1. Open the Management Center and expand the path eCommerce | Product Catalog | Campaigns.
2. Ignore any existing campaigns and click New Campaign on the toolbar and enter a name such as Summer Season.
3. Leave the Start and End date set to their defaults. The default date is today’s date and
the end date is about a month from now. This means the campaign will be active immediately so you can use it to test out campaigns.
If you enable Always valid the campaign has no end-date and will be active until you change it, or deactivate it. You can (temporarily) deactivate a campaign by deselecting the Active checkbox.
4. Click Save and close on the toolbar to save your campaign.
5. Click eCommerce in the Main Menu and locate one of the products you created earlier. On the Details tab, in the Activate product section choose the campaign you just created, shown in Figure 4-26:
Figure 4-38
6. Open the frontend of the web site in a new browser window and locate the product you just modified in a list. It should be available on the Catalog page which you can access from the site’s menu bar.
7. Leave the page with the product open in your browser and return to Dynamicweb. Open the Management Center again and locate the campaign you created earlier. Uncheck the Active checkbox and save the changes.
8. Go back to the browser window with the frontend page and refresh it. The product should now be removed from the list.
Campaigns are great to make products available during a specific period of time only, as with the “Summer Season” example. You can use them for other seasonal periods such as Christmas (not much point in selling Christmas decorations after December 26th) or any period of time your business requirements dictate.
When working with variants – which you’ll learn more about in the next chapter – you have the same option available; enabling you to activate certain variants during a specific period of time. Additionally, you can alter a product’s or variant’s price during a campaign. You’ll learn more about prices in Chapter 9.
So far in this chapter you’ve seen how to display product groups in the content section of a web page using the Product Catalog module. But quite often, you’ll want to make the available eCommerce groups part of your site’s navigation structure. You’ll see how to do this in the next section.
4.9 eCommerce Navigation
In order to understand what eCommerce Navigation can do for you, consider the following page shown in Figure 4-39
Figure 4-39
In the left menu, you see a list of all the groups in your shop at the first level. The Bikes group has been expanded and shows its two child groups as well. To create this
navigation structure you could add a Product Catalog module to the page and configure it to display the groups. However, Dynamicweb has a much easier solution for this. Depending on your exact requirements and how you want the groups to appear, you have a few options:
1. Enable eCommerce Navigation for a page and use your standard XSLT menu to render the groups as part of the main navigation. This can be useful if you want to display the groups directly as child menu items to, say, the Catalog page shown in Figure 4-39. 2. Enable eCommerce Navigation for a page and use a custom XSLT file to render just the
eCommerce groups anywhere you want from your main Layout file. This is shown in Figure 4-39 under the Catalog heading in the left column.
3. Create a hidden page that has eCommerce Navigation set up and then refer to this page from your Layout file.
With options 1 and 2, you need to assign the eCommerce Navigation to every page where you want the group structure to appear. This can be exactly what you need if you want to display the structure on a few pages only. However, if you have a lot of pages that need to display the groups, this can be tedious to implement. In those cases, you can set up and link to a hidden page that shows the groups from your Layout file. The few pages that don’t need the group structure could then be based on a different Layout file.
In the next section, I’ll show you how to enable eCommerce Navigation for a page, followed by a walkthrough that shows you how to implement each of the three scenarios.
4.9.1 Enabling eCommerce Navigation
You enable eCommerce Navigation for a Dynamicweb page using its Properties screen as follows:
1. Right-click a page in the Navigation Panel and choose Properties.
2. Switch to the Options tab and click Navigation. The Graphical navigation dialog appears.
3. Enable the eCom groups checkbox. The Graphical navigation dialog should now look like this:
Figure 4-40
4. Leave the Parent group set to Groups and then choose between All groups and
Selected groups depending on your needs. If you choose Selected groups, you get a Group picker that enables you to choose one or more groups explicitly.
5. If you want to limit the level of sub groups that appear when expanding a parent group, choose a value from the Max levels drop down. If you choose 1, only the top level groups will be shown. If you consider Figure 4-27, a setting of 1 means you won’t see
the Mountain Bikes and Hybrid Bikes when you click the Bikes group. Leaving this value set to All levels automatically shows the available sub groups at the next level when you expand a parent group.
6. Finally, for the Product page item, use the page picker to select a page to which the navigation system should link. This should be a page with the Product Catalog module on it. If the current page you’re editing is already the Product Catalog page, simply create a link to itself using the page picker.
7. Finally, click OK to apply the changes.
In the next two walkthroughs you use the eCommerce Navigation to implement each of the three scenarios discussed earlier.