Hi

When we bought this product, we were under the impression that the cart would use our site skin and not the admin skin. I even asked you to look at the site we were planning to use this product on, to see if we could maintain the design integrity of the site when using this product, to which Scott answered yes.

However, the reality of the fact that the details and cart pages actually use the Admin skin, and NOT the site skin, has caused me some serious issues, as follows :

My site skin has 13 different content panes. I have a bunch of text/html modules sitting in these panes to add additional functionality to my site, such as additional navigation options, social bookmarking icons, payment logos (visa / mc) and so on.

Now, my product listing page is fine, as this uses the site skin setting for the site, and I can customise this pretty easily by editing the productlisting.ascx file of smithcart.

But the issue comes in when my users click through to look at a product details page, all the surrounding info I have in my site disappears completely. Thus the design integrity and user experience is seriously impacted as a result.

I have tried setting the site admin skin to use the same skin as the site front end - no luck. So, my users now lose all the other "bits" of the interface they are used to seeing when they go an look at a product details page ... and also when they checkout.

Frankly, I think this is a MAJOR shortcoming of this product, and your advertising that it uses the same skin as the site is totally misleading.

Why can it not simply use the same skin as the page that you add the buynow module to? It only uses the content pane in any event, so why can it not use this in the site skin?

I normally build a custom backend admin skin for my client's sites, that often looks TOTALLY different from the front end, as I often have additional menu items that I don't want displayed in the front end, and also to simplify the backend screens for the users, so they can easily see when they are in a management screen for a particular item.

Please can you fix this issue as a matter of urgency. I am sure there are many that would agree with me that using the site admin skin for the product details and cart pages is a problem.

Just for the record on this - we use XMod quite extensively for DNN development. XMod also used to do the same thing when you wanted to go to a records detail view (I think this is to do with how DNN handles the postback, but I am not sure as I am not a VB or C# programmer). They got around this by creating a DetailView module that could be added to a page, and the the record's unique ID was passed through to this page to show the detail view ... just a thought in terms of a possible solution to this ...

perhaps a seperate Cart module would also be nice - then you could have a dedicated detail view page that uses the front end skin, and you could have a dedicated cart / checkout page, that also uses teh front end skin, thus giving the user a seamless pass through your site from start to finish of the transaction.

Anyway, looking forward to your response on this issue.

thanks for clarifying what the problem is Scott. Can you give us an ETA on when we can expect to see this in place?

Hi Scott

Ok, I am glad to hear it is top of the list. Please expedite it as from what I can see it will now have an impact on the SSL side of things too ...

I want the cart and checkout secured by SLL, but under the current setup, I would have to secure the page that I add to the BuyNow module to - correct? Which means the whole store will essentially have to be behind SSL.

This will have a significant impact on performance - especially on products that have say 4 images associated with them, as all that data will be encrypted ....

Ideally, users should be able to browse the store, and view products in a normal http environment, but when they add to cart, view cart or checkout, you want this to happen under an https environment ... which, under the current configuration cannot work.

We are about to use your cart software on a new project starting next week (we will be ordering some additional custom development work for this on Monday, discussed with Dave already), but this issue now has become even more important to sort out as quickly as possible - the new store will have at least 50,000 products, most of which will have multiple images associated with them - we simply cannot have these running under SSL.

Please stay in touch with me on this issue.

Thank you for the quick responses so far - its great to see good customer support.

This is a high priority item but programming has not been started on it yet. We are just finishing up a large project to allow language localization and some other cool multi currency features on the cart so it can be used in other languages around the world we are expecting to release this end of next week. There are a few different options to fix the skin issue that are discussed in this thread as well as internally with our dev team. One of which is to split the buynow module to seperate modules as follows:

1. Product Catalog module
2. Cart Module
3. Admin module

This would allow you to add other modules to the product details page and also solve the skin issue. I cant give a delivery date for this yet because I dont have it at this point but alot of folks want this and its a high priority.

-Scott

There are no hard coded colors or fonts in any of the pages of the cart. The cart does use the module.css in some cases to set colors, fonts, styles, etc but they can easily be changed by modifying the module.css. If a particular div, table, tr, td or asp control does not have a css class associated with it you can always go in a add one but any items that do not have css classes associated with them the styles are all inherited from the portal skin/containers.

DNN sites can be tricky sometimes to style and all skins uaually have different quirks to work with but I believe the order or precedence with the style sheets in dnn is the following:

1. skin.css
2. container.css
3. portal.css
4. module.css

-Scott

The cart page is cart.ascx located in the \desktopmodules\smith.buynow folder. But of course all pages in dnn are driven from default.aspx so the cart is inheriting styles from that page using your skin and css I listed above.

-Scott