OXID eShop Visual CMS: Custom Widgets
OXID eShop Visual CMS: Custom Widgets
A CMS (Content Management System) typically is a tool, that facilitates the creation of web content. However, in e-commerce simple web content by far does not satisfy all needs, because references and interactions with shop data (products, categories, campaigns…) are required. Therefore OXID’s new built-in CMS „Visual CMS“ should be seen as a real „e-commerce CMS“. It provides many standard features for e-commerce daily business. Moreover, its OXID module-character allows to easily make use of OXID’s core services and data in order to accelerate customization.
The „Visual CMS“ makes it pretty easy to create custom enhancements, which is a major benefit for shop manufacturers and shop owners. Why
* Shop manufacturers can economically provide custom solutions for their clients. This significantly increases the attractiveness of their offers and distinguishes them from other (standard) solutions.
* Shop owners do not want to adapt their daily content-driven business to the standard usability of a shop. It might slow them down because it was never designed to satisfy their special use-case, e.g. in terms of corporate design. Shop owners want the shop to adapt to their own special processes, which is why creating custom widgets is a perfect alternative. Plus: the better a widget has been designed, the less technical or web know-how is required by those who will create web content in the end. Less specialists means less costs.
Imagine you wanted to create a recurring element for the shop front end. Let’s say, your landing pages need a „box“ element as shown in the picture above. Requirements for it:
– You want to set a background picture
– You want to enter a certain text or message
If a user moves his mouse over this element, other things should happen:
– An extra text should appear
– A color effect should bleach the background picture a bit in a smooth fade
– The element should be clickable and direct you to a specified product of your shop
Now in terms of corporate design there are many things to consider. Both, message positions and styles should always be consistent. The mouse-over effects must be the same for all elements. All these points are essential to make a professional impression when it comes to corporate design. Then there is a technical component as well, as you need to specify the URL of a certain product in a clickable element. All these necessities should not hinder the primary goal to create what it is all about: content driven shopping worlds.
Creating picture-only solutions fails when it comes to multilingual pages or SEO. Giving the user a high degree of freedom by providing WYSIWYG editors and code terminals will pretty sure result in flaws of the corporate design. So, in this case an ideal solution would be a mask for a content creator, where only content-relevant things can be entered and the rest is automatically done by the widget.
These were just a few examples of what can be achieved with custom widgets. A solution like this can be created by a developer in a few steps. A customer afterwards profits from a customized, personalized and easy to use widget tailored to his special needs and in accordance to his corporate design. Just contact us, if you want to know more!
Find more information about OXID eShop 5.3 here!