Is there a way to customise all the magento transactional emails (font-colours, link colours etc) per theme (storefront) without having to create each one though the admin area?
Thanks
I have been working on a module that would be able to handle this, though it is not complete (so many templates to edit!).
It involves including a template at the beginning of each email template that includes style information which then gets cascaded down to the rest of the template. If you had multiple themes, you could simply copy the template from /base/default to /your/theme and that should work.
Unfortunately, it has not been an easy module to build. The transactional system in Magento is fairly rigid in what you may do.
Alternatively (and this would be equally as much work) is to have a look at the sales.xml layout. You could rewrite the Email Layouts Section for each theme to point to different templates in your email, but this would be a lot of work and it would still be pretty cumbersome to maintain.
Related
I'm about to take on my first shopify project where I will need to modify certain theme markup (for WCAG accessibility purposes).
Having never worked on Shopify before, I'm reading their documentation and theme editing using liquid seems fairly straightforward. However, someone warned me that modifying theme markup can sometimes break core functionality like the checkout process or something similar if/when shopify requires a certain specific markup to be present.
This would force me to opt for DOM manipulation with Javascript, instead of modifying template files - which is not a great way to go about it in my opinion.
Out-of-the box, do shopify functions depend on the markup in any way? I suppose anything's that written in Ruby should not be affected. Perhaps there would be JS that expects a specific DOM interaction. If anyone has run into similar issues, or can make any constructive suggestions, I would really appreciate it.
You can't break any Back-end functionality of Shopify if you modify the markup.
The purpose of the liquid is only to output some content, it can't modify the back-end in any way or form.
You can say that it's a glorified HTML markup with a few bells and whistles. ( but it loads before the DOM is ready )
In addition you don't have access to the checkout template if you are not on a Shopify Plus account, so it's really hard to even try to break something there.
That said you can break some base front-end functionality if you delete some items.
For example the product form needs to have an form element with an name="id" and value of the variant.id. If you remove that the product will not submit to the cart and you won't be able to use the checkout since you will never be able to add the product to the cart.
So yes you can break front-end functionality but you can't NEVER break the back-end logic with Liquid only.
I looking for either an open source (or otherwise) php script/library/code that will provide me with a similar email composer that Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor have.
I've played around with lots of wysiwyg editors (eg: tinymce, ckeditor) but, they don't work very well for allowing users to compose emails.
Mosaico Editor is the first open source email template builder of this kind (AFAIK).
You can find a free to use deployment (working also as live demo) at http://mosaico.io and you can get sources at https://github.com/voidlabs/mosaico
I choose blocks from a set defined by the "master template", then you fill you contents and change their styles in a WYSIWYG style. If you're on a large window you can also have live preview for the mobile version.
The master template defines what are the blocks, what you can edit and what you can style and it contains any html trick to make it compatible with most clients: this means you can change the editor behaviour a lot by simply writing a new master template.
It is 99% javascript (IE10+, and any other modern browser) and depends on server-side functions only to do "final inlining" and "image upload/resizing"
Next generation tool for building templates without coding
Grapejs official site
GrapesJS is an open-source, multi-purpose, Web Builder Framework which combines different tools and features with the goal to help you (or users of your application) to build HTML templates without any knowledge of coding. It's a perfect solution to replace the common WYSIWYG editors, which are good for content editing but inappropriate for creating HTML structures. You can see it in action with the official demos, but using its API you're able to build your own editors.
I'm in the process of building one but as a designer it is a work in progress! I'd suggest looking at PHP template engines. They have a similar functionality. Most however will use php variables inside the html page instead of tags.
Another oprion is to check out Perch it is officially a CMS, but is really lightweight and might get the job done for you.
Hope that helps even though it is a year after you posted the question...
EDIT: Actually just stumbled across this thread which links to the new CKEditor - looks pretty cool.
I have a website that has related pages. They have links that point back and forth to one another but I have no integrated system, nor do I know what that would mean.
What is the minimum code that a group of web pages must have to be considered a Content Management System (CMS). Is it that all the settings are in the database and the pages are generated somehow? Is there some small snippet that all my pages could share that makes them a CMS, database or not?
Thanks. I was also hoping not to have to study a giant CMS to see what makes it a CMS . After maybe a basic understanding I would know what I was looking for.
edit: here's why I ask about code. Whenever I have looked at a CMS, and maybe they aren't all the same, I saw that to develop a module you always had to inherit from certain classes and had some necessary code. I didn't know if there was some magic model that I just don't get that all cms makers understand.
edit: perhaps my question is more about being extendable or pluggable. What would a minimum look like? Is it possible to show that here?
edit: how about this? Is something a CMS if it is not extendable and/or pluggable?
I think this is really impossible to say. We all manage content. The "system" is just whatever mechanism you use to do so(dragging and dropping in Explorer or committing content changes via a SQL query). To say there is a minimum amount of code needed really isn't indicative. What is indicative is how often you find yourself making mistakes and how easy it is for a given user of a given skill level and knowledge to execute the functions in the designed system. That tells you the quality/degree of what you have in place being worthy of being called a "CMS."
Simply put a CMS is an application that allows the user to publish and edit existing web content.
In response to the edit:
A "good" CMS allows of extensibility. By using inheritence you can extend the functionality of a CMS outside of the core components provided. That's the magic.
About Extensibility:
Depending on the language/framework you want to build your CMS with, you can load pages or controls(ASP.NET) using command built into the framework. Typically what is being done is a parent class/interface is being defined that forces an module that is to be developed to follow some given standards:
Public MustInherit Class CMSModule
'Here you will define properties and functions that need to be global to all modules being developed to extend your CMS.
public property ModuleName as string
End Class
public class PlugInFooCMSPage
inherits CMSModule
end class
Then it's just a matter of simply loading a module dynamically in whatever construct a given language/framework provides.
