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b-Central and Templates

Microsoft's bCentral Commerce Manager helps you to build an online catalog using the bCentral system. The bCentral system makes it easy for you to link into web marketplaces like eBay and to process online orders.

The bCentral system also allows you to create your own online catalog using the bCentral Commerce Manager FrontPage Add-in, which you can download here. If you aren't too particular about what your catalog will look like or how it functions, then this is a perfect solution. However, if you want the catalog to look like the rest of your site and have a particular page layout in mind, you may come across some challenges. We hope that this article will help you to know what to expect.

The first place to start...
First, you'll want to go here to learn about how to create an E-Commerce Web Site with FrontPage 2002. Then, you'll want to make sure that the products in your catalog are listed in your "FrontPage-based Web Site" so that you can access them when you are using FrontPage.

What can I do? What can't I do?
Reformatting pages: With patience and some trial-and-error, you can reformat the catalog pages to some extent (we haven't pushed the limits as far as they go, but we'll let you know when we do). Be forewarned that this can be a time-consuming process. If you have a huge catalog, you may want to go to the trouble of doing this. If you have a small catalog, you may want to give up on the generated catalog idea, make your own product detail pages, and just add the code for your add-to-cart button that bCentral thoughtfully provides for you.

Navigation bars: As with any FrontPage web site, your pages won't have navigation bars until you drag them into the navigation structure. If you have hundreds of products, this may get kind of clumsy. Not only that, but any time you want to add a product or change something, you have to re-run the E-Commerce wizard. And any time you run the E-Commerce wizard, the product catalog pages are deleted from the navigation structure. Unless you have a small catalog, you might want to give up on the idea of FrontPage-generated navigation bars. From your main site, you might want to open a new window when linking to your catalog, or create your own navigation buttons and links by hand in your Catalog template pages.

Tip #1: You'll need plenty of patience.
One of the first challenges that we faced was trying to connect to the bCentral account. When you run the E-Commerce wizard by going to Tools > E-Commerce > E-Commerce wizard, a log-in window will appear. 40% of the time that we tried to work on our web site, the "server could not be contacted." This meant that we had to work on other things, then go back and try again.

Tip #2: Build your bCentral Catalog before building your web site.
When you use the E-Commerce wizard to create the product catalog files for your web site, two folders are generated within your web site: the Catalog folder and the Catalog Template folder. Theoretically, you can change the files in the Catalog Template folder to look any way you want, then you run the wizard and the individual department list and product list pages will be generated from those templates.

We expected that we would have to edit three files -- the Catalog home page, a generic "Department" page, and a generic "Product Detail" page. To our surprise, we found that the wizard created a template page for every department and a product detail template page for every department. For example, if we had "Men," "Women," and "Children," with different products under those departments, there would be seven template files to edit: "Catalog," "Men," "Product Detail for men," "Women," "Product Detail for women," "Children," and "Product Detail for children." As you can see, you will want to make sure that your product catalog departments are pretty set before you begin.

Tip #3: Save backups of your pages!
When you are ready to edit your Catalog Template pages, be sure to Edit > Copy and Edit > Paste a copy of the page! We found that it was very easy to "mess up" a template... and that the wizard would not even create pages off of templates that were "messed up!" Not only that, but there was no way to "start over" without creating a new web. Saving a backup copy will allow you to start over if necessary without having to go through the hassle of recreating your web.

Tip #4: Work slowly.
We found that making small changes, saving, and rerunning the E-Commerce wizard (to see if the changes were applied without messing up the page) was the best way to go, although a little tedious and time-consuming.