Introduction

There are many ways that you can customize the display of your AbleCommerce store, ranging from simple to complex.  Many changes can be made without any programming skills.  For developers, there is an easy to extend framework on which a fully customized store can be built.

The look and feel of your store is mainly controlled by the Theme.  ASP.NET themes are a new feature made available through the .NET 2.0 framework.

Terms

A description of terms used in this guide:

• CommerceBuilder: The .NET API that the AbleCommerce store is built with.

• ConLib: short for Control Library.  The folder that houses ASP.NET controls used to display dynamic content on some pages.

• nVelocity: A template processor that lets you access dynamic variables and use simple script commands to customize page output. This is a .NET port of the Velocity project for Java.

• Scriptlet: a snippet of HTML code, and can include special markers to indicate where dynamic page elements should be shown.

This chapter covers the following topics:

1. Customizing Your Store

2. Customizing your Pages

3. Scriptlet Management

4. Skinning with ASP.NET Themes

5. Appendix A: Theme Samples

6. Appendix B: Category Display Page Samples

7. Appendix C: ConLib Reference

8. Appendix D: nVelocity Syntax Reference