• Ability to define custom URL Structure. Unlike many other enterprise-level CMS platforms, ExpressionEngine makes it easy to set static, semantic URLs, with the ability to specify custom directory structures. Some other CMSes require core hacks to handle even the most simple structure.
• Ability to specify custom metadata. ExpressionEngine makes it incredibly easy to define custom page title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords, and other on-page SEO elements. While other platforms offer this functionality, ExpressionEngine goes a step beyond other Content Management Systems by making it very easy to manually override default metadata by simply tweaking your templates. This makes it easy and scalable to implement on-page optimization onto thousands of ‘long tail pages’ saving time, while still giving marketing teams the precise control that’s needed to have an effective SEO strategy.
• Internal linking is easy – ExpressionEngine allows pages to reside in multiple categories and channels, without having to worry about duplicate content. Because ExpressionEngine does such a great job of allowing you to display and publish content, it becomes easy to interlink pages.
• An easy way to generate XML Sitemaps – Having a properly formatted XML sitemap is a key step towards getting content indexed in the search engines. Thanks to the inherent flexibility of its template structure, ExpressionEngine is able to easily output a perfectly-formatted XML sitemap, complete with custom priority codes.
• Robust indexing and caching – ExpressionEngine’s advanced caching capabilities, including template caching, query caching, and tag caching reduces server load and improves page loadtime, making it easier for the spiders to index your pages.
• Easy integration with Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer – Analyzing data is key to making your SEO efforts successful. Whereas many other systems make you update multiple pages to put on Analytics scripts, with ExpressionEngine, it’s literally a copy/paste situation. Even setting up advanced subdomain tracking, custom variables, and event tracking is painless, taking minutes where other systems take hours.

Shop Front (Appearance)

• What other sites do you like the look of?
• Do you have an existing logo, branding or colour scheme?
• Do you need logo and branding to be created for you?
• Should the front page have a welcome message, a carousel of images, static images, latest offers or a combination of features?

Products – what you are selling

• What type of products do you sell?
• How many products will you sell online (approx.)?
• What specific product information do you wish to display online to aid your customers in the buying process?
• Do your products have options? For example, do products have choices of size, colour, material, etc
• Approximately how many images will each product have (max)?
• Would you like to show related products when customers view a product?
• Are your products non-physical such as downloads, membership, etc?

Categorisation – how your products are organised

• Should products be grouped together into categories? This can help users find what they need more efficiently, particularly if you have many products
• If so, how many categories are required (approx.)?
• Do you need multiple levels of categorisation? e.g. Boys Clothes -> Shirts Trousers Jackets
• Would you like users to be able to search for products on your website?

Checkout

Discounts & promotions

• Will you need to offer your customers discounts on your products such as vouchers or coupons?
• Will you need to offer discounted or promotional prices? Such as Christmas or Valentines promotions?

Delivery / shipping

• Are your products shippable and do you charge for delivering your products to your customers?
• What structure do you use for this?
  • Flat rate
  • Weight based
  • Cost based
  • Size based
  • Other (please detail)
• Do you intend to ship orders abroad? If so, how does this affect your delivery charges?

Taking payments

• Are you VAT registered?
• Are all your products VAT applicable?
• Do you have a preferred payment gateway you wish to use ie sagepay, paypal etc? A payment gateway is used to process credit card payments
• Do you want to offer fully integrated payment processing on your website? Most gateways can process the payments away from your site (e.g. PayPal, SagePay Form) which is a simpler option
• If you want to process payment within your site, are you aware of the PCI compliance issues related to this?
  PCI is a set of industry data standards and regulations to decrease the amount of online fraud – read more about PCI DSS
• Do you have a merchant account with your bank? Does your current bank offer merchant accounts?
• Do you have the following to show on your online shop?
  • Terms and conditions
  • Returns policy
  • Privacy & security policies
  • Guarantee
  • Company registration details
  • VAT registration if applicable
  • Contact details – email, telephone, address
  • Relevant disclaimers

  The majority of these are required by many payment gateway providers before they will authorise your account.

