Site Templates

LearningCart is designed to operate as a “semi-custom” platform. We strive to offer our clients full control over the look, feel and operation of their site while giving them the benefits of easy to deploy upgrades. From a very high level - your sites look and feel can be extensively customized without have to change any of the underlying code.

LearningCart is able to accomplish this utilizing the following approach:

Page Templates
With the LearningCart system any time a user adds/edits a piece of content, a product or a blog entry they are able to select the page template they would like to use.  Page templates control the overall look and feel of the page. In the web development world we call this the page “wrapper” –  This wrapper is what will contain the content they enter.

Along with controlling the page “wrapper” each template can also use its own specific set of rules to format the content on the page. This means that each template also has control over font colors, sizes, spacing between elements and much more.

Externalized Text
The content of the entire customer facing portion of the LearningCart system is contained in an easy to edit XML file.  This means that you can easily customize any of the default text anywhere in the LearningCart system.  

Page Formatting Strings
For some clients, the ability to control the page template/wrapper is not enough. They have specific requirements on how their content appears. For areas of the site such as Products and Blog Entries, we allow complete control via page formatting strings. Essentially a page formatting string is a simple way of describing to LearningCart how you want your content to appear. So for a blog post for instance, one customer may want the title of the blog to be at the top of the page, another client may want the title of the page to be at the top of the page.  Page formatting strings allow these sorts of changes to be possible without having to edit any site level code.

Custom Controls
For clients that have very unique and specific needs, LearningCart allows the creation of custom controls. If a client chooses to leverage a custom control, they can completely customize how a page looks and functions. This allows users to completely customize core areas of the system while still allowing them to easily upgrade to future releases.