We are in the process of moving one of our e-Store sites off of a script we had made and onto Ecwid. Extremely pleased with Ecwid thus far but would like to find a way for our styles to control some of the typography and minor layout.
My first question relates to forcing Freeway to publish a style sheet we have made in the styles pallet. Note we have more than one style sheet in Freeway and we made all styles in the tag field so they would be on the sheet since they are not used on any page. Since the style sheet is not assigned to any freeway page it is not being published. Is there a way to force publish the sheet.
My next question relates to how Ecwid allows for styling. It appears that you can only past your custom styling into there online system. Also it appears that if I create my own style sheet as stated above and apply it to a dummy page so freeway will publish it that Ecwid does not pull from those styles even though they may be named correctly. First should the code that is being slurped into my page from Ecwid recognize the styles or is it a specificity thing? Second if the slurped in code has to look at the style sheet that is in the Ecwid setup section, is there a way to have that stylesheet look at the one I made?
If you make an external stylesheet using CSSEdit or another tool like that, you can link it to one or all pages in your site using the External CSS Action. As far as I know, Freeway will only link up one stylesheet per page. You can have multiple stylesheets in your site, but only one per page.
Since the style sheet is not assigned to any freeway page it is not being published. Is there a way to force publish the sheet.
Recognized this as well - so I just make a minor change in one of my FW-page so FW publishes the sheet as well.
My next question relates to how Ecwid allows for styling. It appears that you can only past your custom styling into there online system. Also it appears that if I create my own style sheet as stated above and apply it to a dummy page so freeway will publish it that Ecwid does not pull from those styles even though they may be named correctly. First should the code that is being slurped into my page from Ecwid recognize the styles or is it a specificity thing? Second if the slurped in code has to look at the style sheet that is in the Ecwid setup section, is there a way to have that stylesheet look at the one I made?
Sure there is. But it is as you said:
Ecwid uses the “themes” sheet which is located in your control panel under design and css themes. What I usually do (or did) is to duplicate one of their custom sheets (eg red), rename this to be my custom one, copy the whole bunch into an editor such as CSSEdit or Espresso and start to alter there some styles, copy all, paste it back in ECWID (MyTheme) hit save.
So as summary:
FW is anyway not the first choice for me to add/alter external style stuff.
ECWIDs styles are a bit of a mess so it needs a bit of search and research which styles are influencing what (it took me hours and months :-)).
If you really found out the correct class and id names, entered in a FW external sheet, open this, copy the styles and paste it in your prepared ECWID backend sheet as pointed above and you’re (probably) done.
As a result of a “custom theme” I’d like to point to my ECWID test-dummy-tryout shop which can be found under:
Thomas . . . Yes we have discovered the same process you mentioned to be necessary and it is a little painful. What I was hoping for was that we could somehow point the Ecwid back end custom style sheet to our FW Style sheet thus allowing us to quickly make changes and and the would take affect with out all the copy and pasting. Thoughts?
Walter . . . The intent is to use FW to make a second style sheet and publish it. Thus we don’t have to go out to an external editor. We have done this before and it is a slick way to control styles inside of FW and keep things together, it just requires assigning that style sheet created in FW to a dummy page to get it to publish to the CSS folder. Whas hoping for another way to get thee FW stylesheet with styles to publish, any thoughts?
Understandable, but once one has created styles in freeway for this sort of thing you can create a Freeway templet so the whole thing can be repurposed on another project and it is really slick. Aside from the republishing thing I am just uncertain as to a way to get the Ecwid custom page to pull our styles into it, i.e. Ecwed CSS page references our CSS page. Perhaps this is not a capability within a CSS Stylesheet,
We are going to do some further testing to see if once the Ecwid code is slurped onto our page if it will use our styles due to specificity. Our first attempt was unsuccessful but we have had success with other things like when we pull in a script via PHP include or even a Google Calendar made in Freeway.
OK, heres how things turned out . . . Was not able to find a way to do any styling in Freeway so we resorted to doing it all with Coda 2 and manually placing it into the administrator interface. We are almost complete with styling the Ecwid supplied CSS and it is a little nuts as it unfolds into quite a few styles if one truly wants to customize the entire store experience.