Pacecode Blog Tips, Scripts and More…

29Sep/081

VIRTUEMART, OSCOMMERCE AND CRE-LOADED COMPARISON AND REVIEWS.

The following are percept by me, when I go through the net for comparison of shopping cart.

A website with selling products is having good content, and a content site that is indexed can very easily leverage its traffic and sell products. The open source carts and CMS are somewhat related and there is a way to take the core OSCommerce shopping cart functionality and put it into the admin of a CMS.

Virtuemart is a branded version of this attempt. If you look at the admin of Virtuemart it would look like a Joomla/Mambo admin but you would see a new menu option which opens up a OSCommerce shopping cart functionality.

In short if you have Virtuemart then you have OSCommerce. If you like OSCommerce you are better off with CRE Loaded or Zen Cart (especially if your osCom does not have Easy Populate, Sale Maker, Cross Sell, Specials, Featured Products, HTML editors, etc). However, if you have good content and want to sell Virtuemart is a great option for you.

The best open source system depends on what you want to do and how you want to do it.

I have listed features of Virtuemart, OSCommerce and CRE-loaded

Virtuemart

In short:

Virtuemart is great option when the sites’ having rich contents with small and medium range shopping cart sites and also it is open source.

The followings are the some of feature of Virtuemart,

GENERAL FEATURES:

  • capable of using Secure Sockets Layer (https) Encryption (128-bit)
  • flexible Tax Models
  • Model 1: Ship To Address-based Tax Calculation
  • Model 2: Store Address-based Tax Calculation
  • Model 3: EU Mode (Store Owner based Tax Calculation when Customer comes from an EU Country)
  • Shoppers can manage their User Accounts (registration required)
  • Shipping Address Management (Customers can enter their own Shipping Addresses)
  • Order History: Shopper can view all their previous Orders (and Order Details)
  • Order Confirmation Mail (customizable!) is sent to Shopper and Store Owner
  • Multiple Currencies (you can allow Customers to change the Currency and buy using an alternative Currency)
  • Multiple Languages.

PRODUCT BASED FEATURES:

  • Powerful Web-Administration Interface (JavaScript-powered)
  • Manages an unlimited Number of Products and Categories
  • Can be used as a Shop or just as an Online-Catalog (you can even turn off Price Display)
  • quick Search for Products, Categories and Manufacturers; filter by features or discounted Products
  • Product Ratings & Testimonials (moderated or auto-published)
  • feature specific Products by setting them "on special"
  • Product Availability: show how fast a Customer can expect delivery
  • Handles downloadable Products (virtual Goods)
  • "Product is back in Stock"-Notification for subscribed Customers.

ADMIN SIDE FEATURES

  • multiple Images and Files (like Spec Sheets and Flyers) per Product
  • Product Attributes (like Size or Color) can be added to Product
  • Product Types for Classification (like "Car", "Motorbike" or "Music Album")
  • Shopper Groups for Customers (allows different Price Levels and Payment Options),
  • multiple Prices per Product (Quantity-based and/or Shopper Group-based Prices)
  • flexible Price Display (number & currency formatting; including or excluding tax)
  • On-the-Fly Price Conversion between different Currencies using Live Rates from the ECB or other banks
  • Shop Statistics / Control Panel with a Summary of new Customers, new Orders....
  • Stock Level Control for Products and Item
  • Order Management with Order History, Customer Notification and Order Edit Functionality
  • basic Reporting Feature: sold Items, monthly/yearly Revenue
  • Order Status Management
  • manage different Currencies, Countries & States

PAYMENT MODULES

  • capable of live Credit Card Processing
  • pre-defined Payment Gateways like authorize.net®, PayPal, 2Checkout, eWay, Worldpay, PayMate and NoChex
  • Extend your Shop with other Payment Modules using the Payment Module API!
  • Shipping Modules
  • flexible Shipping Carriers and Rates Configuration
  • Live-Shipping Rates using Shipping Modules (e.g. InterShipper, UPS, USPS, FedEx or Canada Post; Modules can use the Shipping Rate API).
  • Extend your Shop with other Shipping Modules using the Shipping Module API!

