This is a quick “heads-up” for all our Spiffy Stores web designers and developers out there who are customizing and building fantastic themes for their customers.

As you already know, Spiffy Stores has always supported the use of Sass (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) to ease the development of stylesheets in your themes. It’s a great productivity tool and makes the whole job of building and managing your CSS styles a whole lot easier. In fact, at Spiffy Stores, we’ve been using Sass almost from day one, well over ten years ago.

Since it’s such a great productivity tool, we were a bit concerned to learn that our current implementation was being deprecated in favour of a newly developed version called Dart Sass, and that this version would be the basis of all future development going forward.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve just built a bridge to the new Dart Sass that can be used by all existing themes and any new themes without any change, ensuring our long-term commitment to the Sass language and environment.

We’re aware that another ecommerce platform has decided that supporting Sass is too difficult, and has chosen to withdraw support for Sass from their theme platform, requiring instead that all stylesheets be coded using native CSS. Booooo! As web developers ourselves, we’d be pretty unhappy about something like this, so if you know anyone who has been affected by this change, then please let them know that Spiffy Stores is fully behind Sass and it’s continued importance in the web development stack.

If you have any questions about the use of Sass, or developing themes for Spiffy Stores, please let us know at support@spiffystores.com.au.

We’re proud and delighted to announce we’ve given birth to a new theme for Spiffy Stores. And it’s a cracker!

Vintage, our most flexible theme yet, is a fully responsive design. The layout will automatically adapt to the screen size it’s viewed on, whether that’s a smart phone, a tablet or a laptop. In fact, it will always look its best on any screen width from 320 pixels to over 2500.

The Vintage theme gives you 6 elegant styles to choose from: Cupcakes, Fresh Linen, Natural, Vintage Velvet, Mellow Yellow, plus a bonus “Not So Vintage” style.  You can re-colour each of these styles to get it looking exactly how you want too!

And we’ve included a bucket load of customisable features such as…

• 4 levels of drop-down menus so you can make really specific product categories

• Cool 5-image homepage slideshow, with 3 different transitions, captions and links, so you can tailor each one to a different message

• 24 funky heading typefaces and unlimited colour schemes so you can style it just the way you like it

• Customisable product pages with custom product fields, dynamic image zoom and related product up-sells

• Display featured collections on your home page with support for collection images (new feature!).

• Featured collection pages with support for collection images (new feature!) so you can show off your different product categories on one page.

• Social media integration to grow your audience on your Facebook, Google +, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn pages

• Newsletter integration with MailChimp, Campaign Monitor or Mad Mimi so you can sign up visitors to your email list through our simple form.

• Built-in icons for payment methods like PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, and Bank Deposit.

• Matching checkout styles with your logo and colours.

Sound good? Why not take a look around this baby in the Vintage theme demo store we’re building. While you’re there, try clicking and dragging the bottom right corner of your browser window in and out. You’ll see the seamless and dynamic resize in action!

If you want to apply the Vintage theme to your store, just navigate to the “Design & Assets > Theme gallery” section of your Toolbox and update your templates with one click. Don’t forget to save your current theme by downloading it first so you can restore it later if you’d prefer to use it instead.

Instructions on how to make changes to the Vintage theme to get it to suit you perfectly, along with previews of the different built-in styles and fonts can be found in the Vintage theme guide in our Knowledge Base.

We’ve always believed in pushing the technical envelope to provide advanced technical solutions to make life easier for our store owners.  This is way more important to us than the hype and gloss that you may find in the rest of the industry.

Over the past year, we’ve been talking to loads of web designers who use Spiffy Stores to create online stores for their customers. Although they love creating new e-commerce shops using our software, the resounding feedback we’ve been getting is that whilst the current Theme Editor in the Toolbox is great for small changes, it get’s a bit more difficult when designing an entire theme for a store.

For larger theme updates it’s really necessary to download the theme files to your computer, edit them and then upload the new files to the server. Using the Theme Editor to do this is a bit cumbersome, and makes the design process more difficult than it should be.

We’ve listened to these concerns, and have spent considerable time and effort working on a solution… so today we’re very proud to announce a major new capability which allows all your theme files and assets to be edited directly from your computer using WebDAV enabled editors such as Adobe’s Dreamweaver, and Panic’s Coda.  If you’re on a Mac, you’re even luckier, as WebDAV is built right into OSX, and can be used in conjunction with TextMate and Taco.

