While Miami Cart straight out of the box comes as a working shopping cart application, seldom will you ever see a production site using a completely stock version of the e-commerce application.

Out of the box, the default installation of Miami Cart provides support for three languages, English, German, and Spanish. It is through the use of these language files that the system is able to dynamically adjust to the chosen language of a visitor to your cart. For example if a user to your cart modifies their personal language setting to German the labels, buttons, and other text on the pages of your cart will appear in German. Same thing for a user choosing English or Spanish, through some available Miami Cart contributions or simply by doing it yourself other languages can also be added by following the existing model.

When you look at Miami Cart as a whole, it can be rather daunting. The system is extremely robust, but with that comes some complexity. However with many things large and complex if you begin by breaking them into little bits, trying not to chew too much at one time, it all becomes a lot easier to digest.

The great majority of Miami Cart installations start with the basic default package. Whether you uploaded it yourself and followed the included installation routine or it came from your web hosting or some other means, you start out looking at a 'default' Miami Cart installation. At that point right out of the box you have a working shopping cart. Now its time to start putting your customizations to your new shopping cart, to start making it your own. In order to perform those customizations you need to start gaining an understanding of how things are put together, so lets start there.

If you were to examine the code within the pages that make up the system, you would find that every visual page contains several common parts. Speaking specifically about the visual parts, there are four external files with are 'included' into each visual page, these are header.php , column_left.php, column_right.php, and footer.php. In each visual page within Miami Cart there is one master table that holds everything which in a nutshell looks like this image:

The file names themselves are fairly self documenting. The header.php contains the main logo or graphic that appears on the top of each page. The column_left.php and column_right.php each contain the various utility boxes such as shopping cart, reviews, best sellers, new products, etc. And the footer.php contains the copyright notice. Finally the center of the table, the 'body content' is defined within the individual page.

Now there is a little more to it because each of these files can in turn also include other files to help define them, though essentially if you want to change the appearance of an area of the your cart the corresponding file which defines that area of the page is where you will begin to work. Remember because all four of these files are included in each page of the cart, when you make a change to any one of them, you change the appearance of every page in your cart.

Lets assume that you have a logo image for your store which is named mystore.gif. Swapping out the logo images is a fairly simple process. First you would upload mystore.gif to the images folder. Secondly you would edit the code by changing Miami Cart.gif to mystore.gif. And finally change 'Miami Cart' to your store name or something else appropriate. Save and upload the file and you are done.

A couple of notes to keep in mind:

The dimensions of Miami Cart.gif 204 pixels wide by 50 pixels tall. If the dimensions of your logo differ it will affect the appearance. Sometimes it won't matter other times it will and you might have to experiment.

The most common mistake anyone makes are misplaced or missing apostrophes ( ' ). If you are getting errors that's always the first thing to check for.

And the most important thing, before making a change to any file in the system ALWAYS make a back up of the file first, so that you always have something to fall back on if things go very wrong.

As mentioned above, our hosting packages make all of the above available without any work by you.

Orlando/Daytona Beach, Florida
Hours 9 to 9 EST

Tech Support and Questions - (386) 738 3080

      Shopping Cart Servers in 26 cities

© Copyright 1995 - 2006 Kickasp.com All rights reserved.

Each shipping company requires you to register and agree to their user access rules. Registering is currently free.
You may also be required to open an account.