Zencart Related Products

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

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

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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CodeIgniter Shopping Cart Library

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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ResponsiBuilders

I’ve very excited about the launch of this product. The is a really neat game  being made by my relative. ResponsiBuilders is a creative card game to inspire your kids to complete chores around the house.  Somehow when sweeping the floor (amongst other household duties) is printed with neat artwork on a card, kids have fun doing it. Read More »

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Open Flash Chart 2 + CodeIgniter

Many of you maybe familiar with the CodeIgniter (CI) PHP framework. I was asked by a client recently about creating a graph for some data in a report. CodeIgniter LogoLooking through several charting libraries at the CI website, I found a few options listed in the wiki. Open Flash Chart 2 (OFC) seemed like a nice option and was also open source. There was a couple libraries written for CI using Open Flash Chart, but the recent code for OFC has recently changed. Read More »

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Zen Cart Easy Populate

Zen-Cart

I recently was switching a online store from using osCommerce to Zen-Cart, and realized how nice it is to have the Easy Populate add-on. For those not familiar with the Easy Populate add-on, this allows you to download the product data from your online store into a CSV file. You can open the file in Excel or OpenOffice Calc, edit the spreadsheet (ie. products, quantities, and other attributes), and the re-upload the file. Easy Populate will update your online inventory with the data in the spreadsheet. The one caveat with Easy Populate has been adding custom fields to the export/import data. This has been discussed in the Zen-Cart Forum, but I wanted a better solution than always having to edit the code.

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