Changing the Look and Feel of Ilance

[D_D]

Hello. I am new to ILance Forum and in the process of evaluating the product for use on my new website start-up.

I have been in contact with website design companies that have quoted me thousands of $dollars to design a site. Being on the shoe-string budget that I am, I was VERY happy to find ILance and was blown away by the quality of the product, its features, and the quick response to my questions that I have recieved from the Staff.

I am a businessman and not a programmer, or developer. I have some technical backround, but none that involves code or design.

My question is about changing the look and feel of the product to suite my particular needs and tastes. What is involved with this in terms of difficulty and cost - and what tools are necessary. I am concerned that it is way over my head and the cost to get developers and programmers involved will bring me back to where I started...

any advice on this would be greatly appreciated!

[lawsu]

I got the same background as you :)

Actually it would be great if ILance can provide more selection of template to choose from.

I am also looking for web designer to mod some changes to the design.

[wterpilo]

Hello. I am new to ILance Forum and in the process of evaluating the product for use on my new website start-up.

Welcome new user in ILance community :)

I have been in contact with website design companies that have quoted me thousands of $dollars to design a site. Being on the shoe-string budget that I am, I was VERY happy to find ILance and was blown away by the quality of the product, its features, and the quick response to my questions that I have recieved from the Staff.

I am a businessman and not a programmer, or developer. I have some technical backround, but none that involves code or design.

My question is about changing the look and feel of the product to suite my particular needs and tastes. What is involved with this in terms of difficulty and cost - and what tools are necessary. I am concerned that it is way over my head and the cost to get developers and programmers involved will bring me back to where I started...

any advice on this would be greatly appreciated!
Probably you will need 2 people. First is graphic designer and other someone experienced in ILance who will implement that template. For sure you will need to pay for that. I don't think you'll find anyone who would like to work for free :)
Technical knowledge about ILance you will find on forum and most simple cases we're able to solve here. When you purchase you will see rest of the forum where we support our users. If you will have any special requirements you will need to hire developer to help you with modifications.
But I think in that case you will be much forward because you don't waist time for writing something from the scratch. You just need to develop what you have and that will reduce time and money.

That's all I can help you right now.

Wojtek

[wterpilo]

Hi guys
I forgot to mention that you can start looking for developers here www.ilance.org :)

Wojtek

[D_D]

Thank you for the information. I will check into hiring a developer on ilance.org.

[Peter]

I have been in contact with website design companies that have quoted me thousands of $dollars to design a site.


Exactly. But there is also one other big thing you're missing in this equation if I may ..

1. You are quoted thousands based on only static designs. Sure it looks nice, but it doesn't do much other than a contact us form request. :) A standard 5 to 10 page site averages around $5k to $10k (firms, not freelancers). Freelancers .. you can find $500 to $5k. Firms support you, freelancers do not. The other problem with freelancers is they tend to "get sick" or run away with the code, or not fulfill their duties, so much can go wrong, it usually does.

2. Having a product such as ILance affordable to you, you are saving (yes, I'll be brutally honest here) at least $50k. If you took 6 programmers gave them 1 year they still wouldn't have created something as nearly feature packed. But then again, we're not even addressing the time they will spend based on the bugs or issues you find :) This is huge work to say the least. We're up to about $100k for the first year now. So, now the product is built, some bugs were found and fixed, it's ready to launch.

3. Optimization. You've recently discovered major issues because after 1000 users were added, it spammed them all because a developer wasn't able to test "hard to find and reproduce bugs" based on logic that can't happen unless this, that and the other occurs. Now, the real bugs come to the surface. Another $10k to find, figure out and squash.

The point I'm trying to make here is that ILance is IMO priced to sell, and saves you not only thousands, but hundreds of thousands. If you ever found a bug, you can report it to our web site, we fix and you receive a patch or update instructions on how to fix it in the code. We're good like that :)


Being on the shoe-string budget that I am, I was VERY happy to find ILance and was blown away by the quality of the product, its features, and the quick response to my questions that I have recieved from the Staff.


I appreciate your kind words. Thanks. We are offering a solid product and great support. The users and staff really keep this place rockin' .. something that not many other vendors or freelancers can offer in my opinion.


I am a businessman and not a programmer, or developer. I have some technical backround, but none that involves code or design.


