Using ProductCart - Content Management

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Content Management

Printed From: ProductCart E-Commerce Solutions
Category: ProductCart
Forum Name: Using ProductCart
Forum Description: Running your store with ProductCart
URL: https://forum.productcart.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=2856
Printed Date: 28-July-2025 at 11:12pm
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.04 - http://www.webwizforums.com

Topic: Content Management

Posted By: mike_aes
Subject: Content Management
Date Posted: 09-July-2009 at 2:08pm

We have been using ProductCart (PC) for some time. We have a portion of our website outside of PC. We are exploring content management solutions and looking for some suggestions.

We had someone recommend taking a look at DotNetNuke, and the ease of creating webpages and menus is very compelling. However, it is not clear to me how that might integrate with PC or if this is really the right direction.

Our requirements for content management:

1. Write content once and use content in several places.

2. Not have to worry about the "skin" of the website when adding/modifying content.

3. Pull down or drop down menuing. Prefer that this be auto-generated.

4. Content and website presentation maintained by people who are very busy with other aspects of business and just need to update content quickly and easily, and be able to add new pages without a lot of effort. We generally do major website updates every couple years.

Thanks.

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Mike

Replies:

Posted By: Greg Dinger
Date Posted: 09-July-2009 at 2:37pm

I've used various CMS tools such as CMS Made Simple and Expression Engine - not in PC stores, but that shouldn't really matter much. There are postings here showing at least one store that was integrated with Joomla. DotNetNuke could also be a solution. Given a developer with the appropriate experience to build the site using such a tool, and to apply consistent graphics over the CMS as well as PC, what you are asking for is not difficult.

The greatest issue I can see in taking such an approach is being able to integrate your cart totals into the non-ASP pages. None of the aforementioned CMS systems are coded in ASP and therefore will not be able to share the ASP session variables, and that's where the cart totals are stored. As such, if you want to carry your cart totals into the design that is rendered by the CMS pages, you will have to find a solution that addresses that incompatibility. Beyond this you should be fine if you or your developer have suitable skills for such a CMS implementation.

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Certified ProductCart Developer

Web Design/Development/Hosting

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Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 10-July-2009 at 12:42am

Hi Mike,

It rather all depends upon what you mean by "integrate".

On the one hand, that could mean simply having a similar to same site theme or "skin" between the ProductCart shopping cart application and the Content Management System (CMS), such as NotNetNuke. On the other hand, Greg brings up a good point about integrating functionality.

As for the site theme/skin issue, you will have different CSS for the two applications, but that shouldn't be difficult to manage as this will likely not change much for years. That is, not terribly difficult to make your CMS look like your store.

The big question here is whether you need functional integration here such that your store and your CMS know something about each other. Greg's example is apt. Another issue might be logged in status. The big deal hear is that there really doesn't seem to be any great CMS systems built in classic ASP. NotNetNuke might be the next best choice as it is ASP.NET and ASP.NET apps can play along side of classic ASP apps pretty well, though managing session state bewtween them would be a hurdle, as Greg points out.

CMS systems such as Joomla would be further "off the mark" as it were because of the PHP architecture. No reason this couldn't be done, but you're more likely to find a developer versed in both classic ASP and ASP.net then to be well versed in classic ASP and PHP, esp. on a Windows server environment.

Please fee free to contact me via PM. Our team has the skills to set up DotNetNuke along side your ProductCart store for sure -- would just need to iron out some issues with the above concerns.

Posted By: intour
Date Posted: 11-July-2009 at 5:28am

I've used wordpress with a productcart store in a similar way.

In fact I've just put up a post about it in the SEO forum section.

The wordpress aspect works fine for the client and seamlessly integrates with the rest of the site - the client uses it for a 'news' section and it also allows him to use RSS.

Though this is working well I had put in a cutsom 404 error handler to mimick mod rewrite in the wordpress part of the site. I've recently been asked to add the productcart seo files but the wordpress part is already using the custom 404 url.

Nigel

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