Our site www.viart.com site is operated by latest Viart Shop 5 with default Clear design
ViArt Shop Manual

To remove the 'evaluation version' message on your ViArt, you will need to purchase a unique license and generate a license.php. Please read this section to get the instructions on the process of activation.

The first thing that you are supposed to do after you have installed ViArt Shop is setting up its main parameters.
The first thing that you need to do after you have installed ViArt Shop is to set up the main parameters.
After you have installed ViArt Shop and set up its main parameters you have to specify its administration settings.
It is natural to desire an online store which is both unique and unforgettable, with ViArt Shop you can do this 'on fly'.
ViArt Shop is supplied with nine layouts as default, 'Default', 'Curved', 'Silver', 'Convex', 'Fashion', 'Rainbow', 'Classic', 'Marine', 'Ecommerce'. You can choose either of these layouts according to the needs of your shop, or if you require, you can build your own one!
Bellow are the samples of screenshots for the 'Classic' Layout. This layout has four available schemes to choose from: blue, green, light blue, red. Select any scheme you prefer.
Bellow are the samples of screenshots for the 'Curved' Layout. This layout has three available schemes to choose from: black, blue, pink. Select any scheme you find the most suitable.
Bellow are the samples of screenshots for the 'Silver' Layout. This layout has two available schemes to choose from: dark and light. You can select the scheme that best suits your needs.
The overall view of each layout is set by its global settings. Read the following section to find out how to change the look and feel of an existing layout, also how to create a new one.
The navigation panel is displayed on all pages of your online store, with ViArt Shop you can change the way it is displayed for each layout. It is also possible to distinguish which navigation options are shown to all your visitors and/or only to those who logged in.
This section details how the home page layout is produced. Read the following to understand how to customize the home page layout to suit your needs.
When running an online store, it is very important to stay up to date with what happening behind the scenes. With ViArt Shop it is possible remain aware of occurrances on your site, even if you are away from your computer!. This is possible thanks toViArts SMS functionality, this function allows you to setup your shopping cart system to send you SMS's whenever certain event/s occur.
This chapter will show you how to add products and catagories into your online store.
Sometimes it might be very handy to have a possibility to inform a friend of yours about what you've found. With ViArt Shop your customers will have it. This can also be a good and free promotion of your site.
Even though you run an online store and deal mainly with orders, it would not be out of place to know who your customers are. ViArt Shop allows you to control your customers accounts through the 'Customers' section.
Sometimes you may need to look through some customer personal details. ViArt Shop provides you with such a possibility.
Sometimes you may need to look through some customer personal details. ViArt Shop provides you with such a possibility.
Sometimes you might need to look through or even edit customer login details. Read what you should do in this case.
As you might have already understood customer type is a key notion in the overall customer account management. It defines main customer account settings, discounts a customer will have and customer profile fields.
Actually, the key notion in the overall customer management in ViArt Shop is customer type. It defines main customer account settings, discounts a customer will have and customer profile fields.
Customer profile contains some information about the customer. You can define what kind of it you need by setting up specific fields.
It often happens that customers forget their password. In such a case they can apply to a site administrator providing their logins and some personal information. But it would be much easier to use a special password restoring option.
Should you ever need to find a customer, you can use the search block in the 'Customers' section.
One of the most attractive features of ViArt Shop is its customizability. You can easily make your online store unique and exclusive by adding custom pages.
One of the most attractive features of ViArt Shop is its customizability. You can easily make your online store unique and exclusive by adding custom pages.
Custom Block is a perfect solution for customizing your online store and attuning it to your needs. You may create custom blocks for anything you ever need and place wherever on your site.
Viart Shop enables you to create opinion polls for the visitors of your website. Such polls can be very useful for your business. You are allowed to choose between single choice and multiple choices polls.
Another feature of ViArt Shopping Cart is its banner management. Thanks to it you can place any banner you want: links to hot offers of the store or to other sites you own. You can even sell the space to other web-masters.
