When to use text maintenance, when to use the ws-customer area?
To update a small amount of text in several places in the shop, use text maintenance. Example: On your product pages, you want to write “product number” with a hyphen (“product-number”). You also use text maintenance when a variable already exists for the text of an element of your shop. Example: The label of the shopping cart button should be changed from “cart” to “add to cart”. As the name says, text maintenance is primarily about maintaining (mostly already existing) texts. Swapping images purely via text maintenance is, for example, not possible. Although a file name can be changed via text maintenance, the file itself still has to be provided on the server. To change a lot of text in one or only a few places, use the ws-customer area. Example: You want to fundamentally change or restructure the text on the “About us” page. When creating a new page or a page section, you should always consider what will change on it in the future. If any of the following applies, it is not a case for text maintenance but for the ws-customer area:- Texts and entire text sections should be added or deleted.
- Images and graphics should be added or deleted.
- The page layout should fundamentally be changeable, for example either 2-column or 3-column.
Procedure: text maintenance
Text maintenance is used for page sections in which fixed, well-defined text sections are only to be changed slightly. Example: The “Legal notice” page is to be renamed to “Legal notice according to the Telemedia Act”. Search for the relevant variable by entering the string “Impressum” in the search field of the text maintenance administration. Double-click the text in the middle panel of the text maintenance screen to be able to edit it. Change the text as desired. With a checkmark next to “Mark as finished” and a click on the “Save” button, the text is changed. Another click on the button with the globe icon updates the shop immediately. No HTML changes to the templates are necessary, and no templates need to be uploaded to the server via SFTP.Procedure: ws-customer area
However, there are pages — for example news — where it is not enough to only change existing text sections. On such pages, new text sections often have to be added or updated. In principle, it is possible to add new text sections via text maintenance. But in order for them to be displayed on the desired page, the text sections first have to be placed on the template. That means it takes 2 steps before the new text section becomes visible on the page. Using the ws-customer area (directory on the SFTP server), you save yourself one step. The texts sit directly on the HTML pages and can be edited directly in the HTML. The source code of the page can therefore also be freely adapted. (HTML knowledge is, however, required to edit such pages.)As a matter of principle, no pages that directly affect the functionality of the shop — such as the shopping cart or login — are located in the ws-customer area. This way, WEBSALE ensures that any errors on the pages do not impair important shop functions. (The “About us” page may then not look nice, but customers can still place orders.)This also means that employees who have not attended a WEBSALE shop training can be granted access to this area.