Overview

You are able to edit all images and templates used for your front-end via the FTP account provided to you by Aurora Commerce. This gives you complete control over the entire front-end design, including all CSS, JS, HTML and images. There are no restrictions in place regarding how these are setup, however if you are using any of the existing Aurora Javascript libraries, you will need to ensure that you are coding to the correct standard.  

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FTP access will be granted at request, however due to increased security precautions, this account will need to be locked down to specific IP addresses.

Guidelines

If you are manually editing front-end HTML/JS/CSS using Aurora, you should be using the following protocols:

• Take a copy of any work that is on live, prior to beginning any new work. No edits should ever be done onto live, but copied there from your test environment to ensure continuity and to also ensure that Aurora Commerce has your latest files without overwriting any work.  
• All work should be done on your own allocated test environment. This will likely be auroratest.  - the username/password will have been provided to you separately.
  • Once this is signed off, you should copy the complete template file from test to live, ensuring that you have once again tested it on live. If any errors occur, revert this change, go back to test and retry. If you are unable to resolve the issue, please contact Aurora Commerce after following these points. 

Mobile Templates

It is important to note that when using mobile templates the following directories are special "symlinks" which means they are a link/shortcut to another directory somewhere else rather than a physical directory:

mobile.example.com/_images/emails links to example.com/_images/emails

mobile.example.com/emails links to example.com/emails

• where  "example.com" is the desktop template directory and "mobile.example.com" is the mobile template directory

These symlinks allow the email templates and images to be managed centrally for the mobile and desktop site, care must be taken not to remove these as this may end up with duplicated templates or images, a broken email sending process, or missing images.

mobile.example.com_images/emails links to example.com/_images/emails

Image Naming Conventions

There are many templates and images in the front-end and the way in which they are named is extremely important. You must:

• Never change the name of an existing template, as doing so will cause the system to be unable to find said template and it will fail when loading the page.
• Only name images and new templates using the following characters: a-Z, 0-9 and any of the these: _(Underscore) -(Hyphen) .(Period). All other characters and spaces should be avoided. Please see the following example of well formed and badly formed filenames.

These two examples are bad as they both include a space in either the directory or file name:

_images/my directory/myImage.jpg
_images/myDirectory/my image.jpg

These are bad because they feature characters that are not recommended for use in the filesystem:

_images/myDirectory!/myImage.jpg
_images/my^Directory/myImage.jpg
_images/myDirectory!/my=Image.jpg

The following two are recommended and acceptable methods of naming your files:

_images/myDirectory/myImage.jpg
_images/my_directory/my_image.jpg

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If you do not follow these conventions then costly errors can occur when managing system updates and maintenance.