Zencart + Price Breaks + Easy Populate

By Joe | Published: February 21, 2010
Zencart + Price Breaks + Easy Populate zen cart logo

Zen-Cart

Here is another update to the popular add-on for Zencart called Easy Populate. For those unfamiliar with Easy Populate, it’s a fantastic add-on for Zencart. Easy Populate allows user to create comma separated values (.csv) files to editing the list of products in their Zencart installation. A user recently emailed me requesting an additional feature of price break imports to be included in Easy Populate. Read More »

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Zencart Custom Session Length

By Joe | Published: February 21, 2010
Zencart Custom Session Length zen cart logo

Zen-Cart

Lately, I have been developing a few modifications for Zencart. One of things I have noticed during the development process, is my shopping cart being lost while typing code and then refreshing the page a little while later. This was no big deal. Just go in add another product, and test again. Then, I got to talking to a few other users who seem to experience the same problem of losing their session. As an end user or a customer this can be frustrating that you have added items to your cart, and then something come ups. They come back to their cart, go to another page, and they have lost their shopping cart. Zencart checks your php.ini for session length. On some hosting accounts, you don’t have access to change this value, or you just want a more user friendly way to adjust this.  This contribution / modification for Zen-cart will fix this problem. No core files are touched with this mod. You can extend the session length / timeout / expiration from the admin page.

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Zen-Cart reCAPTCHA Contribution Mod

By Joe | Published: February 8, 2010
Zen Cart reCAPTCHA Contribution Mod zen cart logo

Zen-Cart

One of the few options to try and combat SPAM on your zencart install, is to try and implement a CAPTCHA text/image on your contact us page. I recently updated a contribution I  created several months ago. This reCAPTCHA contribution will add configuration fields to the database for your api key and password, color theme selection, and enable/disable feature on contact us form.  The original contribution had used native mysql queries, so I have updated the contribution to support zencart’s $db:Factory object. Read More »

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Zencart + UPS XML Dimensional Support

By Joe | Published: February 4, 2010

Zencart + UPS XML Dimensional Support zen cart logo

Zen-Cart

One task I have put off from switching from osCommerce to ZenCart shopping cart platform, was updating the UPS XML contribution.  For those familiar with the shopping cart system, you know by default they only support standard UPS shipping. The cart figures shipping all the items together in one box. However, some products can’t be shipped together, and distorts shipping quotes for UPS. The solution that evolved in osCommerce was using UPS shipping API to get detailed freight quotes.
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Setup WAMP and SVN Subversion on Windows

By Joe | Published: January 20, 2010

Say you work on a desktop and a laptop computer, and you synchronize your laptop. Edit some files, save, and upload. Everything is fine. Now you get home or back in the office, sit down at the desktop, and forget to synchronize. You edit the files some more, upload, and save. Uh-oh, now you lost the changes you made on your laptop. You’ll have to get a copy off the laptop, and find all the changes you made. Ever done this? Version Control makes this scenario so much easier to resolve. Read More »

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Zencart Related Products

By Joe | Published: December 14, 2009

Zen-Cart

Zen-Cart

Zen-cart is an excellent open source ecommerce shopping cart system. One of the features I like about Zen-cart is that once you understand the templating structure, writing plugins becomes pretty easy.

One of the features I enjoyed using with osCommerce, was a plugin for creating a related products box below a displayed. The plugin was easily implemented, and used an extra field add to the database. That was a great asset, that I felt missed using. Zen-cart offers something very similar in its port of XSell (Cross Sell). This feature would work fine if you are adding a few products at time, and do not have many related products. However, in my case, I have about 4,000 items in my catalog. The products are mostly lighting fixtures, which for must companies have coordinating fixtures for each room. This would be a bit cumbersome to create all of the related items. This is why I decided to write a quick plugin to get this simple functionality back. Read More »

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Thunderbird 3 Search Not Working

By Joe | Published: December 11, 2009

Mozilla recently had Thunderbird 3 Release Candidate 2 available for download. I was Thunderbird 3 Search Not Working Thunderbird3 300x113 interested in trying out the new version. I upgraded my XP machine from version 2 to the Release Candidate version. Upgrade completed successfully. I opened up Thunderbird, and all of my emails were imported fine after the upgrade, and the program proceeded to index all of my emails.

I thought I would test out some the new features being touted in the new release. To my frustration, the new search feature would never complete. I would start typing in a search phrase, and then click on one of the terms suggested to me by sqlite. Thundbird opened a new tabbed, and the interface just showed my search criteria at the top with a dialog in the middle reading “Searching…”. The first couple of tries, I thought there was no matching criteria because Thunderbird’s search seemed to never complete. Read More »

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jQuery Uploadify 2 + CodeIgniter

By Joe | Published: October 1, 2009

jQuery Uploadify 2 + CodeIgniter uploadify logo 300x48 Creating useful upload forms having become very popular on the web these days. Many people have found that flash based options create a more rich user experience. I was working on a project recently to allow a user to upload images to a CodeIgniter application. I enjoy using jQuery, and found an excellent flash based uploader in Uploadify. Read More »

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PetFinder API PHP Class Library

By Joe | Published: September 4, 2009

I was interested in a project for a website as to what data could be retrieved from PetFinder.com. To my surprise, on their website located in the footer is a link to their API documentation. In order to use their API, you must first fill out a developer request for a key & password. I did a quick look to see if anyone had written a php class for accessing the api, but couldn’t find anything useful. I have created a php class that you can call the certain methods available to retrieve the records. Read More »

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CodeIgniter Shopping Cart Library

By Joe | Published: August 4, 2009

CodeIgniter is a great PHP framework to work with. One of the items several CodeIgniter Logodevelopers have been asking to be included in the next CodeIgniter release, is a core library for a shopping cart. The library is being added for CI version 1.7.2, and is currently available via SVN on the CodeIgniter website.

UPDATE 09/12/2009: The shopping cart library has now been released as part of the Code Igniter stable release version 1.7.2. You can dowload it at CodeIgniter.com

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