Posted in Zencart June 10th, 2010 by admin - Comments (2)
A while ago, we showed you our new design for ZenMagick Admin
We are very happy that we received compliments as well as suggestions from you, and we have been working on a new design!!! And now it is finally done
Option 2 with horizontal navigation bar span 100%
A few things to explain about the design:
1. The Horizontal (header) navigation bar will contain only the main Sections of the admin, and these are not “drop down” links
2. The left column on the left hand side which we call the Sidebar or Vertical menu will hold the sub menu(s) of each section. This makes more sense when we have the design of other pages to show you soon, but for example when you visit the Plugins section on the Sidebar you will see the list of plugins you currently have.
We hope you find this design modern, user friendly and intuitive. My biggest thank to Mr Frog, our designer working on this design. All suggestions welcomed.
Regarding the implementation of this one, Mano (the guy behind ZM) told us he is working hard on the admin backend code to make it ready for templating etc, so hopefully we can see it soon.
Posted in Zencart May 29th, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment
We were able to confirm that Simple Seo Url for ZenCart (SSU) works perfectly on IIS machine given that your server has some type of plugin that can help it to understand the rewrite rules which were written for Apache servers.
If you have any problem running SSU on an IIS server, please use our contact form to ask for support.
Posted in Add Ons April 22nd, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment
One of the most important feature many web developers need is the ability to load different css file based on the different browser/browser being used. There are more than one modules available on Zencart download that provide this specific feature, but if you already use CJ Loader (and you should), you already has this ability.
CJ Loader at of this version automatically load your browser specific as well as browser+version specific css and jss files. Read more…
Posted in Add Ons April 15th, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment
User’s Tags Manager
Here you can see that the users can see the tag cloud of his/her current tags, can edit the tags (when the user edits a tag, all the products tagged with this tag by this users will also change tags), and delete tags.
Admin Tags Manager
Within the simple admin, you can search by tag name or product id, you can also check certain info to gain insight into your customers’ mind.
Posted in News & Discussion April 14th, 2010 by admin - Comments (1)
Just a quick notification for all zencart users, the long over due 1.3.9 is now available for beta testing, if you want you can pop in zencart forum to read the announcement and download the package to test.
Seems like there are still bugs to be fixed, so it is not ready for your live sites yet.
Posted in Add Ons April 12th, 2010 by admin - Comments (2)
Adding tags for guests (can be turned off)
Adding tags for users
The main difference is that a logged in user can also check an already added tag as “relevant” to them, this will later allow them to list all the products that were tagged with a certain tag by ANY user or only the ones tagged by them. This will also allow us to easily do some statistical stuffs in the backend, and perhaps use this type of data for customers’ insight research or showing relevant products to them.
Note that you can also require that all new tags added have to be approved first before available to the public, can be useful if you want to make sure your users don’t use offensive language on your website.
More demo videos come later.
Posted in Add Ons April 2nd, 2010 by admin - Comments (3)
Tagging allows your customers to sort your products using their own preferences (not yours) so that they can later find these products much faster. Checking your customers’ tags also help you to get a deeper insight into your customers’ perspectives and makes changes to boost your sales.
An additional bonus value of tagging is SEO: your products pages will have more keywords, and even better these keywords are more useful for customers.
You can check out our tag module here, currently we are adding administrative features before releasing it:
Some planned features:
Allowing 2 types of tags: public and private tags- Allowing Guests to add tags (or not)
- Require authorization before adding tags (optional)
- Customers can manage tags via their account manager (edit, delete)
- Admins can manage tags (approve, delete, check statistics)
The modules is written by jQuery and our custom class for Ajax, and will work with or without javscript enabled.
Posted in Add Ons March 30th, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment
This new version has some major updates:
- The browser detection class has been updated to the latest version which will allow you to detect more browsers more accurately.
- The Loader class code has been rewritten a bit to make it faster as well as adding more options.
If you are using Ajax OnePage Checkout released by us, when you upgrade the checkout module you will also need to upgrade to this new CJ Loader version.
Link to get the new version has been updated on the original Zencart CSS Javascript Loader post
Posted in Projects March 29th, 2010 by admin - Comments (1)
I have worked with Zencart for years, and have done many projects, so I was pretty confident and sometimes over optimistic when I take on ZC projects. This proves to be my leads to a rather “deadly” error I made recently.
There is a very great looking store with nice design and tons of features (ajax and all, very very nice) built on Zencart, I will not name the store here for many reasons. The owner contacted us a few weeks ago because the site has compatibility with certain browsers (in short, it doesn’t work on most versions of IE, and has inconsistent display on various major browsers). “This is an easy fix, we have done this many times”, I thought, so I gave a very optimistic estimation.
A few weeks from then, and here I’m still working on this site. The person (or rather, a group of people) who coded this site did not give a care about coding standard, browser compatibility, performance, or anything at all. When I first opened the files, I was welcomed into this dark place, where html, php, javascript all live “happily” together in one place, nested together like spaghetti. Once I fixed an issue, another one popped up and on and on…. In the end, it was decided that fixing thing is more time/cost consuming that re-coding them, so now we are still trying to rewrite almost all the pieces of code for the site.
The moral of the story:
- For me, from now on I will NEVER EVER try to be an overly optimistic estimator anymore, I learned my lesson.
- For you, from now on please check the work of the devs carefully before you approve it. A nice looking apple can be rotten inside. Do you buy a car just because it looks pretty, and don’t give a care about the quality of the engine inside it? If you don’t why do you do that when you have your site developed? Check the code yourself, if you don’t know much about coding ask your friends or a 3rd party company. Or, go with a reputable company that will stand behind its works.
Posted in Marketing,News & Discussion March 12th, 2010 by admin - Comments (1)
Today I was going through my inbox in my regular routine to clean up the spam/ads mails. It’s amazing how much spam I’ve got so far, my inbox has 3000+ unread emails after just a couple of months (these are all emails I don’t bother to read).
Some of them are not exactly spams, they are newsletters emails from various sources I subscribed to in the past. Just simply marking them as spams can be bad for these authentic news sources since email providers like Google flag the sources as spam sources based on users’ reports(BTW, if you are interested in Googles’s policy, check it here: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81126). So I opened these emails to find the un-subscription link, and here are the 3 cases I encountered:
- No un-subscription -> mark as spam, you DESERVE it
- un-subscription requires login, and for 99% of the cases I already forgot my login and don’t want to bother trying to remember it -> mark as spam
- un-subscription link allows me to opt out right away, they also have a comment box which I do fill in from time to time when I’m in a happy mode ^_^
So obviously, we all don’t want to be in the first and second cases, we want our emails to the customers who still want them to be delivered in the inbox, not the spam/bulk mail box. We want our users who opt out for any reason at least not filling (more) pissed off, and so I recommend you all checking your current email un-subscription system and see where does it fall in.
As a Zencart user as well as service provider, I also feel disappointed to find out Zencart’s system is falling somewhere in case 2. Perhaps it is time for the developers to fix this issue by providing an easy way to opt out?
