Author Archives: Brian

Ten cool things we can do when IE6 is dead

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I’ve been busy working on a couple of new themes, and can’t believe how annoying IE6 is.  Hours of annnoying bug fixes later, and I just can’t believe that any company can write software so crap.  Why are people still using it?

Internet Explorer 6 has always been crap when it comes to building websites. While many of its issues are Microsoft’s fault for ignoring web standards, newer problems have arisen simply because of its age. It’s now eight years old, and many of the cool new tools on the web just didn’t exist when it came out.

Even if not all of IE6’s problems are its own fault, I know I’ll be joining the millions of web designers & developers dancing on Internet Explorer 6’s grave… when it finally dies the slow painful death it deserves. Until then, designing pages around IE6’s shortcomings is a fact of life.

Still… if you’ve ever wondered what sort of cool stuff you’ll be able to take advantage of when IE6 is gone, Sitepoint’s James Edwards has a list of the 10 cool things we’ll be able to do once IE6 is dead.

We hate you, Internet Exploder. You will not be missed.

Shipping notification emails & packing slips

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Shipping Notification Email

We’ve been working hard on getting the shipping side of processing your orders sorted out to make it as streamlined as possible for you.

Now, when you mark an order as shipped, a notification email is sent out to the customer to let them know their items are on their way.

You can also add a tracking number so they can track their shipment.  A new Order Shipping Report is also created instead of the old Fulfilment Report, which also allows the printing of Packing Slips.

Very soon you’ll also be able to customise your emails as well, so you’ll be able to completely re-brand all aspects of your store! Check out the preview of the email to the right.

Enjoy!

Support for eWAY payment gateway added

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Spiffy Stores can now accept payments through the eWAY payment gateway.

eWAY is the leading Internet payment gateway provider operating in Australia. Connecting your Spiffy Store directly to your bank to process your customers online credit card payment in a few seconds.

Using a payment gateway like eWAY allows your business to securely trade 24/7 all over the globe, truly automating the accepting website payments component of your business, and cutting out the pain of manually processing transactions.

It’s also super-easy to use eWAY as your gateway provider.  After you’ve signed up with eWay, you just go to the “Checkout & Payment” section of your preferences, select eWAY as your payment gateway, and then enter your eWAY customer number.  You’re then ready to start accepting real-time credit card payments!

Resending a Lost Order Confirmation Email

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Every time a customer places an order, they are sent an Order Confirmation email showing them what they’ve ordered.

From time to time, email messages get lost or misplaced. Now you can resend a lost Order Notification to the customer from the Order page. Just go to the order and you’ll find a new link called “Email Order Notification”.

Just click on the link to resend the lost Order Notification.

New order management controls

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Log in to your store, and check out our new Orders List! We’ve got a whole new look, with an easy-to-see Shipping Status.

Sort your Orders by clicking on the Column Headers. Click again to reverse the order.  You can do bulk operations by ticking the boxes against each order. Close 50 orders in one easy step!

Filter out orders you don’t want to see by selecting one or more of the filter options in the side-bar.

Write good product descriptions!

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Write good product descriptions!

It never fails to amaze me how many people are creating stores and populating them with 1 line product descriptions. I’m stunned by this, as stores set up like this are bound to fail despite our best efforts to make them search engine friendly.

Whoever said “a picture is worth a thousand words” probably never managed to get a website ranked highly in the search engines! As far as Google, Yahoo or Altavista are concerned, a picture is not worth anything. Continue reading →

How to Fake an Uploaded File

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Our store software contains an extensive set of routines for processing uploaded images and resizing them into various image sizes. We’ve recently been adding some code to support a bulk import function and it’s become necessary to somehow fake uploading a file, given a specific URL for an image.

The basic plan is to use Net::HTTP to connect to the remote server and grab the image and save it in a temporary file. It turns out that Rails contains a UploadedTempfile class which is a subclass of Tempfile, and this is used by the CGI routines to handle any uploaded files.

Continue reading →