Ultimately, a CMS is a system that lets you manage content, so it needs an user interface that is dedicated to letting you easily create, edit and delete pages on your website.
However, it's fairly usual to expect from a CMS to provide a browser-based WYSIWYG page editor, file uploading, image resizing, url rewriting, page categories and tags, user accounts (editor, moderator, administrator), and some kind of templae system.
Without dragging you into a theoretical explanation of what a CMS is and what it's not, perhaps some tutorials on the building methodology of a CMS will help you better understand.
http://css-tricks.com/php-for-beginners-building-your-first-simple-cms/
http://www.intranetjournal.com/php-cms/
A Content Management System is a System that Manages Content. :)
So if you got many pages that share the same layout, you can create a system that stores the content into a database and when a page is requested, it gets that content, merges it with a template that contains the page header, menu, etc.. and outputs the result.
The basis idea is that you don't want to copy HTML pages, and have to edit hundreds of them when you want to change your layout.
Such a system can be very complex, featuring wysiwyg editors, toolbars, version control, multiple user publishing and much more, but it could be as simple as a single page behind a standard loging, that contains only an input field for the title and a textarea in which you type the html content.
I was wondering what is the best practice for creating forms in Wordpress? As a developer I hesitate to use a plugin like CForms, but I can understand why someone would like to use it. In the end I want to know the following:
What is the best practice for creating forms in Wordpress? (Custom HTML/CSS with Javascript and PHP validation or just using a specific aspect of the Wordpress API?)
I don't use any part of the WordPress API for forms. You could automatically grab the name and e-mail address out of the cookie WordPress creates when someone leaves a comment, if you want to try to auto-populate some fields.
An easy way to handle forms is to use Page Templates. That lets you create a new PHP file for a specific page, overriding the default page template of the theme. Then you can simply have the form post to itself and this one page template handles the processing as well.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages#Page_Templates
A lot of what's available for WordPress in the way of addins, and what gets a lot of attention, is stuff that I find makes little use if you have programming and general web skills. Almost always they seem to (necessarily) overgeneralize a requirement with a zillion options and configuration requirements because they are first of all designed for non- or barely-programmers.
Just learn the fundamental paradigms, scratch your head and wonder why nothing is consistently abstracted and/or encapsulated, get over it, and use what you already know about php and HTML-based forms. WordPress doesn't add much in the way of either tools or constraints.
I find the Widget feature applies usefully to most everything these days, and Forms is a candidate. But that's my own WordPress viewing prism - YMMV.
What do you mean by "in Wordpress"? Do you just mean placing the form HTML in a Wordpress template? Or storing data collected in the Wordpress DB? If you just want to create a form on your site, there's nothing Wordpress-specific to worry about. I believe there's some special Wordpress data facilities you can use if you're creating a widget or plugin or whatever they're called now. But if you're not, just create the HTML, and point it at a target URL that processes the values and puts them in a DB, Wordpress or otherwise. That target URL could be a separate PHP resource, or the same page. If it's the same page, you just need to include your PHP somewhere in the main Wordpress flow.
I'm just starting to evaluate joomla CMS as a tool to build out my personal site. I'd like to manage multiple sites/domains with one copy of joomla on one host. so I'll own mysite.com and myothersite.com, which will both point to the same host/joomla code. If I do this I need to be able to set which domain/site the content I add shows up on. For some sites the content will be on both for others it will be on only one. What would be ideal it to have some kind of filtering mechanism so I don't have to manually set where the content goes.
What would be ideal is for me to set tags on the content and each site can specify which taged content to show.
My last requirement is that I be able to have different pages on each site.
Is this possible or am I asking too much from a "free" CMS?
Thanks all
I don't know if there's a component that achieves what you're describing here. I use a multi-language component in some of my sites that shows translations, but it doesn't "suppress" articles that doesn't have references to a translation: it just says "No translations to this article". I know you're not asking for translations methods, but I think the Joomfish way of selecting content based in a chosen language would be what you wanted, but not based in languages, just domains.
The only component I know it would be able to suppress articles based in pre defined parameters (in its case the language), is the Joomfish's "Table Localization Plugin", but you need to be a Joomfish silver member paying $60 to Joomfish's developers.
You could write a component(see here for plugin documentation), that analyzing the domain, would suppress articles that shouldn't appear in that specific domain. But I think it's going yo be a lot of work. You would learn a lot of Joomla's architecture, though.
How Joomla displays its content (output) is controlled entirely by parameters. So if you can control what parameters are loading, you can create multiple displays per host
However, that may be overkill in this case. You can just easily hack your template. Just make it load a different menu for siteA and siteB. (The host is set in $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'])
The menu on siteA could have a tagging component item, set to display articles tagged siteA.com. The siteB will have the same for its domain.
While there are extensions that will do what you describe (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/core-enhancements/multiple-sites), Joomla is really designed for one site at a time. I've done setups where I use the same codebase for Joomla and manage it with version control, but I always end up launching multiple sites with individual databases.
However, I don't know of any CMS that inherently allows you to share articles across instances while keeping the data centralized. You may be looking at an extension (or your own customization) regardless of which platform you pick.
We had a similar problem with needing to share content across multiple Joomla! sites so we developed this extension: http://extensions.joomla.org/extension/simple-sharing
It is not very robust in terms of what it can share but it does let you share Articles across multiple sites and choose which sites and categories those articles get published into. I hope it works for you.
Thanks!