To use this new feature in Windows, all you need is a WebDAV enabled editor or a utility such as NetDrive which allows WebDAV files to be mounted on your computer as a local folder. This means that you can use your favourite editor to edit your store’s theme files directly from your computer.

If you’re using a WebDAV enabled editor such as Dreamweaver, you also have access to some advanced features such a file checkout and locking so that you can work in a team without having to worry about whether someone else overwrites your changes.

If you’re a web designer and your current e-commerce software doesn’t support WebDAV, then you should seriously consider Spiffy Stores for this feature alone, as you’ll find your theme development time slashed significantly.

For more info about using WebDAV to edit your store, head over to the WebDAV section of our knowledge base.

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The Midgee Moo online store has a gorgeous range of quality, traditional puzzles, games, pretend food, craft, special needs toys, kinder needs and so much more… sourced from around the globe for kids from newborn up to 6 years old to enjoy.

Their store is based on the Georgia Theme for Spiffy Stores, and they’ve added a super-cute custom designed logo, background and banners designed by Restored 316 Designs.

We’re pleased to announce the release of a new Spiffy Stores theme!.  The Seattle Theme for Spiffy Stores includes a host of features including unlimited colour schemes, Facebook comments, wish lists, social media integration including Google +1, customisable slideshows and 9 different font options.  Read on to find out more about this theme.

Unlimited colour schemes.

Easily choose one of the 6 built-in colour schemes in the Theme editor section of your toolbox… or make your own colour scheme by choosing colours for your titles, background, menus, footer, buttons… just about everything!

9 title fonts.

You have a choice of nine different fonts for your store’s titles and/or menus.  Hopefully you’ll find one that works with the look you’re trying to get for your store.  If not, we can easily add a new font to your store for a small fee.  Our technique for achieving native font display in browsers is tried and proven, and works on most modern browsers.

Upload your own logo.

Easily upload your own logo to your store.  It’s re-sized automatically for you.

Display a slideshow on your home page.

Your store home page can display a slideshow of up to 5 images.  You can choose how many to display, upload your own images, and select the transition you want the slideshow animation to display… as well has how fast you want your slideshow to run.

Social media integration.

Facebook “like” buttons and Facebook comments, Twitter “tweet” buttons, links to your Facebook and Twitter pages, link to your newsletter service provider (such as MailChimp), and even a new customer wshlist function (currently in Beta testing)…. they’re all included, and all configurable in your Theme Editor without you having to edit a line of code.

Plus more features!

You can easily edit your colour scheme, and choose the menus to display in your store with a few clicks!  There are so many options in this theme that it’s difficult to list them without going on forever.  For more information about this theme, head over to our Knowledge base and view the Seattle theme guide.

To preview the Seattle theme, head over to the theme’s demo store at http://seattle.spiffystores.com

We’ve just finished a re-design of the Hair Fairy Clips store using the new Georgia Theme.  If you’re interested in getting us to modify a theme for use in your Spiffy Store, it can generally be done in about 2 weeks and will cost you from $70 for a few changes up to $450.00 for a complete overhaul.

Contact us today to find out about our store design service.

We’re pleased to announce the release of a new Spiffy Stores theme!.  The Georgia Theme for Spiffy Stores includes a host of features including 8 different colour schemes, and 9 different font options.  Read on to find out more about this theme.

8 colour schemes.

Easily choose one of the 8 built-in colour schemes in the Theme editor section of your toolbox.

9 title fonts.

You have a choice of nine different fonts.  Hopefully you’ll find one that works with the look you’re trying to get for your store.  if not, we can easily add a new font to your store for a small fee.  We’re using a new technique to achieve native font display in browsers, and we’re hoping to extend our existing themes to include this early next year.

Upload your own logo.

Either upload your own logo to your store, or use a by-line under your store name.

Feature images on your home page.

Your store home page displays 3 feature images.  You can choose to link these images through to pages in your store, or you can just leave the link blank.

Display up to 3 collections on your home page

If you only want to display one collection on your home page, create an empty collection called none, and then choose it in the drop-down menu.

Social Media

You can choose to display social media links on product pages, and blog articles.  The store footer also includes links to your Facebook and Twitter pages, a link to your blog’s built-in RSS feed, and a link to your contact page.