HelpDesk system is based upon exchanging support tickets. Support Tickets are used for resolving any issue or problem your customers may have. ViArt HelpDesk allows you to track users requests with the help of unique ticket number in a quick and easy way.
Support Ticket System enables your support team to track all the support requests as well as to ensure that no query goes unanswered.
This section provides an information for your customers on how to create a ticket to a tech support team if they face a problem or have a question.
Please read this section to know how to send, assign or edit a support ticket.
ViArt HelpDesk allows to create a request for each client. To do this, you should click Create Message Link and fill the appropriate form.
You or a support specialist may need to find some particular ticket. In this case, you can use a search tool available in the support centre.
The section covers main support center's settings such as Knowledge Base, attachments, random image validation, and email notifications.
This section shows how to assign HelpDesk users - the staff responsible for smooth communication with your customers.
You can estimate your customer by assigning an appropriate status to him. It is necessary if you want to distinguish the most valuable customers.
While preparing an answer to a customer, you can use the Predefined Reply option. Predefined messages can be inserted into your reply by a mouse click. Using predefined messages allows you to save your time and impress your customer with a quick reply.
Once you install your HelpDesk, it is very important to create a department (for example, a support department).
With ViArt helpdesk module you can set the types of a support ticket. Setting the right type of a ticket helps a support team to correctly identify the issue.
One more feature of ViArt HelpDesk is that it provides you with a possibility to support any product you need.
It is usually very important to sort the support tickets by their priorities. ViArt Shop provides you with such a possibility.
ViArt HelpDesk gives you the possibility to create and edit statuses for your replies to customers' support tickets. This option helps you to sort all the tickets at your convenien
You may find it necessary to have some reports on the support tickets. With ViArt Shop helpdesk module you can easily view the status of support tickets, namely, how many tickets were answered, how many tickets are awaiting response, how many tickets were closed, etc
One of the important modules of ViArt Shop is its Forum - an independent portal, intended to provide an online communication between shopping cart users as well as to offer useful information on numerous important issues. If a person has a problem or an idea he/she will have an opportunity to share it with others.
Forum consists of shopping cart related threads or issues which you and your users can exchange and which are later archived for future reference.
Before adding a new topic you should firstly choose the forum to which you want to post your question or issue.
You or someone from your support team may wish to join the discussion and give some piece of advice. In this case, you are to post an answer to a thread.
Categories are 'parents' to forums and are used to hold a group of forums. Your users are unable to post their messages to categories, they can only post their threads to forums. A site which has only a few forum discussion boards may not need any categories. However, if your site has a lot of forum modules, it will be useful for you to create a category.
Sometimes, you may need to create multiple forums for different areas of discussions.
With forum settings you have the possibility to customize your forum according to your requirements. First of all, you should set the global settings.
This chapter is likely to cover the most general settings affecting the whole system and how it works. It allows attuning your ViArt Shop online store just the way you like as well as making main adjustments required for proper operation.
When you are running any kind of business it is no wonder that you need some help. This is true for an online store as well. However, you might not want other people all the information stores in the database. With ViArt Shop you can set up different user groups and assigned different permissions to them.
E-commerce is a place where fraud is very possible. So, you have to protect yourself and your customers as well. With ViArt Shop you can watch IPs your customer use for shopping and block those you think might be trickery.
As time goes by, your online store will grow larger and larger. And it will be quite difficult to watch everything in it, especially what your customers may add or post on it. In such a way you can make your life easier by using banned content functionality.
When working with ViArt Shop you have all the possibilities to make your online store one and only. You can change the feel and look of your site, select different templates and change color schemes. Another great feature is that you have the ability to edit the messages your customers see while surfing your site without the necessity to edit any files.
2.1.2. Zend Optimizer
2.1.2. Zend Optimizer
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What is Zend Optimizer and why is it used in ViArt?


