Tutorial: Custom Yahoo Store: 2/6

You don’t really need global variables to create custom templates. Global variables help you record variable data that is distributed across the site and may change as needed. Hence, the name “global variable.” Examples might include title of your homepage and location of your images. If you don’t think this information will ever change, you can skip this step and hard code the information right into your templates. But if you want to control certain variables via console without code…

Step 2. Create global variables for your store

Assuming you’ve chosen to set a few global variables. Within the Store Control Panel, go to Store Manager and select the Variables tab. Collapse all the expanded trees (you won’t be using them). Create the following custom variables (type “text”):

• Store-name – for the title of your homepage
• Href-code-lib – for the url to your code library, namely “http://c.yourstore.com/”
• Href-images-lib – for the url to your images library, namely “http://i.images.com/”
  (don’t forget the trailing slashes on those urls)

You can also create a custom variable (type “med-text”) called Description for your homepage meta tag. Surprisingly, Yahoo has not provided one by default. This is what the search engines will display under the link to your homepage.

Each of these variables can now be referenced in RTML as @store-name, @href-code-lib, @href-images-lib and @description.

For my store, I also added a few additional ones for my google analytics account (google-uacct), the filenames of my assets like store logo (logo-filename), stylesheet (css-filename) and javascript (js-filename) assets. I also added 3 more text fields to manage links in my store’s global-nav, header-links and footer-links.

Again, none of these variables are really necessary. You can hardwire them into the templates, or not have them at all. But for Sunfitters, we needed them and I would prefer to manage this stuff as variables, outside the code set.

When your complete with setting global variables, you can proceed to Step 3: Custom Types

Step 1: Digital Assets < Step 2 > Step 3: Custom Types