With the growth in demand for social media functionality, we’ll also be expanding out existing themes to include this functionality early next year.

Accepted payment methods.

You can also choose to display what payment methods you select in your store.  If your store accepts payment by PayPal, you would choose PayPal, Visa and MasterCard here.

To preview the Georgia Theme for Spiffy Stores, head on over to the theme’s demo site.  There’s also some handy tips in the blog there on how to insert images in the built-in blog in your Spiffy Store.

We’ve just updated the minimal theme so that now it can be re-coloured in your theme editor.  You can now easily add your logo, add images to your slideshow, change your store background colour, the colour of your navigation, your links, as well as your text, footer background, and footer text.

The best thing of all is that all of your colour changes are also reflected in your checkout, which also exactly matches the colour scheme you’ve created.

It comes with a few different colour schemes built-in as well, which you can see by clicking on the image to the right.

We’re pleased to announce that we have a new feature for our theme templates… Theme Settings.

Although the Spiffy Stores Themes have always been highly configurable, this configuration necessarily required some knowledge of HTML and CSS.

Not any more.

The new Theme Settings ability means that theme designers can now create a custom settings form that allows the end-user to simply choose from basic theme configuration options such as colour scheme, custom logo configuration and design layout.

The settings are created using a simple settings configuration file which includes some industry-unique and innovative features such as colour filters which give designers the ability to create varied colour schemes from a single base colour.

More developer information is available in our Theme Settings Knowledge Base article.

For users who are not interested in designing and modifying their own themes, we’ve updated all themes in the Spiffy Stores Theme Gallery (except Zesty).

If you want to take advantage of these new customization options, please reload a new copy of the theme you are currently using from the gallery. It might be worthwhile downloading a backup copy of your current theme first. Also, you may want to take note of any customizations that you’ve made to your current theme so that you can apply the same changes to the new copy of the theme.

Theme Settings opens up a whole new world for creative and interesting theme design and modification, so look forward to some future updates in this area!

It’s now been just over a month since we launched Spiffy Stores to the general public.  In our first month, we’ve had an overwhelming response in the number of new signups (a fantastic start!), but haven’t heard much from anyone!  Our goal is to make Spiffy Stores really easy to use, and even faster to set up.  To do this, we need some feedback from everyone that has signed up.

During the past month, we’ve been working on adding new features here and there to improve the functionality.  One of the biggest features we’ve been working on is adding new options to customise our themes.  If you have any ideas about what we could do to improve our theme customisation, or what we could do to make it easier to set up your store… please phone us on 1300 727 334 to discuss, or you can email us at studio@spiffystores.com.au

We know we’ve been teasing you a little too much with the delayed launch of this theme… well the Antiqua theme is now available to all stores in your theme gallery.  Check out the theme preview site at http://antiqua.spiffystores.com

To apply this theme to your store, just navigate to the “Theme gallery” section in your Toolbox (in the Design & assets section). You’ll see the Antiqua theme there.

If you want to try it out on your site, remember to save your current theme by downloading it first. This means that you’ll be able to restore it at a later date if you’d prefer to use your old theme.

The minimal theme is a modern, clean theme that features a customisable slide show on the home page to showcase your products, and also includes a stylesheet for the checkout pages so that they match the store.

This theme is very easy to customise and has instructions in the demo store at http://getminimal.spiffystores.com

Oh… and before anyone asks… the Antiqua theme will be ready on the 16th of April.

You may have noticed that things have been a little quiet here lately. That’s because we’ve been busy working on a major update to the software, which is pretty huge!

This update includes a complete re-design of the interface, with a lot of attention paid to consistency… so that once you’ve learnt how to do one thing, it’s pretty easy to work out how the rest of the interface works.

There are also a lot of additions to functionality, including the ability to manage products and orders in bulk, as well as the ability to download them.

With this new version, we can also now release the Showtime and Antiqua themes that we’ve mentioned previously. We haven’t been able to release them earlier, as they include functionality that isn’t available in the current release. There’s also a new theme… Minimal. A screenshot of the theme can be seen to the right.

We’re just working through the final testing phase, so it will probably be about two weeks. We’ll post more info here in the coming days/weeks, and send out an email to all store owners when we get closer to the date.