Skip to main content

Using PHP with Yahoo Store

I seem to get this question a lot: can you use PHP with the Yahoo Store catalog? The short answer is unfortunately now. With store-tags you can access the catalog, any item and any property of any item from within an HTML page (running on Yahoo's server), but the same is not true for PHP scripts.

Store tags are special tags you can embed inside any HTML page of a yahoo store, and those special tags are then replaced by the server with some referenced property of some item in the store catalog. Although store tags were meant to be used in web hosting Yahoo Stores, they actually do work in the Yahoo Store editor as well! You can easily try it out, pick a store tag (see here for store-tag info: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/store/tags/) and put it in any text field in the editor.

While it would be a powerful feature of Yahoo Store to be able to use store-tags in PHP, because currently it is not supported, you are still have to rely on RTML and templates if you want to have more control over your store than what store tags and SiteBuilder or DreamWeaver provides.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Adding custom Yahoo Store fields - Catalog Manager vs. Store Editor

In a non-legacy Yahoo Store, there are two ways to add custom fields: through Catalog Manager under "Manage my Tables" and through the Store Editor, under "Types" (the Store Editor's "Types" are essentially the same as Catalog Manager's "Tables".) Whether you add custom fields from Catalog Manager or from the Store Editor does make a difference as each has its advantages as well as disadvantages. Catalog Manager To me the main advantages of using Catalog Manager to add custom fields are: 1) You can add multiple fields quicker 2) You can later change the field's name and even type 3) You can delete the field if you no longer need it. 4) All the fields that are available in Catalog Manager are included in the data.csv file if you download your catalog. 5) All the fields that are available in Catalog Manager are also included in the catalog.xml datafeed file, which is used by the comparison shopping engines, for example. (See the Search ...
2 comments
Read more

Multi-Add and Yahoo Floating Cart Blues

Although the Yahoo! Floating Cart is considered pretty much bug free by Yahoo (you can look at the official open issues list here http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/store/floatingcart/floatingcart-09.html ) , there are some pretty "interesting" issues still, so since I keep running into them, I decided to post them here along with the work-arounds. The following issues all occur with multi-add forms only. 1) If you have your quantity set up as anything other than a simple text box (for example a drop-down SELECT box), the floating cart will not take the quantity value. It will take vwquantity as a customer-selected option. The workaround: use a text box instead. Nothing else works currently. 2) If you have a script that checks if the shopper made a selection from a drop-down (basically, any kind of an "onsubmit" handler), the floating cart will still receive the item, even if you cancel the submit event. The workaround: put the event handler on the click...
2 comments
Read more

Pre-Season Checkup

With the holiday shopping season fast approaching it's a good idea to do a general checkup on your store to be sure it's ready for prime time. Below are a few things you would want to check, along with a few add-ons that are not too major in scope, but which are often neglected and give you an edge over your competition. Can you Search and Order? Every time we do anything major in a store we test two things: whether searching and adding to cart/ordering works. You can have nice, flashy pictures, cool animation effects, a very quick loading site, anything, but if the store search is broken or you can't add to the cart or can't check out then an ecommerce site is worth nothing. Can you Order? Chances are if your checkout was completely broken you'd know about it by now, but it doesn't have to be totally broken in order to scare away potential customers. So go ahead, go to your site and first do a search and make sure it works. Then, add one or more products ...
Post a Comment
Read more