Got something interesting you can share with others? Post your cool tip, trick or tutorial here for others to learn from.

Please do not ask questions in here, start a new thread. This area is for tips, tricks and tutorials only.

If you are adding a tip, trick or tutorial, please create a bold title at the top of your posting on the subject. So it makes it easier for people to see what things are about.

How To Create a Bigger Banner / Logo

Create a banner in a graphics package, i use dreamweaver, then you need to create a slice of the far left hand part of the banner that is 128 x 128, (or you can actually make it any size you want, i have made my whole banner 183 high) export this slice and call it logo.jpg, you can then copy this file over the top of the one in ccdata\images. Then export the whole banner and call it header_bg.jpg and copy it to the images folder off of the root. then when you view your shop you will see the new banner.

Keep the files in a safe place as each time you upload the shop you will need to overwrite the files again to see the new banner you created.

More to come...

CoffeeCup Shopping Cart within a frame.

I have successfully set up a shop within a frame, therefore using the existing logo and 'feel' of the main site. Obviously, the instructions for how to do it, will depend on the software you use to create websites.

Point the frame contents to www. fredbloggs.com/store, or wherever your shopping cart is to be found. All links still work "within the frame".

The one I use took me and grand total of 90 seconds to achieve the required result.

Here's a quick five minute mockup gch.com.au/fred_bloggs.html

PP




















postings combined by monitor

Adding Google Analytics....

I am a big fan of google analytics, not least because I am a firm believer that the more google code you include in your site the moore google favours it. I know some people will disagree with this theory, but i have great and fast success with google rankings when i include their code in a new site.

So here is a few pointers on how to implement google analytic within your shopping cart software.

1). First as always you will need to set up the new domain in your google analytics account, then copy the code provided.

2). For the main page of the shopping cart browse to ccdata/data and edit the index.inc.php file.
3). Near the bottom of the file you will see a line that starts "?></span></p></div><?php } ?><?php } ?></div></div></div><p id="footer">" this is line 162 on my editing program. (by the way you can change the footer here as well).
4). Move to the end of this line and you will see "</body></html>"
5). Paste you analytics code before the </body> so that the code is within the body of your php file.
6). Save and upload the file again.

You will have to do this each time you upload your shop again, some may see this as a bit of a pain, but it only takes a 30 seconds to do it each time.

Cheers

Dan

Footer info in the templates

Every body is complaining about the CoffeeCup message at the end of Shopping Cart.
What I have done:
I had bought the one theme and edited the xml files cart.xml / detail.xml / group.xml / home.xml and changed some values. As my sites are portuguese I translate the message to portuguese words (I had the need to change UTF-8 by iso-8859-1) and change also the message below:
<a href="http://www.coffeecup.com/">Shopping Cart templates</a> by CoffeeCup Software.
by
<a href="http://www.jimmythesailor.com">Jimmy Photography</a> by Jimmy the Sailor
But as I have two sites I made variants of the theme. The difference is that message and link. Well I can do more differences.
Now, every time i made changes and using this themes things come with my stuff.

Check here the result: http://www.art-i-batik.com/shopping/index.php

I hope this can help some people
Sorry if I was not much clear....
Jimmy








posting combined by monitor

Linking Shopping Cart to Website

Hi, A quick solution to linking the shopping cart to your main web site, is to set up links on your main web site pages which point at the shopping cart categories;

i.e. if your main site is www.xxx.com and the shopping cart files are located in a folder called Shop.

Then the category links href ="/shop/viewcategory.php?groupid=id" where id = 0 etc. The group id numbers can be quickly established by looking at the url displayed in the browser window while stepping through the categories of your shop.

How to change the thumbnail frame colours in the shopping cart tip.


If you do not have a good knowlege of CSS do not attempt to do this, and if you do keep a copy of the original script in case things go wrong

Here is how it is done.

To change the colour of the thumnail frame colours you need to go to your css file, and then open your defaut.css.

Now you can change the colour of the fames in two places.

To change the thumbnail frame colour on the shop home page replace the #c3c3c3 with the colour number of the colour you want.

Layout styles script

#item_list .item img {float:left; display:inline; width:77px; height:77px; margin:0 5px 5px 0; border:2px solid #c3c3c3}

To change it for the product details section (where you can have various images etc) replace the #c3c3c3 in the section below in both places below were you see the #c3c3c3 with the colour number of the colour you want.


Product detail styles script

#product_images {clear:both; float:left; width:220px}
#image_full {padding:4px; border:1px solid #c3c3c3 ; background-color:#efeeee; width:204px}
#product_thumbnails li {float:left; display:inline; padding:3px; width:98px; height:96px; margin:3px 3px 0 0; border:1px solid c3c3c3 ; background-color:#efeeee}
#product_thumbnails img {width:98px}

Dont forget to upload the changed default.css and replace the old one. You only have to do this once.

Again, if you do not have a good knowlege of CSS do not attempt to do this, and if you do keep a copy of the original script in case things go wrong

To change the format of price notation...

For example in the Netherlands we write: 645.000,=
six hundred and forty five thousand euro's and nill cents
Instead writing 645,000.00
I configured it as follows:

In the file 'utilities.inc.php'
There is a piece of code:

function formatAmount ( $number, $dec_places, $lng = 'en' ) {
switch ($lng) {
case 'en':
$r = number_format($number, $dec_places, ',', '.');
break;
case 'nl':
case 'es':
$r = number_format($number, $dec_places, ',', '.');
break;
case 'fr':
$r = number_format($number, $dec_places, ',', ' ');
break;
default:
die("No definition found for language '{$lng}' in formatAmount.");
}
return $r;

The bold underlined part is what I changed...
Not bad for a newbie to PHP...

Adding Video Demonstrations in Items

Thought I would sugest this. If you want to demonstrate a video of an item working, this sets up an Active x command inserted in the description html insertion system. Obviously you have to change values to suit.
Here is a demo of a clock in action http://mrtworld.com I might add this is an Aussie site and I have to address international shipping so this is a demo only DO NOT BUY. This is my bedside alarm and you are not getting it. I would refund first. I grabbed it, videoed it and put it up. dead easy. I repeat DO NOT BUY it is a demo only.


It actually opens all sort of options but product inventory is the biggie everything else can be managed.

For instance the above can be used to sell houses with a panarama of the property. the possibilities are endless.

I hope that the inventory problem is solved as this is a rapier compared to the Zen Cart.

I am setting up both and am 10 % with Zen Cart and about 75% with CCSB in 3 days.
Guess what system I would prefer to run with








monitor combined postings

Stopping customers from certain countries

I am sure this is obvious for the experienced guys, but I needed to stop visitors from a certain country purchasing from my web store.. Mainly because they have to purchase via a direct channel... anyway, I needed to add a geolocation look up so that if they are visiting from that country it would re-direct them to the alternative website...

this is the PHP code I stuck in, just before, the absolute paths section... Yes if going via a Proxy it isn't going to work... but it may be of use to someone else, especially if you want to create a webstore in different languages...

Just an idea... and yes you have to remember to add the code after regenerating.


$geoPlugin_array = unserialize( file_get_contents('http://www.geoplugin.net/php.gp?ip=' . $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']) );

if ($geoPlugin_array['geoplugin_countryCode']=='ZA' )
{
header( 'Location: http://myredirected size' ) ;
}

// absolute paths are more efficient (on proper servers), so is output buffering