How to Reorganize your Zazzle Sidebar

In Zazzle’s “Advanced Store Customization” system it’s possible to do a heck of a lot with your gallery/store there. But it can be confusing at the beginning – so here is a step by step tutorial on something you may want to do – change the order of the elements that make up your Zazzle store’s sidebar.

First things first!

Setting up an additional gallery/store at Zazzle is free. Do that right now, and set it to “Private”. This is where you should experiment with your store layout – don’t put the changes into your public store until you’re sure they all work the way you want!

Copy the Appearance/CSS, Appearance/Layout, and Content/Content Definitions fields from Myzazzle. Paste those into the same areas of your private gallery. Now your private gallery has all the Advanced settings from your public store – so when you’re done, you can copy them in the Private gallery and paste them back into the public one.

Now You’re Ready.

There are some limitations to how down and dirty you can get with your sidebar’s structure, but there’s more to do than the simple skinning facelift I wrote about earlier.

A couple of things are impossible, at least to anyone who is not smarter than me. You can’t edit what a nav bar module can contain (like removing a single item from the infonavigation module) and you cannot, I think, add HTML in between modules.

But what you can do is to change the order of the modules as they appear; you can have the same (or a different) sidebar on any pages you like.

Here’s what the default sidebar looks like in the “Content” section of your gallery admin pages:

<z:content placeholder="navpane">

<z:module name="infonavigation" visible="true" />

<z:module name="gallerystatistics" visible="true" />

<z:module name="productsearch" visible="true" target="products" />

<z:module name="featuredcategories" visible="true" target="products" />

<z:module name="productlines" visible="true" target="products" />

<z:module name="producttypes" visible="true" target="products" />

<z:module name="tags" visible="true" target="products" />

</z:content>

If you look farther, you’ll see that on certain pages the sidebar only contains “infonavigation”. You can, if you like, copy and paste the main version of the navpane to all the other pages.

You can also change the order of the modules, and change which modules are visible – to do that second, you change the “Visible” properties from “true” to “false”, or from “false” to “true”.

Here’s an example of the nav bar I’m using. It’s what makes sense to me, but I’m not saying that you should change yours to match. You should change yours, if at all, to something that makes sense to you. The important thing is that… you can.

Here’s mine:

<z:content placeholder="navpane">

<z:module name="productsearch" visible="true" target="products" />

<z:module name="productlines" visible="true" target="products" />

<z:module name="infonavigation" visible="true" />

<z:module name="featuredcategories" visible="true" target="products" />

<z:module name="producttypes" visible="false" target="products" />

<z:module name="gallerystatistics" visible="false" />

<z:module name="tags" visible="false" target="products" />

</z:content>

So what mine does is to push “Search” and “Product Lines” to the top. I’ve made “Product Types” invisible because for me, they’re redundant (that’s how my lines are organized already).

It’s best to mess around with this in a private gallery until you get something you like. But try experimenting! It’s pretty neat.