Numerous questions regarding mycafecommerce store

I started a free demo on cafe commerce and am overall happy with what I'm seeing. My aunt wants to start and online store and I'm kicking the tires for her and making sure this offers everything she will need to configure her store and maintain it moving forward. To that end, I have some questions that I need answered ASAP (demo expires in a few days):


How do you show that a product is on sale? I can flag a product as on sale, but I *only* see it reflected in the cart, but nowhere else. I need to show a visual "this is on sale!" tag everywhere the product appears. Is this possible? If so, how? If not ... really?

What happens to my data when I need to change hosts? Let's assume that a year from now the store is going gangbusters and we need to build a new store from scratch and host it elsewhere. Can I and how do I get my data exported (user/product/order history, etc)?

As an admin, am I able to create my own template? As an example, if I go to Page Settings --> Catalog & Detail, I see just a handful of options for page layout. Do I have any low-level (programmatic? css? other?) control over my own specific layout?

How do I write the category header (or add a category image) at the top of the category page? Is that possible? As an example ... I go to my store, via the menus I choose products, then choose a category (e.g. Beer). When I land on that page, the left-hand menu item for Beer is not highlighted in any way, nor is there a Beer text header. Am I able to add a dynamic header, so on the Beer page it says "Beer", and on the "Wine" page it says "Wine"? Even better would be to have the ability to know which category I am in and show an appropriate category image.

Related to the question above, how do I highlight the category left-hand menu item when a category is selected?

As an FYI, I'm a long-time web developer and not afraid to get my hands dirty (if that's even possible). I know I can override CSS, but have not seen anywhere to script or man-handle templates or anything like that.

Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide!

Dave

Power Messenger will not show a On Sale message for the products, one way you c can get around this is to create a New category called sale and add all sale items to the category. it is an excellent suggestion, I will add a feature request to have this considered for an update.

In the Cafe Commerce Admin, there is an option to export the data. If you need a more complete database dump, let us know, and we can provide that for you.

Cafe Commerce does not allow you to use a custom template. On the Design Tab, go to the advanced section, this section allows you to create custom CSS rules to override the Cafe Commerce CSS.

You can use fire bug in fire fox to inspect page elements and see the css and selector names. useing those selector names, create css rule in the advanced section.

Showing the category name / highlighting the category are also not features that are implemented in cafe commerce, but they are excellent suggestions, and i will add them to the feature request list.

Thanks Jason, I appreciate the quick response to all of my questions. I'll try adding products to a new Sale category and see if that will suffice.

I dont have any time frame for when suggestions may be added, All i can do is add the suggestion to the feature request list.

Our Cafe Commerce team has just let me know they have implemented Showing the Sale price for items on the Product Results and Details pages.

They will be looking into implementing your other suggestions as well.

Wow, awesome! I just checked it out and it looks and works great.

You guys rock!

Does the sale price element have it's own class so I can change the color to make it pop a little more?

looking at the source code, on the details page:
<div id="details-sale-price" style="display: block;"> Sale Price: $<span id="ProductSalePrice">7.19</span></div>

there is:
#details-sale-price

and:
#ProductSalePrice

on the results page, the code for the sale price:
<span class="results-sale-price">Sale Price: $7.19 - $10.99</span>

so the selector would be:
.results-sale-price


and on the home page the code for the sale price is:
<div id="sale-featured-price">
Sale Price: $7.19 </div>


so use the following selector:
#sale-featured-price

Perfect, thanks again!