• Do you require customers to sign up for an account before they can order or do you want to permit “anonymous” checkout?
• Do you intend to trade internationally?
• If so, do you require multilingual and/or multicurrency?

Back office – managing your online store

• Do you want your customers to be kept up to date with latest offers and products?
  They could do so by signing up to a mailing list either during checkout or using a standalone signup form
• Do you require reporting for your online store?
  For example, sales reports, customer reports, stock reports, product reports
• Do you need to be able to manually create orders such as taking telephone orders or orders in person?
• Would you like customers to be able to view current/past orders and manage their account details online?
• Do you have staff that process orders?
• If so, will they need special permissions to do so without editing the rest of the website?
• Do you require your online store to communicate with any external systems such as:
  • CRM (customer relationship managers – Sales Force, Netsuite, etc)
  • Accounts packages (Sage, QuickBooks, other)
  • Other (please detail)
• Do you require bulk product data uploading or will you enter the products into the website manually?
  Generally, it is quite straight forward to upload product data and images from an excel spreadsheet or CSV formatted document (comma separated values)
• Do you require web hosting or will you organise hosting yourself?
• Do you require any of the following related features for your store:
  • Search engine optimisation (SEO) management – meta tags, titles, keywords, HTML & XML sitemaps, search engine submission
  • Blog/news section
  • Information pages – about us, contact, find us, others
  • Mobile commerce – selling over mobile devices (iphone, blackberry, ipad, etc)
  • Contact forms and/or newsletter signup forms
  • Social media integration and social bookmarking – feeds for Facebook, Twitter and/or You Tube
  • Advertising – ability for companies to pay for banner ads on your site

Although we have watched it many times – the main route goes right past Kinetic Pulse Towers -  it was only this year we felt sufficiently confident to have a go! We had both taken part in a few 5k& 10k races over the past couple of years and thought we were just about ready for the challenge!
We have been training since last summer but upping the distance very gradually – even now I’m worried I won’t make it round!

But I am feeling fitter and actually quite enjoying running (something I thought I would never say! I rememebr desperately trying to do anything to get out of the ghastly cross country runs at school…)

I am running for Run for Congo Women – a charity that supports & sponsors women in war torn Congo.

Martyn is running to support the RNLI.
We’d be delighted if you could spare some cash to sponsor us in our valiant, knee breaking, efforts.

Redwood approached us recently with a request to complete, enhance and launch their OSCommerce website which had been sitting around in a semi-developed state for quite some time!

The enhancements included:

• Custom product price calculations
• Custom user calculators
• Integration with YouTube Channel
• Setup and integration with WorldPay gateway
• Fixing issues with existing OSCommerce modules
• Enhancing some of the usability and visual features of the site

Due to the very specific business and technical requirements, we worked very closely with the company so that we could deliver this project economically and quickly

This group runs regular workshops & community events about topics such as energy-saving & insulation, and provide a support network for the more vunerable members of the commuity during the colder months.

The website needed to be simple to use & navigate and need to use a simple CMS to allow the group to easily update content. Kinetic Pulse came up with a simple, yet eye catching design based on the default Worpdress 2012 theme and gave the client comprehensive training in how to use WordPress.

However the client insisted on having a working “sign up to my newsletter” box on the holding page too, and wanted all the collected email addresses to be collected in Magento as normal, and not in Mailchimp or any other newsletter program.

So I rolled up my sleeves and tried to figure out how to do it. This is the quick and dirty way I ended up doing it.

First I created my holding page in a separate folder called holdingpage\index.php

(I based it on an existing page from the Magento site, by copying the source HTML and slicing out bits I didn’t need.)

Then I edited the .htaccess so  that this page was always redirected to. (there are several posts out there on how to do it but here’s my take on it)

Change the follwoing line:

DirectoryIndex index.php

to

DirectoryIndex holdingpage/index.php

and also change

RewriteRule .* index.php [L]

to

RewriteRule .* holdingpage/index.php [L]

(obviously if you want to undo these changes at a later date I suggest you just comment out the old line by preceding it with a ‘#’)

Now that seemed to do the trick that everything was going to my new holding page. First task done.

