One of the most common X-Cart tweaks I am asked to develop for the order management section, is to provide colour labelling for the order statuses.
So have have put together a download module packaged and ready to use in xcart 4.4.x and above.
Click here to be taken through to the download page.
Also Checkout our other X-Cart modules here.
Are you are local takeaway or a restaraunt that provides a takeaway service? Then have a look at a new PHP script by phpjabbers which allows your customers to easily order for delivery or pickup and pay online.
You can even setup the application to handle multiple delivery zones.
Take a look by going to Food Delivery Script
Need this script style then contact Zone1 Creative for a free quote
Do you have a wordpress blog that accompanies your online store? If you are looking to increase your revenue from your blog using adsense, then you could use this great tutorial by WPwebhost to show content to visitors who are outside your stores catchment area.
We’ll be using these two plugins for our help:
GT-Geo Targeting : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gt-geo-targeting/
WP PHP Widget : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-php-widget/
http://www.wpwebhost.com/show-dynamic-content-as-per-pagepost-and-visitors-country/
When coding it is not always practical to perform changes in a test environment first and then transfer to the live. Sometimes you just want to make a quick test and show the client before putting the changes live to the whole world to see.
X-Cart uses the smarty templating language and to do this in smarty is pretty simple. Continue reading
Here is a tutorial on how to show an RSS feed on your X-Cart Homepage without javascript. This allows google to see that your homepage is showing updated content regularly.
1. firstly you will need to download the latest version of SimplePie from the simple pie website. http://simplepie.org/downloads/
2. In your X-Cart directory create a folder called ‘simplepie’ inside the modules folder. ie, /modules/simplepie
3. Upload simplepie.inc and LICENSE.txt from the simplepie archive to /modules/simplepie
4. Create a folder called cache inside /modules/simplepie and give this file 755 or 777 file permissions.
5. Edit the file /modules/simplepie/simplepie.inc and find
1 2 3 4 5 6 | /** * @var string Cache location (relative to executing script) * @see SimplePie::set_cache_location() * @access private */ var $cache_location = './cache'; |
change this to
1 2 3 4 5 6 | /** * @var string Cache location (relative to executing script) * @see SimplePie::set_cache_location() * @access private */ var $cache_location = './modules/simplepie/cache'; |
6. Now create a new folder called rss in the modules folder ie, /modules/rss
7. Create a file called rss.php and enter the following information.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 | <?php if (!defined('XCART_SESSION_START')) { header("Location: ../../"); die("Access denied"); } include_once($xcart_dir . '/modules/simplepie/simplepie.inc'); $feed = new SimplePie(); $feed->set_feed_url("http://www.zone1creative.co.uk/blog/feed"); $feed->enable_cache(true); $feed->init(); $i = 0; foreach ($feed->get_items() as $item) { $rssitem['title'] = $item->get_title(); $rssitem['url'] = $item->get_permalink(); $rssitem['description'] = = $item->get_description(); $rss[] = $rssitem; //set value to how many feed items to show if(++$i > 4) break; } $smarty->assign_by_ref('rss', $rss); ?> |
Change the line http://www.zone1creative.co.uk/blog/feed to your rss url.
Upload this file to /modules/rss
8. Download and edit /home.php
Find
1 2 3 | if (!empty($active_modules['Gift_Registry'])) { include $xcart_dir . '/modules/Gift_Registry/customer_events.php'; } |
and add below it
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | if (!empty($active_modules['Gift_Registry'])) { include $xcart_dir . '/modules/Gift_Registry/customer_events.php'; } if ($cat == 0) { include $xcart_dir . '/modules/rss/rss.php'; } |
Upload the file again.
9. We now need to edit the smarty template file /skin/{your skin folder}/customer/main/welcome.tpl
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 |
clone forest php mysql script
If you have used Code Canyon and Theme Forest, then you maybe interested in setting up your own marketplace. Unlike e-commerce where you need to source products, buy in bulk and then find customers to buy. You could think of approaching it the Etsy or Amazon way.
Setup a market place where others can use your site to sell their creative work.
Clone Forest sell a number of high quality scripts that allow you to setup an online market place to sell code, images, video and docs.
