Developing an Online Storefront for Distribution

If you are a web designer or a web developer, you can use Avactis Shopping Cart as the basis on which to build full-blown websites and distribute them independently of Avactis Shopping Cart software. All the user should do is install the Avactis Shopping Cart software, copy your design package into any folder, specify the installation location, and voila - the website is ready to be used.

Avactis Shopping Cart is made so that you can create designs of custom store blocks (Navigation Bar, Buttons, Product Info Blocks, etc) as well as the whole online storefront, including storefront pages and store block templates. That means you can develop designs for store blocks and distribute them as you like. You can also develop and distribute designs for fully functional websites. In doing this you distribute your designs independently of the software, thus there is no need to buy additional licenses for any design you create.

In the given example, all store block templates are located in the folder my-templates. The first line of each file of an online storefront page includes the command to run init.php. This instruction helps avoid including the initialization string for each individual file. The initialization string is specified only once in the file init.php.

Another feature of init.php is that it specifies the configuration file my-layout.ini, which is provided with the package. This is done in the following string:

$layout_file_path = 'my-layout.ini';

Your file my-layout.ini should be placed in the folder avactis-layouts. Or you must specify the absolute path if it is placed in another folder:

$layout_file_path = '[PATH_TO_FILE]/my-layout.ini';

Thanks to this directive, it is possible to get around (ignore) the system configuration file storefront-layout.ini. As a result, the user has a completely independent, custom online storefront.

After the user receives your package, only one thing remains before the online storefront can be launched. In init.php the user should specify the path to Avactis Shopping Cart; this can always be done by using helper.php (see Step 3 above). The site is now finished and ready to be used.