A ShopSite more information page only gets created once. Sounds like a simple and intuitive statement. For the most part it is.

However, it’s not completely cut and dry if you have a product assigned to more than one page in ShopSite…

First come, first serve

Even though a moreinfo page is created once, what happens if a product is assigned to multiple pages?

• If you’re doing a full regenerate in ShopSite, the first page the ShopSite software is processing that has the product assigned to it will generate the moreinfo page.

• If you are editing a specific page that the product is on, click save, and then Publish, that specific page in ShopSite will control the moreinfo file being created.

• If you are editing the product itself, the first page the software finds for that product being assigned to will create the moreinfo file.

Why does it matter?

If all of your pages do not hardcode the product template in their page templates, then it doesn’t make much of a difference which page triggers the moreinfo file creation. The moreinfo page is generated the same in all scenarios.

If you do have some page templates that hardcode the product template in the [– LOOP PRODUCTS –] section, and this particular page is the first one ShopSite is working with on a publish/regen, your moreinfo page may be different from what you expected, or even change from publish to publish.

This can be a tough one to track down, as it can appear as if ShopSite has a mind of its own when generating more information pages. Even though you assigned a different product template to a product, it could use an alternate one if one of the pages it’s assigned to controls the creation of the file, and that page template has a hardcoded product template. (I tried to avoid a long run-on sentence to make this clearer…)

Breadcrumbs can be affected too

If you use breadcrumb navigation in your pages, this will be affected by this issue as well. A moreinfo page will only be generated once, so whatever page caused it to be generated will be the breadcrumb path in your navigation, regardless of how the customer actually arrived at this product page.

This navigation could even change depending on what type of publish is performed.

…

If you are using some hardcoded product templates in some of your page templates, and this phenomenon affects your site, you could add code to your product template to detect which product is being generated and alter the display accordingly to deal with specific cases.

If you find yourself scratching your head trying to figure out why your moreinfo page is not using the template you expect, the info above is the likely culprit.