eShop: A Great WordPress E-Commerce Plugin!

Nick
0
4th November

cash register

Online business made dead simple!

eShop is a completely free e-commerce plugin for WordPress, packed with a tonne of great features that offers small businesses an easy solution to going online. eShop is compatible up to WordPress version 3.01 and is periodically being updated by its author elfin, who also offers a tremendous amount of support and documentation for his work.

The plugin utilises WordPress pages, posts and custom post types to create products that can be displayed in a variety of methods with multiple functional options or, with a little coding prowess, can be completely customised. Other features include: shipping options (including by weight); basic statistic keeping; automatic email confirmations using configurable email templates; inventory control; discount options and order handling, to name a few. On top of this, eshop is WP Affiliate compatible, can be used for down-loadable products and can be used with Google Base for configuring client libraries that enable analysis of target markets.

Show me the money!

eShop has you covered in the payment department too, with merchant gateways to:

  • PayPal
  • Authorize.net
  • Payson
  • eProcessingNetwork
  • Webtopay
  • iDEAL
  • cash/cheque

All-in-all this is an easily manageable e-commerce option for small businesses with a product catalogue of up to 100 products. WordPress and eShop make a powerful combination offering you a solution to your CMS, blog and e-commerce needs all in one. After personally implementing eShop into some of my own projects I strongly recommend considering this option if you are looking to take a small business venture online.

Visit the eShop homepage to get a more detailed description of its features, documentation, support and videos on installation and such, or download eShop on it’s WordPress page. Also, if you do find this great plugin helpful please consider a donation for elfin too for all his hard work and support.

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Categories: WordPress, eCommerce

Wordpress 3.0 is Here!

Nick
0
25th June

wordpress-iconThe most highly-anticipated open source upgrade of the year Wordpress 3.0 is finally here and it brings some amazing new features and updates. On June 17, 2010, WordPress Version 3.0, named Thelonious, was released to the public for all to enjoy. This new release is packed with tons of exciting features, like custom post types, better menu management, editor styles, merging of Wordpress MU into the core and many more. It also comes with a new default theme – TwentyTen, that is compatible with most of the new features. All in all, a very exciting update packed with real value-adding features. It’s amazing to see how far Wordpress has come along and what potentially lies in the future. With over 10.3 million downloads of version 2.9, there is no doubt that the growing community of WordPress advocates is helping drive the continued development of this beautiful open source platform.

You can now download the latest stable version. For more information on this enhancement and bug-fix release, read the WordPress Blog and see the Changelog for 3.0. In the meantime, check out this video explaining some the new features better than I ever could. Enjoy!

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Categories: Industry Trends, Technology, WordPress

Conduct’s top 10 WordPress must have plug-ins!

Simon
0
18th May

If you don’t already know by now Conduct is a massive fan and advocate of the all mighty WordPress. Simply put – we love it!

I have compiled a very concise list of must have plug-ins that we install on almost all of our WordPress sites. These plug-ins enhance various aspects of WordPress like the pagination, SEO and user experience.

1. Improve your pagination:

Improve the pagination on both pages and posts – WP-PageNavi. We love this plug-in because it is beautifully written and just works.

2. Quick PNG fix for the dreaded IE6 browser:

As a thorn in every web developers back – IE6 still ranks in browser statistics and thus sites ’should’ be compatible. HITS- IE6 PNGFix takes out some of the pain when applying the infamous png fix. We select the DD_belatedPNG script inside the options section of this plug-in.

3. Easy to install breadcrumbs:

Display breadcrumbs on pages and posts. Breadcrumb NavXT is an easy to use plug-in that requires you to add a small piece of code in your templates. The options are plentiful and the results are great.

4. Create great looking forms with ease and simplicity:

cforms II does all the heavy lifting when adding forms to your WordPress site. You have a plethora of style options and functionality settings including attachments, date picker, auto-responders – to name only a few.

5. SEO at your finger tips:

It doesn’t take a genius to work out why All in One SEO Pack is a must have plug-in. This plug-in reduces the time and effort required to optimise your WordPress site.

