Glossary

This glossary described the key concepts and terminology throughout nopCommerce and our products and is a good place to get started learning how to set up and use nopCommerce and our products. 

PLUGIN

An extension for nopCommerce that provides additional functionality on top of nopCommerce.  Plugins are the best way to extend nopCommerce as they are completely separated from the core nopCommerce framework, which makes them easily upgradable to newer versions of nopCommerce.  A plugin can be used for integrating a payment provider like PayPal (payment plugin), a shipping provider like UPS, FedEx or a tax provider.  A widget plugin is a plugin that usually has a visual public part that can be displayed in a specific places in the store called widget zones. 

RESOURCE

A text that is displayed in the store.  Most of the text parts in nopCommerce are resources i.e "Add to Cart" button text is a resource.  Resources are used for localization purposes and allow your store to support many languages.  Each resource consists of three parts - language, key and value.  The key part is unique i.e "shoppingcart.addtocart" and the value part is the actual text that is displayed i.e "Add to Cart".  The resources in nopCommerce are distrubuted in language packs and have all the resources translated for a specific language i.e the "shoppingcart.addtocart" resource in the Italian language pack is "Aggiungi al carrello".  The resources are usually divided in two main groups - Public and Admin.  The public resources are the ones that are visible in the store frontend and are the ones your clients will see while shopping in your store.  The Admin resources are visible only in the Administration of the store, which means that only the store administrators will see them.  All Admin resources have their keys prefixed with Admin i.e "Admin. Catalog. Products".  The resources can easily be changed from the nopCommerce Administration by going to Configuration -> Languages and click on the "View string resources". 

SETTING

A way to control the different features in your nopCommerce store.  The settings in nopCommerce are stored for the whole store and are unique (they are not per language).  Most of the settings are separated in different groups/pages in the administration under the Configuration -> Settings menu i.e Catalog settings, Customer settings, Order settings etc.  Some of the settings in nopCommerce are not visible in any of these settings pages and can be accessed only via the Configuration -> All Settings page. 

THEME

A set of files that contains the web site layout and styling.  A theme consists of Razor view files (.cshtml) that contain the rendered markup(HTML) of the web site, the styles of the web site (.css) and the images used in the styling of the site. 

WIDGET

A plugin that can be added to one or many widget zones in nopCommerce.  When a plugin is added to a widget zone then the plugin is displayed in that widget zone.  Some plugins can be added to multiple widget zones, which means that this plugin will be shown on all these places in your store. 

WIDGET ZONE

A specific place in the nopCommerce store.  For example the "left_side_column_before" widget zone as the name implies is the position before the left column in your store on all the pages that have a left colomn.  There are many widget zones available in nopCommerce, which gives you a lot of options for placing and displaying your plugins.