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Small customizations. How to handle?

Adrian Ursu Dynamicweb Employee
Adrian Ursu
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Hi guys,

I am trying my hand on the first Rapido 3.0 implementation. iIt is actually an upgrade from Rapido 2.1.

I have received a few small requests from my customer, and I want to understand how it would be better to handle them.

For example, my customer has most of the products with variants and the variants have different prices. That's why he wants to display a "starting from" text in from of the prices on the Product List.

My investigation showed that this part is handled by the ViewGrid, ViewList and ViewDetail blocks.

Is there any way I can make this change without making a custom version of the ProductRendered and custom versions for each block?

Thank you,

Adrian


Replies

 
Karsten Thuen Dynamicweb Employee
Karsten Thuen
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Hi Adrian

Great question. Of course you can write your own list view. And if you need all three, you will have to write three list views. But that will of course require a lot of maintenence, and you will need to check these carefully on each Rapido upgrade.

I have another idea that may work in this case. Maybe you can use CSS and use a pseudoselector + the "content" property: https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_gen_content.asp

If you, for example, needs this for the regular list view, then you will have to target it like this:

.price--product-list.dw-mod::before {
    content: "From "
}

There may be more styling needed for it to actually render. But maybe the idea works?

We will consider if we can make even more extensability points available for the product list views. So you will have more posibilities to make small customizations without touching the large templates.

 

Best regards
Karsten Thuen 

 

 
Adrian Ursu Dynamicweb Employee
Adrian Ursu
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Hi Karsten,

Thank you for your answer.

I believe I will end up customizing everything for this project :)

For this change, CSS is not enough since I need to put the text only for products with variants :)

I ended up creating custom files for every template in the ProductList folder.

Probably my project is not a good example for the regular/ideal use of Rapido.

It would be very nice to have more granularity on customization but I believe this will be hard to accomplish without making 1000 checkboxes :).
I believe Rapido is a good starting point as it is and it is important to understand the use cases that can benefit from upgradability.

I could still use a good documentation on how to use Custom Blocks or customize existing ones.

Thank you,

Adrian

 
Karsten Thuen Dynamicweb Employee
Karsten Thuen
Reply

Hi Adrian

The feedback is always appreciated. We can always do things better. I think your case here is still great as it may demonstrate an area we could improve for broarder use. 

If you take a look at the product page template it is much more complete regarding the extensibility points and where you can easily customize. And this actually demonstrates your 1000 checkbox point: Throug website settings it is easily possible to do a lot of customization for the product page. But of course there is a limit, as we do not want 1000 checkboxes and a system that is not manageble. The great thing here is that the configurations that is not possible through website settings is really easy to do in the template, using the Blocks concept. 

Hopefully, someday, the concept will be that, in many cases, if configuration through website settings is not enough, it is possible to write more advanced configurations through code. 

I am sorry that there currently is a little too little documentation for the Blocks. We have written a bit more, and we are currently making some small improvements to the Rapido.dll to make all this a little easier to work with. More documentation will soon come.

 

Best regards
Karsten Thuen

 
Nicolai Pedersen
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Hi Adrian

Also remember the 'spirit' of Rapido. The spirit is not to be able to solve all solutions in the world. If you have customers with a strong focus on cost, risk and agility, they can easily adapt their ecommerce to the features Rapido comes with. If they have a strong focus on something else, you just change the templates all that you want.

The purpose of Rapido is not to be customisable and extenable for all kinds of scenarios - but where we see the most common (minor) needs for it. So if say, 8 of 10 customers needs it, it makes sense to implement. But if 1 out of 100 needs it is not for Rapido (or Dynamicweb for that matter).

BR Nicolai

 
Adrian Ursu Dynamicweb Employee
Adrian Ursu
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Hi Nicolai,
I completely agree. Rapido should not be a Swiss Army Knife. It should serve specific scenarios. It cannot solve everything nor should it aim at solving everything.

But it is also important to understand the limitations and the methods for extending it.

A recorded webinar with your presentation from the summit about customising, would be very helpful.

I can say that even for more complex scenarios Rapido can serve as a starting point. Eventually every customer will want some level of customization. Having a pretty feature rich version 1.0 would help the customer identify what they really need and we can customize less.

I am pretty happy with using it even as a starting point. Future projects will benefit from newer functionalities while older ones will have to be manually upgraded.

Thank you,

Adrian

 

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