6. Mobile compatibility please:

WPtouch iPhone Theme is an easy to install and customise theme specifically designed for mobile devices like the iPhone, blackberry and android. Let’s face it, it won’t be too far in the future where everyone has at least a smart phone. Prepare your site for the inevitable.

7. Display pretty, sortable and editable tables:

WP-Table Reloaded is a great re-carnation of the WP-Table plug-in. If you need to display tabulator data on your website look no further.

8. 301 redirection a breeze:

Redirection is a simple plug-in that enables you to setup 301 redirections without touching the htaccess file. Why would I? When we setup a CMS style WordPress site with up-to 3 levels of navigation sometimes you don’t want to have landing pages for all of your parent pages… this plug-in solves that very issue.

9. Create a buzz – get people talking:

Sociable is a very simple plug-in that allows you to select various social bookmarks like facebook, twitter and digg for example. You can configure a nice subtle strip of these icons on your pages and posts allowing people to easily share your content with their networks.

10. Expand the attachments functionality:

This may be less obvious to the everyday WordPress user but we love the Attachments plug-in. Please note that we often use this one in conjunction with some custom scripting. The power of this plug-in is more relevant for the template developer opposed to the WordPress admin. It allows you to interact with the media library allowing the editor easy methods for displaying galleries, video and audio.

We hope you find these plug-ins as useful as we do.

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Categories: Technology, WordPress

Tip: Add Facebook ‘Like’ button to your Wordpress blog

Simon
3
5th May

Tell me what and why…

The Like button enables users to make connections to your pages and share content back to their friends on Facebook with one click. Since the content is hosted by Facebook, the button can display personalised content whether or not the user has logged into your site. For logged-in Facebook users, the button is personalised to highlight friends who have also liked the page.

The benefit is quite clearly – horizontal spread and link backs = traffic. Remember that content is king. It doesn’t matter where your traffic comes from or how it’s being tracked. The content your visitors see when they get to your landing page is what will determine whether sales are made, people sign-up, or connect with people who legitimately “like” you.

Some interesting gossip about Facebook ambitions for reshaping the internet –
Google has highlighted this as a major threat to the way in which they rank and evaluate page relevancy as it is bi-passing standard href links. If Like buttons take off, that’s really bad news for Google, since its algorithm uses links between sites to determine their order in search results. Read full article.

Meat and Potatoes

To implement this simple function navigate to single.php and look for the_content() tag. Once you have located this simply paste the code block before or after the_content() tag.

// Start

// End
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3 Comments
Categories: Marketing, Social Media, WordPress

CakePHP, jQuery, Wordpress and Coding Goodness

Simon
0
7th April

social media bandwagonIn these posts I will be publishing code snippets, tutorials and plugins that I have used (or created) while making sites for Conduct HQ.

Primarily I have been using a framework called CakePHP (which I love), it is very flexible and once you have the database and frontend designed a MVC (model, view, controller) web application is easily created (baked),  following this process, the design can be applied and the application can be finetuned to the end product.  I am mostly using Cake 1.2 at the moment and have begun using Cake 1.3 which is nearly ready for full release.  Among many improvements Cake 1.3 now has native support for all javascript frameworks (not just prototype and scriptaculous) which is great as I prefer jQuery.

I use jQuery with various plugins, mostly for user interfaces and any ajax I need.  My favourite plugins at the moment are jQuery Tools and jQuery UI for excellent and easily configurable user interface components like modal boxes, sortable elements, datepickers, accordions and many more.  For easy ajax forms you can’t go past the jQuery Form Plugin.

Our company has also been producing iPhone applications and any time we need a web service for the application it is inevitably CakePHP that we use.  With Cake the creation of a JSON web service (or any other for that matter) is simple and straightforward, and with a little work creating a content management system or even a web application is also easily developed.

I have also been using Wordpress and its extensive list of community produced plugins for blogs and content management systems and even some small online stores.  There are many themes available and customising the themes or creating them from scratch is easy.  For larger online stores you cannot go past Magento which I am currently in the process of exploring more fully (and learning from a more experienced colleague).

Anyway I think that is enough of a summary for my very first post.  Stay tuned for more.

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Categories: Blog, CakePHP, Code, WordPress
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