WebSphere Commerce Developer

Task flow: Enabling Commerce Composer support for a starter store

You must update your store pages to provide business users the capability to design and manage the store pages with the Commerce Composer.

The Commerce Composer gives business users the freedom to quickly create and assemble the contents of your store pages without involving IT. By using a library of prebuilt layout templates and widgets, business users can manage store page layouts directly in Management Center. The Commerce Composer offers a streamlined workflow that improves your productivity and reduces time-to-market for your campaigns.

For more information about the Commerce Composer, see Commerce Composer overview.

Note: You can use the following instructions as a guide for updating store pages for any starter store other than the Aurora starter store that is provided with WebSphere Commerce. By default, the Aurora starter store that is provided with WebSphere Commerce and higher is enabled to use the Commerce Composer.

Before you begin

Ensure that you complete the following tasks:
  • Verify that you have a working WebSphere Commerce store.
  • Enable WebSphere Commerce search. WebSphere Commerce search must be enabled for your WebSphere Commerce store before your store can use certain Commerce Composer widgets or extend layout assignments for search results pages when customers use catalog entry synonyms as search terms.
    • Many widgets use WebSphere Commerce search APIs to retrieve catalog information. If WebSphere Commerce search is not enabled, these widgets do not work.
    • The Commerce Composer framework uses WebSphere Commerce search to check search term associations for synonyms of a customer search term. If the synonyms are included in the search term associations for a catalog entry, the Commerce Composer framework can use the layout assignment for that catalog entry. If WebSphere Commerce search is not enabled, the Commerce Composer tool cannot check the search term associations. For more information about using synonyms with layout assignments, see Layout assignments for search terms.

    As part of enabling WebSphere Commerce search, ensure that you build the search index for your store. For more information, see Building the WebSphere Commerce Search index.

  • Update your store to Dojo 1.8. To support the use of Commerce Composer widgets and templates on your store pages, your store must use Dojo 1.8. If your store is not updated to use Dojo 1.8, update the Stores\WebContent\store\include\JSTLEnvironmentSetup.jspf file for your store, where store is the name of your store directory. Change the value of the dojoFile attribute in the file to point to dojo18 instead of an earlier version.
    Note: If your store includes custom code that uses Dojo, you might need to update the existing custom code to support the update to Dojo 1.8.
  • Download and extract the following compressed file into a temporary directory, CommerceComposerStarterStoreSupport.zip.

About this task

By enabling your store to use the Commerce Composer to design and manage your store pages, you can gain the following benefits:
  • Business users can use Commerce Composer templates and widgets to design and configure store pages without the need for IT assistance.
  • Cleaner organization of code.
  • Separation of data and presentation.
  • Ease of reuse of code. For example, a Header widget and Footer widget can be easily used in the layout for all store pages.

With support for designing and managing pages with the Commerce Composer added, business users can use the widgets and templates that are provided with WebSphere Commerce to design your store pages. Store developers can also create custom assets for use with the Commerce Composer. For more information about developing custom assets for use with the Commerce Composer, see Developing Commerce Composer assets.

As an example for updating starter store pages to support the use of the Commerce Composer to design and manage the pages, the following instructions modify one catalog page and three static content pages. Specifically, these instructions are updating a AuroraESite starter store Product Details page, Home page, Help page, and Site Map page. To update the Search Results page and category pages for your store, use the steps for updating the Product Details page as a guide. The steps for updating the category and Search Results catalog pages are similar to the steps you complete for updating the Product Details page for your store. The specific code that you must use to update the Search Results page and category pages can be different than the code for updating the Product Details page.

Procedure