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This article applies to:
ML8
Varying the Skin Within a Site
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Store owners may want to use different skins on different areas of the site, rather than using the same skin throughout. This is often done for branding purposes, name recognition, etc. There are several ways to do this, outlined below:
Home Template
The first way to do this allows store admins to have the 'home page' look different than the rest of the site. Having a landing page that clearly identifies your brand or company without the extra menus is often desirable. Using this feature involves 2 AppConfigs:
| AppConfig Name | Description | | HomeTemplate | This should be the name of the skin file which was created for the home page (ex: hometemplate.ascx). Be sure to include the .ascx extension. | | HomeTemplateAsIs | Setting this to true tells the software to ignore the standard content section that is usually generated by default.aspx. The custom skin file will be solely responsible for generating the content of the home page. |
Template Switching
Template switching allows store admins to create a custom skin for every entity (category, department, etc) if desired. This can help with branding or dividing the shop into 'sections'. To enable this feature, follow these steps:
1 - Create additional .ascx pages for each entity that needs to have an individual look. These can be named whatever you like, as long as the .ascx extension is intact.
2 - Set the TemplateSwitching.Enabled AppConfig to true.
3 - Set the template to use for each entity by navigating to the entity in Product Manager, clicking on the ExtensionData tab, and putting the full template name (with extension) in the 'Use Skin Template' field.
When browsing your store, any time you navigate to the entity that you have specified a skin template for in the Extension Data tab, that entity, and any products that you view from that entity page will use the .ascx file that you have specified in the admin. Navigating away from that entity or product will revert the site to the original skin template that you use for your site, or if you've navigated to another entity for which you have specified a skin template the site will use the one that you have specified.
Individual Page Templates
It is also possible to vary the skin for non-product/entity pages, such as the sitemap page, affilate pages, etc. NOTE: This is an advanced, unsupported feature. Support cannot assist with any problems encountered enabling this feature.
To have individual pages have their own skins, follow these steps:
1 - Create additional .ascx pages for each page that needs to have an individual look. These can be named whatever you like, as long as the .ascx extension is intact.
2 - Create a new AppConfig for each page that needs its own skin, in the format templatePAGENAME.aspx. For example, if you wanted the sitemap page to have its own skin, the AppConfig would be called templatesitemap2.aspx (be sure to include the .aspx). For the value, insert the name of the skin file created in step 1.
The individual pages handled this way should now each use the skin file selected for them. Leaving those pages will return customers to the default skin.
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