I have been playing around with Open Cart recently as part of implementing a searchable database into a Freeway website. At the moment, I have it working well using iFrame to call in the Open Cart area of the site which currently sits on a test server.
It seems that the iFrame content is not going to be found in search engines, so I was wondering if there is another way I can call in the Open Cart search section of the site another way.
When the site is live the Open Cart area will be on the same server as the rest of the web site.
I’ve never used Open Cart specifically, but many if not most of these cart systems are designed to be “skinned” with HTML and CSS, so that they can be integrated directly into another site and fit in visually. That would be the direction I would pursue, and it’s going to depend on the specifics of how Open Cart is styled how difficult or easy this is for you.
Then you can simply change all the links in your Freeway document that currently point to your store iframe page to point to a folder (example.com/store) or another host (store.example.com) and that’s the extent of the integration needed with your regular site. Freeway even makes this easy – if you delete an existing page, Freeway will ask you if you want to leave a link behind as a placeholder. Say yes, and all of the links to that (now missing) iframe page will be replaced with an external link like youriframe.html. In the Edit URLs dialog, you can then re-assign that link to whatever URL scheme you like for your store, and in one step you will update all the existing links into your store.
I set up an online store using osCommerce 2 or 3 years ago, and that was a real pain to incoporate into a Freeway layout - not Freeway’s fault! So, the iFrame action seemed perfect, and it works very well, but really I could do with the content being all part of the Google indexing, and using that method it won’t be.
I will try and delve into the OpenCart code and link to it directly in the way you suggest.