About this Site

You might be wondering, is this site itself created with CFWebstore? The answer is YES, this entire site runs on a single copy of CFWebstore. I thought you might like a little tour of some of the coding and changes I did to have all the functionality you see here. Some of this will refer to functions in CFWebstore that you might not be familiar with if you have not worked with it yet.

Layout
You might notice that the headers for this site change as you move to the different sections. This is easily accomplished using the Palettes in CFWebstore. You can do this by having a separate layout for each section, but I prefer to keep my design in one file, so with a little extra coding, I was able to accomplish this. First, I created a layout file with the bulk of the site design. I then added a variable that will be used to dynamically change the headers accordingly. Then for each section, I create a layout file that contains two things: the header variable set for that specific area, and a cfinclude for the main layout file. I can then copy the main palette with all the proper color settings and change the designated layout file to the new one. Then for each page or category I create, I can select the approprate template to use with the header that I want. Version 6 makes this kind of function even easier, as you can send parameters into a layout file. So you can do something similar without creating extra pages at all.

Checkout Section
I also wanted the checkout section to use a different header, specifically the one that matches the Purchase area. To do that, I simply modified the fbx_Layouts.cfm file to use the purchase layout for the entire shopping circuit. This is one of the great things that you can do with Fusebox!

Side Menus
I also wanted each section of the site to have a side menu with the options available in that area. To do this, I added another variable to each layout file which defined the top-level page for that section. I then used that variable with the custom tag for page menus to dynamically create the menus. I did a little custom coding to use the title image assigned to the top-level page for the header graphic on the box.

Homepage Callouts
You'll notice that the homepage has some additional dynamic code embedded into the content (such as the customer testimonial). This is something that cannot easily be done normally since the page text is already output dynamically from the database, so you can't just throw CF code into it and have it work. There's a neat trick to get around this, once you learn it, you may find all kinds of other uses for it. First, I created a page that will create the content I want to include. For instance, for the customer quote, it pulls a random one from the list of testimonials and adds the little graphic header and footer. I wrapped this code in a cfsavecontent tag to drop it into a single CF variable. Then I decided on a "fake tag" that will be used to insert this code into the page. For instance %testimonial%. I put this tag into the text of the page and then modified the custom tag used for outputting page text to do a seach for this text, replacing it with the code in our savecontent variable.

Additional Functions
You might notice some pages through the site that appear a little more complex than just simple text. The sample store list and FAQs, for instance. While I could just manually enter the text for these, it's a lot easier to store such information in a database, and I already had an existing one for these that I wanted to continue using. So to create these pages, I imported my tables into the CFWebstore database, and then created new template pages that would use these tables to retrieve and output this information. Using the Category & Page Templates function, I added new templates for these functions. These new templates were then available when I created new pages and categories.

Site Design
The design and graphics for this site were done by Cheryl Donovan of Firecat Studios. I love her work and if you're looking for a designer with CFWebstore experience, you couldn't do much better!

Hosting
CFWebstore is currently hosted on a ColdFusion 7 VPS server with AHPHosting.Net. Their prices are very competitive and the service is excellent. Mention CFWebstore if you sign up with them to receive a $10/month discount on VPS hosting.