Michael Roebuck's Blog: Yahoo! Design Wizard

Yahoo! has released a new design wizard with new templates. Some of you may already know about them. If you are a current Yahoo! Store and are using custom templates, DO NOT UPGRADE your store without talking with your designer first! Upgrading to the new system will delete your current templates.

Yahoo! has made this very clear in the upgrade process, but I just have this feeling I'm going to get a call at 8:00pm one night from a frantic customer who just upgraded and now there site doesn't work.

There does not seem to be any immediate benefit to using the new templates that can't wait until your site has been evaluated by your designer. Sure the new templates are cleaner code and offer more flexibility, but there is a downside as well. Did I mention the deletion of all your custom templates?? If you aren't sure whether or not you are using custom templates or not, please ASK someone! This could save you a really big headache. (Maybe an expensive headache at that!)

Here is a page as taken from Yahoo's Help File located at:
http://us-f1-edit.store.yahoo.com/P/COMGR/yhst-69344145228119/mtool/wiz/sdw/design-site-upgrade.php?ref=ofb
Please visit this link and read everything.

Merchant Note: Upgrading to new templates requires some work

Your store is currently using templates associated with Store Editor 2.0.

Using the Design Wizard requires that your store use the latest version of the Store Editor. While moving to the latest templates has many benefits, it also requires you to redo some work in your store. Learn more.

What You Will Need to Do Before Upgrading

Before: Copy any information in global standard and custom variables to a spreadsheet or text file. Learn more.
Before: Create a list of pages with custom types. You can go to the Contents page to see pages by type. Learn more.

What You Will Need to Do After Upgrading

After: Recreate any custom variables and upload the information you copied before migrating to the proper variables.
After: Pages that used custom types will need to be reassigned to the custom type.
After: You may wish to reset the contents format and elements to match your previous site.
After: Merchants using v1 or v2 checkout (not Checkout Manager) will need to override their head-tags variable on the norder page and include full paths to their CSS files in order for the styles to appear correctly. Learn more.

What is Not Affected

All product data including pricing, product images, and descriptions will appear in your new template.
Your site structure including sections, pages and accessories will appear in your new template.
Non-product data such as your privacy policy text, info page text and image, and home page text and image will appear in your new template.
Any overridden variables (where you use a page-specific instance of a global variable) will appear in your new template.