Next I had to figure out how to get that newsletter subscribe working. Now I’m not a huge fan of Magento as it seems to over complicate a lot of stuff (and is mightily slow etc etc) so cover your eyes people if you are a fan of code purity.

I used regular PHP and MySQl to get this done. Turns out the newsletter_subscribers table isn’t one of the ones that is used in all the Magento indexing, so I could just update it using a regular MySQL statement.

I added the following code to the top of my index.php

<?php
if($_POST["email"]!=""){
    global $con;
    $con = mysql_connect("DBHOSTNAME","DBUSERNAME","DBPASSWORD");
    if (!$con)
      {
      die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
      } 
    mysql_select_db("DBNAME", $con);

    $strSQL="INSERT INTO `newsletter_subscriber` (`subscriber_id`, `store_id`, `change_status_at`, `customer_id`, `subscriber_email`, `subscriber_status`, `subscriber_confirm_code`) VALUES (NULL, '1', NULL, '0', '".$_POST["email"]."', '1', 'NULL');";

    mysql_query($strSQL);
}
?>

Note: I only have 1 store so have hardcoded those values

I added the following block just below the heading area of my holding page to generate a friendly message on sucessful subscription.

<? if($_GET["subscribe"]==1){?>
           <ul>
               <li>
                <ul><li><span>
                    Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. You'll hear from us soon...
                </span></li></ul>
            </li>
           </ul>
<? } ?>

And the subscribe form is just:

<div>
    <div>
        <strong><span>Join Our Mailing List</span></strong>
    </div>
    <form id="newsletter-validate-detail" method="post" action="/newsletter/subscriber/new/?subscribe=1">
        <div>
            <label for="newsletter"></label>
            
               <input type="text" value="enter your email address" title="Sign up for our newsletter" id="newsletter" name="email" onfocus="if(this.value=='enter your email address'){this.value=''}" onblur="if(this.value==''){this.value='enter your email address'}">
            
            <div>
                <button title="SUBMIT" type="submit"><span><span>SUBMIT</span></span></button>
            </div>
        </div>
    </form>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    //&lt;![CDATA[
        var newsletterSubscriberFormDetail = new VarienForm('newsletter-validate-detail');
    //]]&gt;
    </script>
</div>

Which the eagle-eyed of you will notice is just the default Magento HTML it generates for a subscribe box. Note: I have addedd subscribe=1 to the action parameter of the form too, which is used to display the message.

I admit its not pretty but it is quick and dirty and most importantly it works!

The timescales were tight as the site needed to be live in time for the influx of visitors from the Bath Christmas markets.
Aside from the logo design and wrapping design, Kinetic Pulse were left to create a simple and clean design for the site to reflect the wide range of natural beauty products that Aranais sell from their stall at the Bath Guildhall Market.

Aranais online shop

We installed several Zen cart plugins to improve the site experience eg:  zoom image light box,  stock by attributes and the url rewriting plugin from  Ceon. We also managed to fix a few ongoing issues with the Paypal & Worldpay payment gateways that had been mostly caused by a PHP server upgrade on the hosts!

This was all completed within a week just in time for the brand relaunch - www.aranais.co.uk

Here’s my attempt at getting it to work inspired by work done by Dan Coulter at the http://phpflickr.com/ project

1) Create a Flickr account

2) Upload your pictures into groups called “Sets” – giving each a title & description. These will be pulled into your Zen Cart

3) Create an EZ page called “Gallery”

4) In the tpl_page_default.php for your theme (as always ensure you override the default) add the following block of code:

<?php
 if($var_pageDetails->fields['pages_title']=="Gallery"){

// check if there is a query string 'set'
 if($_GET['set']!=""){
 //if there is a query string find out what pos it is in the photosets array
 $setName=$_GET['set'];