Your sellers pay a selling fee which you collect via paypal and you concentrate on just marketing your site.
Beadazzle run two jewellery sites online. One site www.beadazzle.co.uk sells official Pandora Jewellery and the www.beadazzle-boutique.co.uk site sells all other non Pandora Jewellery products. Due to Pandora’s strict selling guidelines, they cannot sell any other products apart from Pandora on a single site.
This meant that if they wanted to buy item Pandora and non Pandora products they would need to place two separate transactions. To make it easier to find products I implemented a Search Suggest feature which is licensed from Code Canyon and modified it to work on Digishop. Then wrote a php script to pull product information from Beadazzle Boutique into the Search suggest script.
Customers can now type in the search box and products from both sites will be suggested to them, and click on a non Pandora product will result in a new window opening for beadazzle boutique. This will hopefully show loyal Pandora customers that Beadazzle sell more than just Pandora.
This script can also be implemented in X-Cart which is what I will be implementing in Beadazzle Boutique.
A new Drupal module that allows you to run your own Groupon style campaign. This type of marketing is getting evermore popular as newspapers and magazines have started to roll out their own versions. So if you run a community site the http://www.opendealsapp.com/ will allow you to offer your visitors one off deals easily.
Groupon is a localised daily deal site, that is to say you choose your city and each day a new deal appears on the site, maybe a hotel break offered at a very low rate or a great discount at a particular restaurant. You buy the deal at the price offered, but the deal is only “on” and your card only debited when enough people go for the deal, a number specified by the business seller. The deal is cancelled if at the end of the time frame not enough people have gone for it.
The power of voucher sites like Groupon lie in their reach. Groupon itself is a slickly run and marketed operation, with a huge number of users and access via the web and phone apps. As a business, you are getting exposure to a huge audience. In addition Groupon claims that not only do they send new customers business’s way fast, but these usually turn into repeat customers.
But be warned! While Groupon may draw you in with their promise of “you don’t have to send us a penny” -they will take a sizeable chunk out of whatever you take on your deal, sometimes as much as 60% of the money you make. So you’ll need to check and recheck your figures before diving in with your monster offer.
The Guardian recently wrote a pretty unfavourable article -no change there – concerning users’ experiences of Groupon. A lot of their feedback concerned customers having bad experiences with the retailers themselves rather than the site, but some businesses were also none to pleased with the response:
A company that runs boat tours described what it was like to partner with Groupon. The firm said it had received just £6 per person from a two-person voucher for £30. With a boat full of Groupon customers, the firm soon realised it was costing them money to put on the trip. “Groupon would work much better for everyone concerned if they lowered the commission that they take – 50% plus VAT is just pure greed,” the boat company claimed. “Additionally, Groupon holds on to all the funds until the voucher has been used and redeemed. Thousands of vouchers do not get redeemed, and if the use-by date has passed we understand Groupon retains the funds.”
So we’ve discussed why businesses and customers use voucher sites like Groupon, but why would you build your own site? Isn’t this just reinventing the wheel?
Well, not exactly. Clearly there’s a market for daily deal sites, but the Open Deal module for Drupal seems to be making some pretty big claims. Number one being, as is the norm with the open source platform, the module is free! But perhaps the quick and easy set-up is what’ll prove the biggest draw for developers and entrepreneurs alike.
Have a gander at some of these points and see if you fancy starting your own Groupon style empire! And if you have any feedback on using the module, or indeed Groupon, we’d love to hear from you.
We have Nick Eagland in to help us at Zone 1 Creative for a week. He will helping Pin out on X-Cart integrations due to workload.
Nick’s an old buddy from Dreamteam Design and brings Jammy Dodgers into the office.
I never use dreamweaver or any other code generator. I have always used my trusty notepad++. But I have come across shiftedit.net which allows you to have all the syntax highlighting of notepad++ but through an online editor.
It includes an FTP manager to store you connection settings so you do not have to remember this everytime.
If you are with heartinternet then you will need to add your servers ip address to the global unlock.otherwise you will get annoyed with have to log into your hosting control panel before try to edit any files.