Smart Contractor
Website Publishing Setup

To open the Website Publishing Setup form, click on Setup in the shortcut or drop-down menu, then click on Other, then click on Website Publishing.

To be able to publish customer job information on your web site...

  1. You must have a web site.
  2. Your web site host must provide you with FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access to your website folder.
  3. Your FTP login account must has read/write/delete access to the web site folder.

This is typical of a situation where you (or your web site developer) develop your web site on your computer and upload it to your web site host, or if your website is created in a "content management system such as WordPress or Joomla. Some web site hosts (known as "web site in a box") only allow you to use their web based editing tools to develop your web site online. This type of web site will work with Smart Contractor as long as you also have FTP access to your website folder.

Here's how it works:

  1. Enter information in the prompts (discussed below) to set up Smart Contractor to upload to your website.
  2. Specify documents to be made available to your customers on your website.
  3. Smart Contractor creates these documents, stores them as PDF files, and uploads them to your website.
  4. Smart Contractor also creates and uploads a page that prompts your customers to log in, then displays a menu of their documents to view or download.

Website Publishing Setup Prompts

Fill in the prompts below to set up Smart Contractor to upload documents to your website.

Publish Customer Job Info To Company Web Site:

Check this option to enable Smart Contractor to publish customer job information to your web site.

Company Web Site FTP Address:

Enter the FTP access address for your web site. This can be in the form of a URL (example: ftp://ftp.companysite.com/), or an IP address (example: 123.12.23.123).

FTP Login Username:

Enter your FTP login username.

FTP Path:

Some web servers store the files of the web page in a folder below the folder accessed by FTP. If that is true in your case, enter the web site folder path here.

Important: Remember that UNIX based servers are case sensitive. This means that if your web hosting server is not a Windows server, then the path name must be spelled using the correct case for each letter.

FTP Login Password:

Enter your FTP login password.

FTP Port Number:

Enter the FTP Port Number, which is typically 21.

FTP Encryption:

Select the FTP encryption setting required by your FTP server.

Customer Login Path:

Enter the path name that your customers will use to access the customer login page on your website. For example, if you set the customer login path to "customerlogin", and your website URL is www.CompanyName.com, then your customer will type "www.CompanyName.com/customerlogin" into their web browser address to get to their login page.

NOTE: If you use more than one Smart Contractor database, then the customer login path name must be different in each database. If they are named the same in more than one database, then when you publish customer information to your website, the customer login information from one database will be overwritten by the customer login information from the other database.

Format Pages For iFrames:

Check this option if you will be displaying the uploaded customer web pages in iFrames within your company website.

If you check this option, Smart Contractor will not format each page with a page heading (your company logo, address, etc.).

Specify Documents to Upload

Specify the documents to made available for each job/customer. There are a number of places in the program where you can specify which documents to upload to your customer's web portal.

Edit Job Form

  • In the Edit Job Form, go to the Job Info tab and click on the Documents To Publish prompts. This displays the list of documents that Smart Contractor can generate. Check the documents that you want to be available in the customer's portal.
  • Also in the Edit Job Form, click on the Attachments tab. Any attached file (or web link) can be made available in the customer's portal by checking the box in the Customer Portal column.

Attachments

  • In various places in the program where you can add attachments (Purchases, Invoices, etc.), there is a prompt to Post To Customer Website. Check this option to make the attached document available in the customer's portal.

Publish Documents

There are two ways to publish documents to the customer portal...

Exit Options

When you exit Smart Contractor, the Exit form will include an option to Publish To Website. Click Run Exit Options to automatically create and update your customers' web sites.

Publish Customer Documents Menu Option

If you want to update the web sites without exiting Smart Contractor, you can use  the Utilities > Publish Customer Documents option. See the help topic for that menu option for more information on publishing customer documents.

When you publish customer documents to your website, Smart Contractor generates all the documents you specified, stores them in PDF files, and uploads them to your website. It also uploads all documents and links that have been attached to the customers' job or job transactions.

Customer Portal Login

There are two ways customers can access their customer portal login page:

1) Customers can browse directly to http://www.DomainName.com/customerlogin (where DomainName.com is your website domain name). The index.html page in the customerlogin folder will prompt your customers to login.

2) You can add a menu option to your website to take customers to the login page. You can link that menu option to http:// www.DomainName.com/customerlogin, or you can use an iFrame to nest the customer portal in the website so it will be visually integrated with your website.

When customers access the login page, they are prompted for their Customer Name and Password. To log in, they must enter the name and password that you enter in the Customer Name, and Web Access Password prompts in the Edit Customer form.

When they enter these and click Login, they will be taken to a web page with links to all of their documents. To view a document, click on a link.

Using iFrames in WordPress

To embed the customer portal in a WordPress website, create a "page", and insert the following command:

[iframe src="http://www.DomainName.com/customerlogin"]

(where DomainName.com is your website domain name)

How To Customize Web Page Formatting

Smart Contractor allows you to customize the appearance of the uploaded customer web pages so that they will conform to the appearance of your company website.

To customize the uploaded web pages, you must edit the "SC_Style.css" file in the C:\Program Files\Smart Contractor program folder.

If you are not familiar with CSS style coding, then you can have your website developer do this for you.

If your website developer is not available, then you can request Smart Contractor technical support to assist you with this.

If you are familiar with CSS style coding, then edit the "SC_Style.css" file and add or modify the styles for the following HTML tags:

  • h1 - page heading text
  • body - default page body text
  • p - paragraph text
  • table - default table text
  • tbody - default table body text
  • tr.heading - heading text (subordinate to h1 text)
  • a.link - link style
  • a.visited - visited link style
  • a.hover - hovered link style
  • a.active - active link style

The links to uploaded job documents are displayed in a table in the customer web page. The link is in the left column, and the description of the document is in the right column. The following two styles are used to format the columns in the link table:

  • td.link - formatting used for the link
  • td.linkdesc - formatting used for the link description