OSCOMMERCE

In-short:OSCommerce is great option for small and medium range shopping carts. It doesn’t come up with CMS.

osCommerce is a free, open source online shop software. The default installation includes a large number of features that you can easily enable and configure. You can easily install osCommerce on your website with the help of the Fantastico auto-installer.

With osCommerce shopping cart you can add multiple products on your site, organize them in categories, set discounts and special promotions. osCommerce allows you to set your prices in different currencies and accept all popular payment methods: PayPal, credit cards, cheques. osCommerce has a built-in shipping and tax functionalities.

PRODUCT DISPLAY

  • Unlimited categories
  • Unlimited products
  • Unlimited category nesting
  • Buy-Now button option
  • Products search
  • Manufacturer information
  • List by Manufacturer
  • Product Options
  • Unlimited product options (i.e. color, size)
  • Unlimited product options attributes (i.e. red, blue, green)
  • Options effect price
  • Product Data Stored
  • Name, price and description
  • Product image
  • Weight (for shipping calculations)
  • Date available
  • Model Number (for easier order fulfillment)
  • Inventory counter
  • Image upload tool for each product
  • In stock or out of stock setting
  • Automatically allows for additional languages.

SHOPPING CART

  • Temporary (not logged on) and permanent (logged on) shopping carts
  • Auto tax calculation
  • Remove products
  • Edit quantity of products in cart
  • See options and option prices

Order Process

    1. Suitable for large shopping cart functionalities. (Paid version is best)
    2. Comes CMS Features
    3. Affiliate program features
    • Checkout procedure is clear
    • Customer registers when placing order
    • Repeat customers need only login to place orders
    • Secure transactions with SSL
    • Choice of shipping options
    • Choice of payment options
    • Automatic E-mail notifications for new registration and each order placed
    • Customer is notified of customer center
    • Edit contact info
    • Customer address books (other shipping destinations)
    • Order history
    • Order status
    • Email newsletter subscription status (can easily subscribe and unsubscribe)
    • View all customers registered
    • Email specific, all or subscribed customers
    • Edit customer information
    • Temporarily set special price
    • Can be percentage or number
    • Does not effect actual price data
    • Special price is shown next to actual price
    • Specials are highlighted through out the site
    • Product reviews by site members
    • Bestseller lists automatically calculated
    • Display what other customers have brought (relating to the current product displayed)
    • Send to a friend
    • New design for user-friendliness
    • Backup tool
    • Statistics for products and customers
    • Add/Edit/Remove
    • Tax zones, classes, and rates
    • Configuration parameters in database for remote editing
    • Not tied together with the catalog module (admin module can be installed on another server)
    • CRE Loaded Standard à $95
    • CRE Loaded Professional à $295
    • CRE Loaded Professional B2B à$350
  • Order Confirmation

    Customer Account (what the customer sees)

    Customer Management (what you see)

    Most shopping carts do not address marketing. OSCommerce brings high end logic to the entire shopping experience.

    Specials

    Customer Interaction

    Administrative Functionality

    o    categories

    o    products

    o    manufacturers

    o    customers

    o    reviews

    Configuration

    Set most aspects of store information

    o    Store name

    o    Email address

    o    Location

    o    and other settings can be easily viewed and edited

    Modules

    Multiple payments modules:

    o    PayPal

    o    Credit Card

    o    C.O.D

    Multiple shipping modules

    o    USPS

    o    FedEx

    o    UPS

    o    Flat Rate

    o    Custom Price Table

    CRE-LOADED

    In short:

    CRELoaded 6 - a fork of osCommerce version 2.2 MS2 - is a feature-rich ecommerce solution for new and existing store owner, and web professionals. With CREloaded the you will be able to upload product images and add text, and thus to create the storefront of your online shop. Orders and inventory are easy to manage with the shopping cart, credit card payments are processed through PayPal or Authorize.net. It is possible to set up special pricing, and to determine shipping costs. CRE Loaded also offers plenty of different templates to customize the look of the online store in order to offer a unique, easily identifiable, and fully branded shopping experience to the customer.

