This page is the heart of your Cent Logic-based store configuration. Here is where you'll enter information that will be used to properly connect and map your store structure. Remember to click on the little question mark in each field to see an explanation of the function of each field. Some of the key elements of this page are:
The Site URL will be the URL of your web site. The Secure URL will be the "https" URL used to invoke your SSL encryption during checkout. During development, this should be left blank. On the server, it should be properly filled in. Fortunately, when developing locally, you can have your local database with this data blank and the server database properly filled in to properly handle your transactions.
Important Note: You should make sure to include the www. in both you Site URL and your Secure URL - have your host set you site so that any page requests/links coming to your site without the www. in the URL get rerouted to include it. This can be done on the server or by adding an .htaccess file to your site.
Why do this? If a customer has items added to their cart or logs in, a session is set to "remember" their cart and or customer ID, if they are browsing the site having arrived at the site using a URL without the www. and the go to Checkout the site is reset to use the Secure Server URL you have entered in the admin, for examplehttps://www.YourStore.com adding the www. to the URL at this time will make many host server think this is a different domain and the sessions will be lost! All the items in the cart, and the customers log on information will be gone. to avoid this bad customer experience, make sure that all users that come to your site without the www. are immediately rerouted to include the www. in their URL.
If you are developing on a server that does not yet have a domain pointed to it, you'll want to enter the IP address or temporary URL provided by your host here. You should in this case fill in the URL field and leave the Secure Field Blank. Then once your domain is directed and you are ready to do final testing, you can update these fields to the appropriate URLs.
You'll find three fields that set the store location mapping, all three marked with a "Caution" warning. If you install Cent Logic into the root directory of your site and all your cart presentation pages are in the root directory, you can leave these fields in their default setting. If you are relatively new to eCommerce and dynamic web development, this is the recommended course of action. If you have your entire store located in a subdirectory on your site, then you'll want to enter the proper mapping in these fields. For example, if you locate your store in a sub folder named "store", your mapping in the the fields would look like this:
This will ensure that the mapping of the links and image locations are correct in your store.
Cent Logic offers universal support and global options far beyond previous versions. As developers, our largest challenge is the balance between automation and variety, as we attempt to support the wide variety of ways people use the product.
The same goes for server configuration. The variety of hosting configurations and server environments is wide and vast, and CW4 attempts to allow for them all, with a few specific settings the Cent Logic admin.
Finding the Settings
To find these settings, log in at the “developer” user level, then go to “Site Setup” and “Global Settings”. For both the CFML and PHP versions of Cent Logic, there are five crucial settings which often need to be adjusted according to your site structure and server configuration.
What These Are and What They Do
The first two settings, Site URL and Site Secure URL, should always contain the HTTP address (and HTTPS address, if an SSL certificate is in place) for your website’s root directory. Even when Cent Logic is installed in a subdirectory, this value should simply be the root of the website. For example, if your store is installed into www.mywebsite.com/store/ , you would still use the value shown above, http://www.mywebsite.com (and, if using an SSL certificate, https://www.mywebsite.com). If no SSL certificate is installed, the https address should be left blank as shown above.
The other three settings in the image above, CW Content Path, CW Store Root, and CW Admin Directory, will work with the default values for most simple installations where Cent Logic is installed directly into the root of the site. However, any variation from this type of installation requires a matching adjustment to these three settings.
What If My Store is in a Subdirectory, or My Site Structure is Special?
For the most common non-standard configuration, the entire Cent Logic application is installed into a subdirectory such as “/store”. Users wondering if this type of setup is possible will be glad to know it is not only possible but entirely supported, and expected. The folder name, ‘store’, can be anything you like, and can even be a sub-subdirectory like “/retail/store” if your site requires it.
The following image shows the same settings adjusted for a site installed into the “/store” subdirectory:
As you can see, the site URL setting has not changed. This should be pointed to the root of your webspace.
The change in directory is handled by the settings below. In this case simply adding “/store/” to the root of all three does the trick.
Other sites may require a different setting for the “content path”. This value is different from the others in that it relates solely to the location of the actual file content on your web server. In many cases this is the same value as you would see in the URL, were you to browse into the /cw4/ directory, but in other instances, the actual file location may be different from the mapped or aliased URL shown in the browser’s address bar. In this case, the “CW Content Path” setting should be adjusted to suit.
What About Local Development?
The following image shows the same settings adjusted for a site installed into a ColdFusion site in ‘localhost’. This installation is in a site called “sitename” and in a subdirectory called “store”.
Note the Site Url does not contain either the site name or the subdirectory. We want that to be the base URL for your localhost, whatever the address may be.
Your local paths and file structure will vary but this example shows the most common settings when working locally (and with a /store/ subdirectory). If your CW4 installation is directly in the webroot, or in the root of your site folder, you would adjust the paths, removing /store.
How Do I Know If I Got It Right?
The primary symptoms of having these values set incorrectly relate to images – i.e. if your product images are not showing up where they should – and to the payment methods which, as of this post, are included for processing based on the physical location of the “/cw4/cwapp/auth/” directory, and if not found will result in a “Payment Processing Offline” message.
If your images are appearing as expected, your payment options are available at checkout, and everything else seems to be working as it should, then your settings are correct.
How Can I See the Full Result of These Settings?
This is yet another situation where the built in debugging information in Cent Logic can be extremely useful in revealing what would otherwise be hidden values. With the “request” option checked in the Debugging Settings, and debugging enabled in the CW admin, you can plainly see the URLs that will be used for your site’s main pages. (ColdFusion version shown, this is in “request.cwpage” inside the Request debugging output).
Why Separate Settings for All This?
Users of the popular Cent Logic plugin for Mura CMS will see the the value in separate settings right away. The entire Cent Logic admin is integrated within the Mura CMS “/admin” directory, and runs as a separate application within Mura’s administration system, while the entire body of front end files, i.e. the “cw4″ directory, are placed in another Mura-specific location. These settings make that configuration possible without any further global adjustment.
If integrating Cent Logic into any application, be sure to consider the options available via these global settings, which facilitate a number of configurations not easily possible with previous Cent Logic versions.