How the Catalog is Organized
Warning: This page applies to the legacy UltraCart Catalog, which was replaced by UltraCart StoreFronts in May 2015. This content is kept only for long-time merchants still running a legacy catalog.
For current storefront and catalog management, see:
StoreFronts User Guide (start here)
StoreFronts Overview (how StoreFronts works, key concepts)
StoreFront Themes & Visual Builder (theme selection, Visual Builder basics)
Storefront File Manager (hosting files in UltraCart)
Creating and Managing Pages (add pages, navigation, layouts)
Menus and Navigation (primary menus, category menus, links)
Widgets and Content Blocks (common widgets, configuration patterns)
Domains, SSL, and StoreFront Publishing (DNS, go-live checklist, environment/publishing flow)
If you’re new to StoreFronts, start with the StoreFronts Overview, then move into Themes & Visual Builder, and finally Pages + Menus as you build out your site structure.
The UltraCart Catalog System has many different objects interacting to create the web page that your customer experiences. In this chapter, we will cover the basis of how the catalog operates to give you some context to begin learning the technical details.
Catalogs are organized in a hierarchy of levels know as groups. When a customer enters a URL on your website, UltraCart parses the URL to determine the group that the customer is requesting. The system then fetches all the data associated with the group and passes it through a rendering system. The rendering system uses the Velocity scripting language written in the templates to process the data. The output is the web page that the end user sees.
Each group within a catalog has two templates associated with it: group view and item view. If the customer requests the URL /products/dvd/ within your catalog, then it would render the page with the group view. If the customer requested the URL /products/dvd/sony-brdvd2001.html, it would render the item template associated with the group for the particular item ID specified at the end of the URL.
The bulk of a site is rendered using templates and the group hierarchy, but there are two other ways to have additional pages on your site. The first way is with an arbitrary page which is a template located at a specific URL. For example, a pop-up image gallery might be an arbitrary page /products/popupGallery.html. The second way is a static HTML page that is located on the virtual FTP server. By having a virtual FTP server available for your catalog, you can store HTML, images, CSS, JavaScript, movie files, and more on your website just like traditional hosting environments.