    Price:

    Brief:

    CRE Loaded Standard:

    CRE Loaded Standard is a scalable shopping cart for Ecommerce sites developed primarily for the SOHO (small office, home office) store owner who wants to add transactional capabilities to an existing website. You can organize, manage and ship your products, and you have the the flexibility you need to run a successful online business. It includes shipping, payment, marketing, security, design, and admin features, as well as customer and product management tools. Subscriptions are available in 1 year and 3 year options.

    CRE Loaded Professional:

    CRE Loaded Professional is a complete ecommerce application with shopping cart functionality and content management developed for the serious web entrepreneur. It comes complete with a content management system which allows you to create standard web pages within your store and manage, organize, and search content on a website. It includes shipping, payment, marketing, sales, design, and admin features, as well as customer and product management tools. Subscriptions are available in 1 year and 3 year options.

    CRE Loaded Professional B2B:

    CRE Loaded Professional B2B is a secure and scalable ecommerce application with shopping cart functionality for wholesalers and store owners who would like to display different information for separate customer groups. It includes shipping, payment, marketing, security, design, and admin features, as well as customer and product management tools.

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24Sep/0813

ADDING ADDITIONAL IMAGES IN THE PRODUCT DETAILS PAGES -Virtuemart tips

If you are new to the virtue mart shopping cart software, the following steps will help you to add additional product images in Product details page.

Assumptions:
You are using,

  • Joomla 1.5 or Joomla 1.0.x
  • Virtue Mart 1.1.0 stable.

Steps to add additional images in Product details page:

  1. Go  to  virtue mart  admin panel
  2. Choose “choose extended layout” <helps easy navigation>
  3. List out your products.
  4. Click on media button. A new popup will be opened.
  5. Click the new button to add additional images
  6. Choose additional image s as option, give appropriate height and width for the image
  7. Click on save button. That’s all

I  am not sure about, it will work for lower version of virtue mart also. Please check and gimme a feed back to this post.

The following pictures help you for easy understanding.

ImageShack

ImageShack

ImageShack

ImageShack

ImageShack

ImageShack

23Sep/080

Customizing the Read More link with WordPress

If you have set your WordPress site to display post excerpts on the front or home page, you will want visitors to click on the title or a link to encourage them to continue reading your post or article, right? WordPress makes this technique easy, and customizable.

Here is the steps:

  • Go to wordpress admin panel --> Design tab --> Theme Editor.
  • Select Main Index template (index.php) to edit it
  • Find the line  "<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;'); ?>"
  • And replace it with the following code.

<?php

$content = get_the_content($more_link_text, $stripteaser, $more_file);
if(strlen($content)>500) // chanage 500 as per your needs
{
$part_msg=substr($content, 0, 500);// chanage 500 as per your needs
echo '<p>'.$part_msg.'... ';
?>
<br /><br />
<a href="<? comments_link(); ?>">Read More...</a></div>
<?php
echo '</p>';
}
else
{
echo '<p>'.$content.'</p></div>';
}

?>

Where "500" represents number of characters that you want to show.

If you cannot able to make the above changes with the wordpress theme editor, use your ftp.

