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.
19. Multisite feature
19. Multisite feature
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The built-in multisite feature is the hugest and long wait functionality which will help you to build any number of sites sharing the same database. Multi-Site treats multiple sites as truly independent sites and enables you to utilise numerous functionalities completely separate from the parent site.

You will definitely want to have a deep inside on the functionality. There are two ways to configure your multi-site functionality, namely:

  • Create a separate folder for each shop and copy all the files from the parent shop
  • Configure the var_definition file to support multi-site feature from one location

Create a separate folder for each shop and copy all the files from the parent shop

Let's start from the steps necessary to activate a Multi-Site feature as per first method (assume we need to add one sub site). Please, follow the steps below:

  1. Create a separate folder with a different name on your server, make a copy of your current shop and paste it in the created folder. Therefore, you should have two shops with different names, like: shop 1 and shop 2.

  2. Copy var_definition.php file from your current shop and paste it to the 'includes' folder of your subsite to save the data of your DB. Please, do not forget to do it for other shops (if you have more than two shops).

  3. Further, open the Admin console of your parent shop via browser and go to Administration > System > Privilege Groups > Administrator > Edit Permissions. Check off appropriate options from Multisite section. This step is extremely important, otherwise you won’t be able to start sites configurations.

  4. When doing this, you will see the Sites Section in the System menu at once. Click the Site Menu and add the second site by pressing the New Site link. Give the name to your sub-site and select whether you want to duplicate the Page and Global settings of your first site or not.

  5. Further important step is to set the correct site URL for each of the site. To do this, please go to Administration > System > Global Settings, select Current Site from the drop down box in the upper right corner and set the URL for this site like: http://www.yoursite.com/shop1. Then select the second site and specify the URL, like: http://www.yoursite.com/shop2. If you are using SSL for your shop, then you should change the SSL site URLs as well, like: https://www.yoursite.com/shop1 and https://www.yoursite.com/shop2.
  6. Please, also note that you should decide at once whether to use MD5 Password encryption or not, because the method you select for one site will be automatically applied to all your sites.

  7. The next step is to add your site IDs to the var_definition file. This is a very important step. For this firstly open the var_definition file for the parent shop and insert the below string under the line: $session_prefix = "";
    $site_id = 1;
    where 1 is a unique ID number of your parent site, for example. Please, ensure that you use correct IDs for all your subsites. You will find the correct site ID in the browser's bar when selecting this or that site. Save the file and add the same string in the var_definition file for your subsite.

    In addition, it is highly recommended to specify the correct names of your folders (where your subsite(s) are located) for session prefixes. For instance, if your subsite is located in the folder 'testshop1', then please specify: $session_prefix = "testshop1";

Configure the var_definition file to support multi-site feature from one location

There is another possible way to support Multi-site feature if all your subsites are located in one place (for example, if your server can be configured to support virtual hosts). However, please note that appropriate changes are to be done on your server first. When this is done you need to configure your var_defintion file to use only one copy of files for all your subsites. Please, open your var_defintion file and insert the below code (instead of adding the site ID - as per the first method):

$http_host = $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"];

if (preg_match("/^(www\.)?example\.com$/i", $http_host)) {

$site_id = 2;

}elseif (preg_match("/^(www\.)?another\.com$/i", $http_host)) {

$site_id = 3;

} else {

$site_id = 1;

}

where www.example.com - is your second sub-site, www.another.com is your third subsite and site_id=1 is your parent site. This example is valid if you want to use Multi-site for three sites. In case you will have more sites you are to add one more string of the code per each subsequent subsite, namely:

} elseif (preg_match("/^(www\.)?another2\.com$/i", $http_host)) {

$site_id = 4;

Note: All the Admin settings stated above are to be done for the second method as well.

Set different categories and products for the sites

  1. Please ensure that you set the appropriate permissions for the category.

  2. Go to Administration > Products and Categories. Select a Category and click the Edit link. You will see the Sites tab there. In case you want to use this category for all your sites, tick off the 'Use this category for all sites'. If you are going to use the categories for particular sites, it is recommended to leave this option unticked and select the sites where you want this category to be displayed. Besides, there are some additional options to display products within this category, within subcategories. Please, see the attached image how it should look:


  3. You can also select to show a particular product on different sites. This is done on the Product Edit page (Sites Tab).

Set sites for different users groups

If you need to assign different customer groups to different sites, go to Administration > Site Users > Profile Settings >, select a particular type and click the Edit Type > Sites tab. Select on what sites to display this customer group from the list of available sites or tick off the 'Use this user type for all sites'. Then this customer type will be displayed on all your sites.


Set different prices for various users groups

Multi-site functionality enables you to use different prices on different shops. To set the prices, go to Administration > Products&Categories, select a particular product and click the Prices link. Specify minimum and maximum amounts and the individual pricing. Further, select the user group and the site you want to show the prices on. Please, use the below image as an example.


CMS settings for multiple sites

Set a unique template for each site

With multi-site feature you can manage multiple sites with unique layouts within one web interface. To select a particular layout for one site, please go to Administration > CMS > Layout > Select a layout you want to set for the site and press the Global button. You will see the 'Sites' tab there. Go there and select what site will have this particular layout by unticking the default option 'Use this layout for all sites'. When this is done, please click the 'Update' button. Follow the same procedure for other sites.

Create different header menu items for different sites

Multisite enables you to add different menu items to each site. To do this, please go to Administration > CMS > Layouts > Site navigation and add the links you want to be displayed for this particular site. When this is done, select another layout for your sub-site and change or add other menu items. For more information on how to add menu items, please click here see section 3.4.3.

You can attune all other ViArt Shop features for different sites, like Filters, Custom pages, Custom fURls, Manuals, Forum, Ads. Therefore, you can have a plenty of opportunities to play with.

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