Some of ViArt's files have been processed with an application called Zend Encoder. These files will not be executed without Zend Optimizer being installed and configured correctly on your Web Site's Host Server.

Zend Optimizer can decode and execute 'optimised' files with greatly improved performance when compared to standard PHP files.

We use Zend optimisation primarily to provide you with:
  • Improved performance: There is a very complex and sophisticated PHP structure which gives ViArt its power, speed and flexibility. When ViArt is running, there are a great many operations being carried out to create what you see in your web browser. We have found that by compiling our files with Zend Encoder we can greatly improve the speed at which these operations are performed, thus creating a faster page rendering time, and a more responsive web site.

  • Safety: The files that govern Viart's underlying framework i.e. the file which hold certain 'protected information' and the other files we would not expect customers would need to modify, are processed with Zend Encoder.
Since Viart's whole reason for being is to allow customization, we have not encoded all of Viart's files; only those files which we feel will protect our intellectual property have been optimized. Any files pertaining to the look and feel of the interface: Style Sheets, HTML, layout files, shopping cart messages and system function variables are all open to alteration in any way you wish.

We would estimate that 97% of Viart is 'open' for modification in any way you choose.

How to install Zend Optimizer

The Zend Optimizer is a fully free package that can be downloaded from zend.com. Click here for the latest version of Zend Optimizer. To download and install the Zend Optimizer, please do the following steps:

  1. Log in or register with your Zend account. The Zend Optimizer – Free Download page opens.
  2. Select the Optimizer version that corresponds with the platform system you use and select “Download Now”. The File Download dialog opens.
  3. Choose the Save option and save the selected file to your local system.

From this point the installation instructions differ according to the operating system on which you would like to install the Zend Optimizer, namely:

To install the Zend Optimizer on Windows:
  1. Double click on the package ZendOptimizer-x.x.x-windows-i386.exe The Optimizer Install Shield opens.
  2. Follow the instructions in the Installer. These instructions define the basic system configurations necessary for installing the Zend Optimizer such as the Web Server in use and the location of the php.ini.

You can now jump to the section: Installation Verification, page 5 for instructions on how to confirm the Zend Optimizer was successfully installed.


To install the Zend Optimizer on UNIX Variants:
  1. Open a terminal window and change dir to the directory in which the Zend Optimizer package was saved. To untar the package use the command: gunzip -c | tar xf -
  2. From the extracted package's directory, type the following command: ./install. The installer is launched
  3. Follow the instructions in the installer. These instructions define the basic system configurations necessary for installing the Zend Optimizer, such as the Web Server in use and the location of the php.ini.
  4. If for some reason, the graphical installation will not start or is illegible, use the command: ./install-tty which is useful on low-end terminals such as when installing on a remote server via SSH/Telnet.". The text only installation starts

Important note: To install or uninstall Zend Optimizer, you must be logged in with Administrator/root permissions.

How to check that Zend Optimizer is installed

Please make sure that Zend Optimizer is properly installed. To check this on your web server, just run a file like test.php that contains only 1 line:
<?php phpinfo();?>
Then look at the output information and try to search a block of parameters like on this picture:

http://www.viart.com/images/manual/Zend_Optimizer_installed.gif

If it is not there, it means that Zend Optimizer is not installed. Please check your php.ini file whether it contains settings like:

[Zend]

zend_extension_manager.optimizer_ts="C:\Program Files\Zend\ZendOptimizer-3.2.2\lib\Optimizer-3.2.2" zend_extension_ts="C:\Program Files\Zend\ZendOptimizer-3.2.2\lib\ZendExtensionManager.dll"

Most common questions

My Web Host doesn't have Zend Optimizer, what should I do?

Zend Optimizer is a completely free application: it costs nothing to install and run it on your server.

If you have your own web server and you have "root administrator permissions", you will be able to download Zend Optimizer from the above link and install it without issue.

In most cases where you are relying on another company to host your site, your hosting company's Technical Support will carry out this operation for you, if indeed Zend Optimizer is not supported already.

Unfortunately, if your web host refuses to install Zend Optimizer, you won't be able to run ViArt Shop on their server. In this event we would recommend using ViArt's Web Hosting services, details of which can be found here.

How to enable Zend Optimizer?

To enable Zend Optimizer is to check whether all settings are set correctly. Here are the correct settings for C:\xampp\apache\bin\php.ini:

[Zend] zend_extension_ts = "C:\xampp\php\zendOptimizer\lib\ZendExtensionManager.dll"
zend_extension_manager.optimizer_ts = "C:\xampp\php\zendOptimizer\lib\Optimizer"
zend_optimizer.enable_loader = 1
zend_optimizer.optimization_level=15

After saving changes in the php.ini please restart the Apache web server.

Are the PHP and Zend Optimizer versions you are using compatible?

Please, refer to the Zend Optimizer product page for the detailed information. We recommend to use Zend Optimizer 3.2 or later for PHP 5.x and Zend 2.6.2 - for PHP 4.2.x.
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