Fair enough :)

What is involved with this in terms of difficulty

There is no difficulty. When you are running the marketplace, you are more or less reviewing statistics, viewing transactions, moderating attachments (if you choose to do so) and/or listings and basically watching and waiting for fees to be paid in full that are generated from your marketplace to the end user. They pay for the service ILance marketplace provides them, based on your market niche. Let your niche be IT, Health, Construction, Moving/Shipping, fill_in_the_blank you're site will cater and connect trading partners.


and cost


Cost depends on what license you need when deciding to purchase ILance. We offer 4 unique and distinctive license tiers which cater to your business model. Some clients need 5 or more domains running the ILance solution, which our Enterprise caters to Unlimited Domains, Unlimited users for $5k

Then business start up companies usually enjoy moving forward with our $497 starter license which offers five thousand users seats to roll out with, 1 domain to launch on and is a quick and simple launch up and running smooth.

We also offer Addon Products which are priced to sell. So it all depends on what you need.


and what tools are necessary


An Internet Connection, a Server to host ILance on (we can provide that if you need it) and some time to manage, promote and market your marketplace. But when you get busy you just hire remote administrators whom are partners, family members and/or business associates in which you trust.


I am concerned that it is way over my head and the cost to get developers and programmers involved will bring me back to where I started...


That's the ultimate decision you'll need to make. Why not keep it simple?

1. Review ILance Demo.
2. Decide if that's what you need to get started NOW.
3. Decide and obtain quotes based on customization of PHP code.
4. Roll out < $1000 (In my opinion if you need customization).


any advice on this would be greatly appreciated!

Don't waste time. I'm serious, the longer you wait the longer it will take to figure things out. You have a goal, so did http://www.domystuff.com and they are doing pretty well from what I can see. They also chose ILance for their startup plan, changed the look and added some needed features that catered to them. Same idea here.

But the best advice I can give is you need to market and make your brand name come to life. Send out PR's, get in contact with similar markets, offer them tools like RSS job / products syndication via your ILance marketplace RSS feeds already integrated.. it's virtually endless and the tools are all there to get started now.

Good luck! :)

Regards,
Peter

[pjain]

Is there any documentation at all on changing the look and feel or changing the template engine used with iLance?

I find that there's too much html and css code embedded in the various .php files to get a complete understanding of the separation between the Model, the View (the html templates and css), and the Controller (business logic).

Great product but I wish the developer and theming documentation was better and adherence to MVC development practices were more widely used.

[Peter]

All main templates can be found in the template folder:

./templates/default/TEMPLATE_*.html. They begin with upper case characters. You'll see about 5-6 of them which deal with the main framework of the HTML layout within ILance.

As for the php embeded code, some areas contain <div> and then some functions attached standard css values to them : <div class="something">xxxx</div> .. in these situations if you are not to fond of having some "formatting" you can post a bug in the ILance bug Tracker to have these looked into to and made more stock without formatting.

Regards,
Peter

[wterpilo]

Hi
I'll prepare some tutorial on creating your own template and will publish it at www.ilanceblog.com

Wojtek

[pjain]

Thanks Peter!

That would be awesome wterpilo.

[kprashant]

Hi,

We have following queries:

We are trying to change layout of Ilance, which will be similar to attached file. But system is throwing an error. Could you please tell us how can we do it?

From where can we find database schemas? It will be easier for us to see the constraint of the tables. If you have any document regarding this then it will be helpful for us.

How can we debug the code so we will be able to trace an error where it occur.

Thanks,

[wterpilo]

Hi
really nice template :)
What error do you get?

Wojtek

[kprashant]

Hi,

We are getting "Warning: </if tag not closed within template!" error.

How can we change css and left side bar.

If you have any document regarding code or database can you provide us. It will help us to complete our site quickly.

Thanks,

[Peter]

What version of ILance are you using?

That error only presents itself when there is an <if condition=""> statement and no ending </if> is found.

Adding an ending </if> to the first conditional tag will resolve that error.

Good luck! :)

Peter

[kprashant]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

When we tried to change templates from templates/default, system is throwing an error.

We need to change css and left side bar. How can we do it.

Thanks,

[wterpilo]

Hi
what version do you use?

Wojtek

[kprashant]

Hi,
We are using version 3.1.6
Thanks,

[wterpilo]

Hi
css you can find in AdminCP->Languages->Templates->CSS
What exactly do you want to change in left CP? If you want to remove/add/modify items there you should look for them in /functions/xml/client_nav.xml

Wojtek