Yahoo Store Tips & Tricks 2nd Edition

Editor V3.0 Compatible

This is a printed book, not an e-book.

Updated to cover Yahoo! Store Editor V3.0.

"When Mike and Istvan asked me to write the introduction to this book, I was very excited for two reasons: First, I just wanted to read the dang book and get the good stuff for my own stores before everyone else did. Second, I wanted to steal the really good stuff for my "Yahoo! Small Business / Yahoo! Store For Dummies" book!

All teasing aside, you really need to buy this book if you are serious about making more with your Yahoo! Store. It shows you over tips, tricks, tweaks, and templates to jazz up your store. You can do something with this info almost immediately, too! I was editing templates after about 30 minutes of diving into the book.

Buy this book if you are a Yahoo! Store owner. Improve the look and feel of your Yahoo! Store without touching custom programming or RTML. This book shows you specific store features you can add or enhance with RTML template tweaks. It also shows you exactly how to do it!

Not a programmer? Me either! If you don't want to wade into the thick stuff, read the overviews, skip the code, and buy a copy for your favorite geek. You can always outsource this stuff, too. Open up your wallet or your Paypal account and hire a Yahoo! Store developer. There are dozens of RTML guys (and gals) who can implement RTML template changes for you.

Buy this book if you are an RTML developer. You'll learn enough from one or two little tricks to more than pay for the price of this book. I think they should charge fellow developers $500 or $1000 for the tips and tricks alone, much less the template examples.

Mike & Istvan have forgotten more RTML than I'll ever know. I was playing with RTML back in the good ole days, but I didn't know what I was really doing until their books came out. I am NOT a programmer. I'm a retailer turned internet marketing consultant who had to learn to hack RTML to be able to make my Yahoo! Store pages look the way I wanted to increase conversion rates and to make the pages as search engine friendly as possible.

Mike's book ("RTML for Yahoo! Store - A visual quick-start tutorial to modifying templates") got me deeper into modifying RTML templates. I could already do cool design stuff with RTML with tables, but I was afraid to actually do any programming until I read his book.

Istvan literally wrote the book on RTML with "RTML 101." I re-read Istvan's RTML 101 book for the 17th time on the flight out to their latest training seminar. Wow! I'm still amazed at how Istvan was able to reverse engineer all of this stuff with almost no documentation from Yahoo!

Mike & Istvan's "Yahoo! Store Tips & Tricks" shows Yahoo! Store owners how to do two very important things: 1) save time by speeding up daily store editing and maintainence tasks and 2) make more money by creating a faster and easier shopping experience for customers. Highly recommended."

-- Rob Snell

By Istvan Siposs and Michael Whitaker.

330 pages (perfect bound)
Size: 7" x 9"
ISBN: 0-9719663-9-7

Here is what's covered in Yahoo! Store Tips & Tricks:

How to remove your store's name (title) from the pages
How to modify templates?
Graphical order button
Breadcrumbs
Enabling the built-in breadcrumbs
"Click here to enlarge"
Icon-style graphical navigation buttons
Automatic graphical navigation buttons
Rollover buttons
Cascading style sheets
Bestsellers
Quick fix for non-functioning index. template
Alphabetized index page
Hierarchical index page
Quantity box
Concatenating strings
Rob Snell's "Magic" Edit Button
Upcharge
Checkbox options
Radio button options
Textarea options
More than one "Empty" in button bar
Company logo as Home button
Free forms (email form results)
Relative page width
Imexpands bug
"Click Here To Enlarge" in text body (next to image)
Enlarged image pop-up
Get list of on-sale items
Shop by price
Using TAG-WHEN
Creating "Floater" Pages
Hiding pages from the search results
Exclude pages from the Index
Deleting pages temporarily from the store
Related items
Separator line in contents
Drop-down navigation box
Search Box (in nav bar)
Uniform custom page template
"On Sale" tag for sale-price-text
Quantity pricing table
Text page titles
Text navigation bar
Adding a Description Meta-tag
Better Title tag
Quick "404" page
Adding free text below the navigation bar
Dynamic testimonials
Deleting multiple items at once
Strike through regular price
Border around images
Print this page
Catalog request customized
"You Save…"
Custom Banner
Show current date on page
Hide the E-mail address on the Info page
More than 25 buttons
Disallow right mouse clicks
Trackable links
FTP
Using LINKs
Your choice for "Availability"
Database upload
Calculating key metrics
Uploading updated file still displays older version in the editor
Eliminating last line break from the caption
Controlling the id and hence URL of your section and item pages
Shipping status update
Raw-html
Using quotes in the TEXT operator
Upload a PDF file into an image property
Red Blocks instead of images?
Config page
Order button at the top of the page
Setting the default size of abstracts on section pages
Using SHIP-WEIGHT in RTML
Finding the top section
Safely Configure the New Editor's Entry Page
"Turn off" pieces of RTML code
Change the appearance of option labels and form submit buttons
The "Head-tags" hack
Deleting duplicate pages
Deleting sections without deleting the contained items
Find overridden variables
Including images, streaming video, Macromedia Flash, and other downloadable content
Aligning the Option drop-downs
Relative versus Absolute URLs
Alt tags
Fixing accessory names
Adding multiple items to the shopping cart
Add to Favorites
Database inventory
Hide Product Price
Sorting
Creating a Snapshot of the Store
Determine if your code is running in the editor
Real-time Link
How to remove HTML tags from text
Emphasize key phrases throughout your site
Page not reachable in the published site
Site last modified
Turn off the Publish button
Images in table cells misaligned

Editor V3.0/RTML 2.0 Updates

With the introduction of Yahoo! Store Editor V3.0 and RTML 2.0, some of the tips - mostly the RTML tips - are now outdated if you are using the new templates/editor. Watch this place as we post the relevant corrections here.

How to remove your store's name from the pages (p. 12)

This tip does not apply to Editor V3.0

Graphical Order Button (p. 13)

This tip does not apply to Editor V3.0. To add a graphical order button, upload your Add to Cart image into the "add-to-cart-image" variable.

Breadcrumbs (p. 15) and Enabling the built-in breadcrumbs (p. 19)

This tip does not apply to Editor V3.0. Breadcrumbs are built into Editor V3.0.

Click here to enlarge (p. 25)

In Editor V3.0, you will have to modify your copy of the "image" template. In that template, you'll see towards the end of the template the following code segment:

IMAGE source RENDER image image
                    max-height h
                    max-width w
      alt @name
      class WHEN CALL :has-price 
              imgclass
      title @name

this needs to be changed to

IMAGE source FUSE axis :vertical
               RENDER image image
                      max-height h
                      max-width w
               RENDER text "Click to enlarge"
      alt @name
      class WHEN CALL :has-price 
              imgclass
      title @name

Enlarged Image Popup (p. 87)

The template to modify is your copy of the "image" template. In that template, you'll see a code segment like this:

TAG-WHEN tag STRING-APPEND 
               "a href=\""
               IMAGE-REF image
               "\""

Change this to:

TAG-WHEN tag STRING-APPEND 
               "a href=javascript:popup('enlarge.html?"
               IMAGE-REF image
               "') "

In addition, Editor V3.0 does not have a "raw-html." template. Instead, use x2-raw-html. as the template for the enlarge page.

Alphabetized Index Page

You will have to modify your copy of the sitemap template. Everything starting with the FOR-EACH operator in the book will replace the entire FOR-EACH block in the sitemap template.

Hierarchical Index Page

In Editor V3, the ITEM operator requires its contents to be pasted within, not after, so if you are using editor V3, the CALL :hierarchy-list expressions in the templates will have to be pasted within the ITEM operator.

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