$pos=array_search($setName,$photoSetsNames);

echo "<h2>".$setName."</h2>";
 echo "<p>".$photoSetsDescriptions[$pos]."<br/></p>";
 echo $photoSetsPhotos[$pos];
 //print_r($photoSetsDescriptions);

}else{
 // if no query string then display list of all sets
 echo "<ul class=\"galThumbs\">";

foreach($photoSetsNames as $photoset){
 $pos=array_search($photoset,$photoSetsNames);
 ?>
 <li><a href="gallery/?set=<?=$photoset?>">
 <p><?=$photoset?></p>
 <? echo $photoSetsThumbs[$pos];?>
 </a></li>
 <? }
 echo "</ul>";
 }

}
 ?>

5) Upload the two attached files phpFlickr.php and phpFlickrGetSets.php to your “includes\modules” folder phpFlickrGetSets.zip

6) Change the lines indicated in your phpFlickrGetSets.php to be your Flickr App id and the absolute path to your new folder flickr_cache (Note: You absolutely must enable caching otherwise the lookups to Flickr can slow your site down horribly! Plus db caching I found to be woefully slow so stick to file system caching) And your Flickr User Name
(Get your Flickr App Id here: http://www.flickr.com/services/apps/create/apply)

7) Make sure you have created a folder called flickr_cache & set permissions to 755

Include your two new modules in the tpl_header.php file like so:

/**
 * load the module for getting the Flickr data
 */

require(DIR_WS_MODULES . zen_get_module_directory('phpFlickrGetSets.php'));

I’m putting it in the site header as I want to dynamically get the list of set names to use in the site menu. If you wanted it only on the gallery page then you could just add it to your tpl_page_template.php along with the other code above

And Bob’s your uncle:

See it working here: www.dorisdesigns.co.uk

As always any comments feedback appreciated!

Unfortunately Zen Cart doesn’t have this facility out of the box, but its not too trick y to add it yourself.

In your templates html_header.php add the following lines:

<!-- bof facebook "like" meta tags -->

<meta property="og:title" content="<?php echo META_TAG_TITLE; ?>" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://<?=$_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"]?><? echo $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];?>" />
<? if(META_TAG_PRODUCT_IMAGE=="META_TAG_PRODUCT_IMAGE"){?>
<meta property="og:image" content="http://<?=$_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"]?>/includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/images/path-to-default-logo.jpg"  />
<? }else{?>
<meta property="og:image" content="http://<?=$_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"]?>/images/<? echo META_TAG_PRODUCT_IMAGE;?>" />
<meta property="og:type" content="product" />
<? } ?>
<meta property="og:site_name" content="XXX-Name-of-your-site-XXX"/>
<meta property="og:description" content="<?php echo META_TAG_DESCRIPTION; ?>"/>
<meta property="og:locale" content="en_US" />

<!-- eof facebook  meta tags -->

Note: this is using a new DEFINE variable called META_TAG_PRODUCT_IMAGE.

This needs to be defined in your modules/meta_tags.php file.

(use an override for your template obviously by copying the existing one into a folder called YOUR_TEMPLATE)

In the line around 194 that is builing the SQL to pull data from the products table add the following  field to the list:

p.products_image

Then around line 208 below where it says // custom meta tags per product  add the following line:

$meta_products_image = $product_info_metatags->fields['products_image'] ;

The just before     } // CUSTOM META TAGS on line 277 add the following:

define('META_TAG_PRODUCT_IMAGE', $meta_products_image);

Thats it. You can see it in work here http://www.thepartypirate.com

Rob at Surfplugs had wanted to update his site for a while and contacted Adam Wyatt at Flipside studio to produce a fresh new design, with the hope to launch his products internationally.

The wireframes for the site showed quite a complex array of features (an order workflow which included an interactive world map, video secion, gallery of team riders and an array of products – on top of the usual website CMS features such as Pages & File Library) So we made the decision to use a custom php based CMS which could be customised exactly to the client’s needs.

The front end of the site uses jQuery slideshows & carousels to display images and has an Ajax driven contact form.