The Love a Dog store design is based on the Georgia Theme from Spiffy Stores.
Author Archives: Brian
Syntax highlighting – now in our Liquid template editor
Until now the Theme Editor has displayed your theme’s Liquid template files in a very boring, black text field.
We think this makes it harder to edit and change your theme files than it needs to be, so we’ve added a bit of colour to the whole process.
Now, when you go to edit a theme’s Liquid file, you’ll see the text highlighted and colour-coded according to the syntax of the language. You’ll see HTML, CSS and Javascript as well as all the Liquid tags highlighted using different colours so that it makes it a lot easier to navigate your way around the file. In addition, strings, numbers and various other bits of punctuation are highlighted as well.
To round off this update, we’ve added line numbers on the left to make it easier to locate and refer to the code.
In technical terms, this is known as a syntax-directed editor, but we just call it easy to use
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Store of the moment: Arlington Milne
The Arlington Milne store is based on the Minimal theme from Spiffy Stores, and features photography by Jedd Cooney.
NZ Post shipping calculator now available
We’re very pleased to announce that we’ve incorporated New Zealand Post’s domestic shipping calculator into the Spiffy Stores ecommerce software. It’s currently available to all NZ-based Spiffy Stores for calculating postage costs to your customers within New Zealand.
To activate it, just go to the “Shipping & handling” page in your Toolbox and click on the “add a shipping agent” button to go to the “Shipping Agent Rate Calculators” page.
From here, you can add, delete and edit the shipping agent and the services that you want to support in your store. All our New Zealand customers will see a new entry on this page from today for the new NZ Post calculator. All you need to do is click on the “Activate” button, confirm the services that you want to support and you’re done.
Now, whenever you add a weight-based shipping rate and you switch to using a Shipping Agent rate calculator, you will now have the option of using the New Zealand Post calculator.
If your online store is in New Zealand, the best way you can currently provide postage prices for shipping your products worldwide is to use prepaid ParcelPost bags for shipping to Australia or shipping worldwide… but we’ve just been informed by NZ Post that their shipping API will be extended to incorporate international shipping in early to mid July. Not long now!
More information about our New Zealand shipping calculator can be found in our knowledge base.
Another New Zealand payment gateway available
With the recent expansion of Spiffy Stores into New Zealand, we’re actively looking out for new ways to add support for our New Zealand store owners… so we’re pleased to announce the addition of a new payment gateway from Flo2Cash today.
We’re obviously used to writing code to interact with a wide variety of credit card payment gateways around the world, but we have to admit that adding the support for the Flo2Cash Web2Pay web service had to be one of the fastest turnaround times that we’ve ever experienced. The whole process from start to end took just over 24 hours, and included some very helpful support from the Flo2Cash people!
In coming weeks, we’re expecting to be adding some other features specfically for New Zealand, so watch out.
Of course, this new gateway is in addition to our NZ support for PayPal Website Payments Standard, PayPal Express, and the ability to accept credit card payments manually using your own credit card processing facilities.
If any of our New Zealand customers have any feature requests that are specific to New Zealand e-commerce stores, please let us know!
Google Shopping arrives in Australia!
Google have just announced that they are launching both the Google Merchant Center and Google Shopping in Australia!
If you’d like to use Google Shopping to reach more customers, just log in to your Spiffy Store Toolbox and head over to the “Marketing >> Product data feeds” section. You can then set up a new feed for the Google Merchant Centre by following the instructions in that section.
When you’ve done that, the next step is to log in to the Google Merchant Centre, create a new feed , and choose Australia from the drop-down menu. If you’re new to the Google Merchant Centre, we recommend reading the “Getting Started” articles in the Google Merchant Help Center.
Store owners that choose to advertise their product catalogue can also do so using AdWords’ product extensions as well. Product extensions use the product information submitted by the retailer and automatically display the extra information within ads, where relevant. To learn more about product extensions, visit the AdWords Help Center.
Happy shopping!
Easy image editing with the Feather Editor from Aviary.com
Spiffy Stores has just joined the flock!
We’re pleased to announce the addition of a new, easy to use image editor to your store toolbox. The Feather editor from Aviary.com loads into your browser and allows you to perform a wide range of editing tasks, all without leaving your Spiffy Stores Toolbox.
It couldn’t be simpler. Just click on the edit link that you’ll now see on your uploaded product images. If you want to edit an image file that has been uploaded into the uploaded files section, or an image that is part of a theme, then click on the file icon for the image, and then click on the new edit link that appears above the image preview.
Once you’ve invoked the editor, it will start to load into your browser. After a few seconds you’ll see your image in the Feather toolbox. From there you can perform actions such as image resizing, cropping, colouring an other effects. You can annotate your image with text or additional graphics. In short, you can really make your product images look extra spiffy!
Introducing SASS – Syntactically Awesome Spiffy Stores
Actually, it’s really “Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets”.
For all the theme designers out there, we’ve just made your life a little bit easier. We all know that sometimes CSS stylesheets can get complicated, so anything that can help you manage that complexity is a welcome bonus.
As you may already know, when you enable the Theme Editor by creating a ‘theme.settings‘ file, you can parse your CSS files by making sure they have a suffix of ‘.css.liquid‘.
Now, as part of the CSS processing that gets initiated to deal with the Liquid tags, we’ve added a pass through the SCSS processor, which is part of the SASS CSS extensions. You can read more about these CSS extensions at http://sass-lang.com
By using the CSS extensions, you can simplify your stylesheets by using variables, conditional logic, mixins and templates, nested attributes and a whole lot more. Even better, at the end of the processing you get a compressed CSS file so you can ensure that your site loads as fast as possible. Even if you don’t use any of the CSS extensions, you still get a compressed stylesheet, so that’s got to be something to smile about!
You can read more about the Spiffy Stores Theme Customizations in our Knowledge Base.
Enhanced product tags
Here’s a small but useful enhancement that has just been released for your Spiffy Store.
We all know how important it is to add tags to your product, as they help your customers find the right product and add extra information about your product that search engines can use to help you get a better ranking for your online store.
Well, we’ve just made it easier to add more descriptive tags to your products. From today, you can create multi-word tags which means that your tags can more accurately reflect the terms that your customers will be searching for.
When you create or edit your tags, they will now be separated by commas, which means that you can include multiple words in a single tag.
Now you can create a tag for ‘spiffy stores online store software’, rather than being restricted to the single words, ‘spiffy’, ‘stores’, ‘online’, ‘store’ and ‘software’.
Don’t forget that product tags are also used in the keyword meta tags for your site, and whilst these are going out of style, they are still very important to use.
New Australian payment gateways available
We’re pleased to announce that we’ve added payment gateways from Suncorp Bank and Bendigo Bank to our supported Australian payment gateways.
This means that you now have even more options for accepting credit card payments directly in your online store.
Our current direct payment gateways available to stores in Australia are:
- Advam
- ANZ eGate
- Bendigo Bank
- Camtech
- Commonwealth Bank CommWeb
- eWay
- NAB Transact
- NetRegistry
- PaySecure
- PaymentExpress
- SecurePay
- Suncorp Bank
These are in addition to our support for PayPal Website Payments Standard, PayPal Express, and the ability to accept credit card payments manually using your own credit card processing facilities.