Fixing the Interspire Google Base Feed

August 17, 2010

in Google,Interspire

Google Base updates their guidelines faster than Interspire updates its Shopping Cart.

Google loves when we feed it products.Upon launching the new MakeUpMania.com website, I discovered that the XML feed that Interspire generates for Google Base is not properly structured. There were many hits and misses before making the modifications necessary to get the feed approved.

Fixing the generated feed

Below are fixes to three issues that kept throwing errors on the Google Base side.  Read more&hellip

1 comment

Interspire & BigCommerce WordPress Plugin

August 16, 2010

in Interspire,Plugins,WordPress

Integrate Interspire or BigCommerce with your WordPress website

You want to spend your time writing the best content, not hunting for the link for the product you’re blogging about. This plugin is simple to set up, and powerful. If you use WordPress and Interspire or BigCommerce, it’s a must have.

For for information, check out the plugin information & download page on WordPress.org  Read more&hellip

2 comments

Squidfingers.com Patterns – Download All the Patterns in One ZIP

June 26, 2010

in Design

Squidfingers Patterns in one file

Download all the great patterns in one place.

Squidfingers.com has the best source of free patterns out there, and has been used by thousands of web designers. Unfortunately, however, you have to download patterns one at a time. With 158 patterns, this can take a while.

I have compiled all the Squidfingers.com patterns into one ZIP file. Please remember

Feel free to use any of these patterns on your own site. If you do decide use one, a credit link back to my site [http://www.squidfingers.com/patterns/] is always greatly appreciated.

Please continue to respect the terms of use for these patterns, and link to their site. It’s a great, free resource.

  Squidfingers.com Patterns (278.5 KiB, 215 hits)

0 comments

Preview Hidden Products in Interspire Shopping Cart

Preview Hidden Products in Interspire Shopping Cart

June 14, 2010

in Interspire

Interspire Shopping Cart admins need to preview products before they go live.

Yep, we’re talking about Interspire once again today. 

The Interspire Shopping Cart doesn’t allow you to preview products that you are editing without making the product live in the store. This is plain silly; it’s vital for store owners to make sure their products pages look just as they expect when they make the product live in their store. As it is currently (in Interspire 5.5.x), this is not possible.

All it takes is one minor change in code, and your world gets a lot easier.  Read more&hellip

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Add ‘Customers Also Purchased’ to the Cart Page on Interspire Shopping Cart

June 8, 2010

“Customers Also Purchased” should be on the cart page, right?

The Interspire Shopping Cart has a “Customers Also Bought” feature, but for some reason, they didn’t think to make it functional on the cart page — one of the most useful (and obvious) places to have the feature. This modification will allow you to place the SideProductAlsoBought panel into your theme’s cart.html template, using the %%Panel.SideProductAlsoBought%% placeholder in the template.

Goals of this mod

  1. Keep the existing “Also Bought/Purchased” functionality working on product pages
  2. Add “Also Bought/Purchased” functionality to the cart page
  3. Give an option where it will only display “Also Bought” for the most recently added product

With those goals in mind, I went about implementing a solution, which is below:  Read more&hellip

Read the full article →

How to prevent your Google background image from fading in slowly.

June 7, 2010
Thumbnail image for How to prevent your Google background image from fading in slowly.

Google + slow loading = not worth having background images.

In trying to keep their homepage as minimal as possible, in December Google switched to fading in the home page links only on an event: moving your mouse or tabbing out of the search box. This was fine when the home page was only white, as it wasn’t taxing on computers to fade in on white.

Now that Google allows for custom image backgrounds (likely in response to how beautiful the Bing backgrounds are), the fading in process can be tedious, even using blazing-fast Chrome. I can only imagine what users using Internet Explorer 6 are going through: fading in images takes a lot of work and time!

This was annoying me, so I made a quick modification to my SEO Stylesheet (a Custom Stylesheet to display search results and no-follow nicely in Safari, IE and Firefox). This mod will make the image load solid, with no fading or resulting lag.  Read more&hellip

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Generate CSS Body Classes in Interspire Shopping Cart

May 20, 2010
Interspire CSS

If you’re used to WordPress’ body_class() function, this post for you.

Working with WordPress, it’s easy to get accustomed to some of its nice features, like the body_class() function introduced in WP 2.8. When working with Interspire Shopping Cart, I wanted the same level of information added to the page’s <body> tag.  Read more&hellip

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Improve Interspire Shopping Cart Search with Smart Redirections

May 7, 2010

Good search results are magical

I am always impressed when a website’s search goes where I want and finds what I expect it to. When trying to find a specific product by SKU in Interspire, you will be presented with a search result that shows the product you’re looking for first. But this is not good enough, as it adds an extra click in the process.

If your users are specific enough to type in an exact product name, brand name, product SKU or product ID, you better get them to the product they want, right away — they’re likely to buy! I don’t want to show them a search results page, I want them to see the product or brand page itself.  Read more&hellip

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How to Add an `Edit Product` Link for Interspire Shopping Cart

May 6, 2010

Why can’t I just click a link to edit the product I’m viewing?

Interspire, I love ya, but the Interspire Shopping Cart has some silly omissions. Like a simple “Edit Product” link if you’re logged in as an administrator. Instead, you have to go to the backend, search for the product, then edit it…which takes a solid 20 seconds.

Well, I got tired of that, so here’s a way to generate a proper Edit Product link.  Read more&hellip

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Auto-Optimize WordPress Database without a Plugin

March 11, 2010
Thumbnail image for Auto-Optimize WordPress Database without a Plugin

These horses are somehow not cool. Speeding up your blog is.

I am working on a WordPress project that has a pretty heavy database, and I want to be able to auto-optimize the WordPress database. Even though they are integrating this functionality into WordPress 3.0, I want it now, and without having to use a plugin (I have had some issues with WP-DBManager configuring properly on a few sites).

If you add the following code to your functions.php file, it will automatically optimize your WordPress database every 6 hours, keeping it squeaky clean.  Read more&hellip

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