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Reserved page in Yahoo! Store

A client of mine asked me to figure out why her order status page - which contained only a simple HTML form - didn't work on her published site. It was a strange phenomenon, the page she created worked perfectly fine in the editor, but on the published site, all it showed was the word OK. This was really strange, as I couldn't see anything wrong with the HTML itself.

Then, I thought, since the form used an outside service to return order status, maybe that service did something to the page. So I took the form out (leaving that order status page basically blank, with only the store header, navigation, and footer on it) and republished. Same thing! Only OK on the published site... Then I looked at the source of that page, and in the source there was nothing else except for OK. Now that was really strange, because in Yahoo! Store you cannot even create a page that does not at least have a regular web page layout like this:

<html>
<head>
<title>No Name>/title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

Since this page had none of that, I had a thought and plugged in the same URL but within another Yahoo! Store, my own: http://www.ytimes.info/status.html

Voila! Same result, that page only showed OK - but I didn't even have a status.html page... So I went back to my client's site, recreated the order status page as order-status.html, published, and all of a sudden everything worked great.

Out of curiosity, I tried a few other Yahoo! Stores to see if they also had a status.html page, and as I expected, they all did - and with the same OK and nothing else on it. So I contacted Yahoo! and confirmed:

status.html is a reserved page in every Yahoo! Store used for server monitoring.

So my first conclusion was: don't create a page whose ID (url) is status, it won't work on your published site.

But better yet, you can turn this into a useful feature: create a status.html page in your store, but use it for internal communication for your company. You can put notes there for your staff, instructions, etc. Whatever you put there will only be visible in the editor, not on the published site.

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