Here is the template directory

/public_html/blog/wp-content/themes

or

/www/blog/wp-content/themes

where blog is the directory where i installed my wordpress

22Sep/086

Magic with htaccess file – Increase execution time, session expiry time and file upload size limit

<IfModule mod_php5.c>
php_value post_max_size 5M
php_value upload_max_filesize 5M
php_value memory_limit 300M
php_value max_execution_time 259200
php_value max_input_time 259200
php_value session.gc_maxlifetime 1200
</IfModule>

php_value memory_limit 300M - Set higher default php_value memory_limit in .htaccess

upload_max_filesize 5M - it increases default upload limit. The default upload limit is 2MB. the above htaccess increase increases file limit 2mb to 5 mb

php_value max_execution_time:

Set the number of seconds a script is allowed to run. If this is reached,
the script returns a fatal error. The default limit is 30 seconds or, if it
exists, the max_execution_time value defined in the configuration file. If
seconds is set to zero, no time limit is imposed.

php_value session.gc_maxlifetime:

The session.gc_maxlifetime only sets the age of the session files that will be deleted when

garbage collection runs.

If you have a busy web site with a lot of sessions being created, garbage collection will

run based on session.gc_probability/session.gc_divisor. Despite this being called

"probability" I tested this and it is strictly a count. Using the default

gc_probability/gc_divisor of 1/100, this means that garbage collection will run every 100

new sessions (Edit: Actually this occurs within the session_start() coding and would count

re-started sessions as well) and delete any existing session files that are older than the

session.gc_maxlifetime. There is no file locking on the session files, so active session

files will be deleted and things like users getting logged out will occur.

If this is on shared hosting and the session files are all kept in the default location and

someone else is using a smaller session.gc_maxlifetime or a more frequent

gc_probability/gc_divisor, then any of the session files will get deleted based on the

lowest value of gc_maxlifetime and the most frequent gc_probability/gc_divisor.

You need to increase session.gc_maxlifetime or make session.gc_divisor larger and if this is

on shared hosting, set session.save_path to be a location within your web space.

21Sep/082

Part of Page refresh using AJAX with timed delay

<head>
<script type="text/javascript">
function makAx() // this function to activate XMLHttpRequest Object
{
try
{
xm = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
return true;
}
catch (e)
{
try
{
xm = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
return true;
}
catch (e2)
{
xm = false;
}
}
if (!xm && typeof XMLHttpRequest != ‘undefined’)
{
xm = new XMLHttpRequest();
return true;
}
}
function showImages()
{
if(makAx()) // XMLHttpRequest checked here
{
url = "external-page-for-db-query.php"; // this file will contains your db query
callavail();
}
}
function callavail()
{
xm.open("GET",url,true); // This is ajax functionality. It may have true(for synchronous request) or false(for asynchronous request)
xm.onreadystatechange = cavail;
xm.send(null);
}
function cavail()
{
if(xm.readyState == 4) // If ready state reached
{
var response = xm.responseText;
var str = document.getElementById("showResult"); // result of "external-page-for-db-query.php" will come here
str.innerHTML = response;
setTimeout("showImages()",1000); // here 1000 represents one second for time delay. showImage() function will be called with the specified time delay
}
}
</script>
</head>

<body>
<div id="showResult"></div> <!–page result will be displayed here–>
</body>
</html>

21Sep/080

Part of page refresh with time delay using MockAJAX – Facebook Developers

A Simple script that make our application works great. Yes, The following FBJS - FaceBook JavaScript will help you for part of page refresh in the facebook applications.

Uses:

1) Helps to retrieve data from your server database without refreshing the page
2) It would be useful for cricket scores and other live datas.

Mock AJAX Script as follows,

<script>

<!–
function partRefresh(){

var ajax = new Ajax();

ajax.responseType = Ajax.FBML;

ajax.ondone = function(data) {

document.getElementById(’partId’).setInnerFBML(data);

setTimeout(function() {partRefresh()},60000); // Making time delay

}
ajax.post("http://www.example.com/filename.php");
}
//–>
</script>

<div id="partId"></div> // the output of filename.php is displayed here
<script>
partRefresh(); // Just calling the function on browser loads
</script>

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