="row"> <div class="col-sm-3">$shoppinglist_name$<a hrf="$shoppinglist_view_link$"></a></div> <div class="col-sm-3">$shoppinglist_description$</div> <div class="col-sm-4">$shoppinglist_date$</div> </div> -----Shopping List Listing---- <div class="row"> <div class="col-sm-3">NAME</div> <div class="col-sm-3">Description</div> <div class="col-sm-4">Last Modified</div> </div> $shoppinglist_records$

In the [User/Account Management - User Details/Favourites/Orders - User Detail Form] Formats Library, there are two hooks... $user_emarketing_categories$ & $user_receiving_marketing_field$. When the "checkbox" changes state for these two hooks will the server update the change on the user action or is an additional action required to save the state?

We are trying to add a Basket Surcharge Calculator to or shopping cart but cannot get it to show up. Are there any prerequisites to adding this functionality that I should be aware of? eg - Settings to enable, min hooks required, special Surcharge Type rules?

An issue was reported where on a content managed website users were not able to logout after they clicked on a logout button that was displayed on the web page. The question is why was the logout button not working?

On a content managed website, we often see administrators and web implementors hard coding the currency symbol and currency code into the format areas. A bad example of this in a Product Detail area format would look like: {code}AUD $ $_P_PriceEx${/code} This would evaluate out to AUD $ 10.00 The reason why this is bad is because if in the future a TOTECS project wanted to support displaying pricing in different currencies enabled through the multi-currency feature, it would cause a world of pain for somebody to go through all the formats displaying the currency label and fix them up. The recommended, and best approach from the beginning is to use the currency session hooks to do the same job. These session hooks can be used to display the currency code, currency symbol, currency label, and currency exchange rate. The data in the hooks will change based on the currency assigned to the user. These session hooks are available to any area format, but for areas displaying historic data such as orders, it is recommended to use the currency hooks made available to the data. So a good example using the session hooks: {code}$SES_locale_currency_code$ $SES_locale_currency_symbol$ $_P_PriceEx${/code} This would also evaluate out to AUD $ 10.00 There are a number of other session hooks available, which are listed in this post http://totecs.gosquizz.com/ecommerce-solutions-forum-post/419-news.html

An issue was raised where a content managed web page was configured to display a Product Search Form (Using Search Profiles) area, and this area would allow a user to search for products. However when a user clicked on the search button it would cause the whole page to reload itself and no products would be found. The question is what is going wrong?

Hey TOTECS, Is it possible to sort the Model Listing Area results first by Model Year descending, then by Name ascending? Cheers

Hey TOTECS, Is there an API somewhere where we can view a list of all the global hooks such as $SES_IsGuest$? Or could you post a list of the hooks here? This would be really handy for making the most of your system. Cheers, Andy

Hey TOTECS, upon clicking $addFav_onclick$ which is in a product search record in a product search results area, an overlay pops up and says "Item was added to favourites" but $_P_IsFavourite$ does not change. Regards, Andy

In the user account management area, is there a format library that can be used to create an area for a user to add a product to a shopping list and or create a new shopping list on a product details page Essentially what I am hoping to achieve is: When the user is on a product description page. List there current "shopping Lists" and allow them to create additional "Shopping Lists" from this page and then be able to add the current product that they are viewing to any of these lists.

Since Google's mobilegeddon kicked into gear in April 2015, companies are quickly transitioning to a website interface that is mobile responsive. To understand what responsive is, go back to 2009 when iPhone and Android hit the market. The solution at the time was to build a mobile website separate to the desktop website optimised for the mobile browser resolution. This became a hassle because content masters needed to manage content in effectively two separate websites. To compound the issue, more devices were coming out with different mobile resolutions such as the iPad and phablets such as the iPhone plus. Web developers and designers wrestled with these issue and thought why not create a website interface than can 'respond' or alter its appearance according to the resolution of the device. In order to make the responsive experience fast and efficient in the browser, complex javascript and CSS is required. To make matters worse, designing responsive website interfaces work on older browsers was a major headache. Since 2010, people have upgraded their browsers that adopt the latest HTML/CSS standards and various web development groups started the evolution of responsive frameworks and guidelines. The two most popular responsive frameworks are Bootstrap (originating from Twitter) and Foundation (originating from an open source initiative). Google have now released their framework Material Design. These frameworks have evolved and search engine crawlers have evolved inside a chicken and egg senario. As late as 2014, Google penalised responsive websites because googlebot struggled to understand and render these websites. By 2015, googlebot was all over these responsive frameworks and giving websites 'mobile friendly' status. And this is only the beginning. So the fundamental questions is: Can anyone build a responsive website on TOTECS using responsive frameworks? a set of javascript

Hey online super heroes, The problem: On our site we have a vehicle make/model database search function. Once a user searches for their vehicle, a table of data is returned from the database and then I run my own custom Javascript function to sort the data and make it more user friendly. Sometimes this takes a split second if there is only a few results, but sometimes it can take a few seconds if there is a few thousand results. To avoid having a user sit there wondering what's happening, I want to call the "Updating Area" overlay so that they can know it's just loading. I could just create my own "Updating Area" overlay, but for consistency I would rather use the one you guys have already created. So my question is, is there a function I can use to call and to dismiss the "Updating Area" overlay? Thanks, Andy

It was reported that on a content managed web page containing a Account Detail area, that when the area was displaying a message appeared with the error "Unsupported Connector version. Please inform us of this issue.". The area should be displaying the details of the customer account associated with the project's user.

On a content managed web page that contains a Order Checkout/Submission area, when a user is navigating to the page and has set the details of their order, after the clicking the next button and viewing the order, the billing address is always being set to delivery address that the user chose. How is it possible to set the the billing address to be different to the delivery address?

Often when creating content managed websites a number of people will place the CSS rules that style web pages in different locations, the question is where is the best location to place the CSS rules?