From the category archives:

Interspire

Interspire: A modern shopping cart
The Interspire Shopping Cart is a full-featured, SEO-friendly and standards compliant shopping cart. These articles are about modifying or extending the cart’s capabilities.

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

0 comments

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

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

0 comments

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

June 8, 2010

in Interspire

“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

4 comments

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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Interspire Shopping Cart — Add a Brands Drop-Down Menu

August 6, 2009

Don’t use the Interspire Shopping Cart? Check it out; it rocks.

The Interspire Shopping Cart is a great tool, but it’s missing some stuff out of the box.

This is how the Panel looks in the 'Adventure' theme.

This is how the Panel looks in the 'Adventure' theme.

I am working on a shopping cart for a client, and wanted to incorporate a drop down menu of brand names using a standard <select> form. Sounds easy, right? Well, it’s not included in the Interspire cart.  Read more&hellip

The Interspire cart has few brand options out of the box:

  • The Brands tag cloud – using the SideBrandTagCloud.html Panel
  • Brands unordered list – using the SideShopByBrand.html or SideShopByBrandFull.html Panels

This tutorial will show you how to add a brands drop down menu in 5 steps.

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Incorporate WordPress with Interspire Shopping Cart

March 30, 2009

I’m going to elaborate on this further (and about Interspire in general), but for those of you who want to make WordPress functions available throughout your shopping cart, here’s how:

Before the closing ?> in the init.php file, add the following code:
require(realpath(ISC_BASE_PATH).'/blog-directory/wp-blog-header.php');, where /blog-directory/ is your WP installation. If you installed it in the root directory, then you’d simply need require(realpath(ISC_BASE_PATH).'/wp-blog-header.php'); (see Update below).

Update: There is a bug that happens when the include is placed at the bottom of init.php; instead, add require(realpath(ISC_BASE_PATH).'/wp-blog-header.php'); on the line below require_once(dirname(__FILE__).'/lib/init.php'); (line 3).

Voila! That simple. Any questions?  Read more&hellip

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Recover your password from Interspire Shopping Cart

February 9, 2009

Where did my Interspire password go?
I develop my websites locally, so sending Lost Password emails never works. When I forget what my password is, it’s quite the hassle.

I’m developing an Interspire Shopping Cart website, and lo and behold, I lost the password.  Read more&hellip

Here’s how to recover your password from Interspire Shopping Cart:

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