Well I’ve finally done it – installed the Simple SEO URL module for Zen Cart!

And I thought I’d better document it here before I forget the steps I’ve done and need to do it again for another cart.

I had avoided doing on previous carts as its a bit fiddly to set up and if you get it wrong it completely breaks your cart (those unhelpful Internal Server Error 500 messages!) But its SO useful for SEO that I thought it worth persevering.
So here goes:

1) Download module from http://wiki.rubikintegration.com/zencart/modules/ssu/installation (or search on ZenCart’s Modules page)
NOTE: For PHP4 installs the latest stable release is 2.9 – not 3.x

2) Download & install the Zen Cart Module Manager from here (http://code.google.com/p/zencart-module-manager/downloads/list) (Before installing the above module, ok?!) Update: June 2010 – the only module manager I can g et to work with ZenCart 1.3.9d is Module Manager rev16 (the latest one doesn’t want to play ball)

3) Ensure Module Manager is installed by going to Admin > Tools > Module Manager
4) Now upload the files for the SEO module then install by going to Admin > Extras > Simple SEO URL Manager

NOTE: this is NOT enabled yet just installed.

Look at your .htaccess file – VERY IMPORTANTLY make sure that the Rewrite Base line reflects the site you’re on – if the shop is in a subdirectory change the name here – if its in the root is should just be /

5)Upload the .htaccess file
6)To enable the module go to Admin > Configuration > Simple SEO URL and the last setting is “Set SSU status” – which defaults to false. Change it to true – and have a look at the live site.
If its working, well done – go have a celebratory cup of coffee!
If you get 500 errors, double and triple check your .htaccess file.
Still not working? Try reuploading your SEO mod files again and re-do steps 3 onwards

There’s help online in this thread here:
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=86353

I have noticed a performance drop but will persevere with it as I think it does mean the customer will see far nicer URLs

Let me know how you get on!

UPDATE: As is the zooms on additional product images stop working – all you have to do is go to Configuration > Simple SEO URL and in the field called Exclude List add “popup_image_additional”

The New Products view can be a mixed blessing in Zen Cart.
Of course you want to showcase new items to your customers – but what exactly defines “new”?
There are a few places to set this up in Zen Cart

1)The default ordering for products in the New Products list is set in Configuration > New Listing > Default Sort Order to Newest Products first
(but this can be changed to other sort orders)

2) The window of “new-ness” so to speak is defined in
Configuration > Maximum Values > New Product Listing Limited to…..

Products can be deemed to be new from 7 days old, a month old, 120 days old or always

*Beware however if you are using a batch upload facility to import new products (such as EasyPopulate) as I have found that it sometimes doesn’t add a timestamp to the products. This gives distinctly odd results in the New Items page. This should be able to be resolved by adding the column ‘v_date_added’ to the batch import and hardcoding the product added date that way

Here’s a useful snippet of code if you need to show just the total of items in a Zen Cart shopping cart.

echo “Items in cart: “. $_SESSION[‘cart’]->count_contents();

I’m using it in a discrete header including a link to the shopping cart page.
I think it looks cleaner than the default Zen Cart shopping cart side box.

(I’ll add link to the live shopping site – when I’ve finished it. Watch this space!)

Well I figured it would be easy to do – so why has it taken me most of the afternoon to figure it out?!

I was looking for a way to simply get the text of my last Twitter “tweet” and then use the text within my site somewhere.

Ok I shall fess up – the reason I really wanted to know how to do this was for a client who needed to be able to update one line of text on his website, so he can have a lovely ticker tape banner across his site (I kid you not!) – but he didn’t have the budget (or technical know how) to have & use a CMS for his web site – anyway it would be like using a hammer to crack a nut, right?

So I though maybe if I could use the last Tweet he posted in his Twitter account it might be a nice way of getting him to write more on Twitter (great marketing potential yadda yadda…) and a natty way of giving him a mini CMS!

So after a lot of searching – and finding some very complicated solutions doing all manners of things with the Twitter API (which is very mysteriously documented if you ask me) I came up with the following solution – a PHP function that returns the last tweet.

(Note the XML parser I use is only available in PHP5)

status[0]->text;

}

echo twitterCapture();

?>

Kudos goes to this post for starting me off:
http://blarnee.blogspot.com/2009/09/this-is-test.html

There’s probably an easier way of doing this – so I’m interested in any feedback

Here it is in action:
http://www.kineticpulse.co.uk/twitter5.php5

You gotta love web designers – they create lovely animations in Flash then expect you, the developer, to be able to instantly transfer them into roll-over-able, clickable buttons using the wonders of HTML.

Hmm. Time to roll up my sleeves and delve into the murky world of Flash and ActionScript again. (Didn’t help that I only have Flash 8 either)

Actually once I had figured it out it was quite simple. The designer had sent me the animation fla file – which just played continuously. We wanted to make this into a animated button that would appear on the home page of a site – that would play the animation when you rolled over it and stop when you rolled out. And to click on it and it will take you somewhere.

OK here are the steps you need to take:

1) Add 2 new frames on top of your current frames. Name one actions and one holderframe

2) Edit the holderframe and insert a new symbol – make it a Button with the name of “LauraBtn“. This should appear in the Library

3) Draw a blue box (don’t worry about the colour we’ll change it later. btw -Why can’t you see the size of your Stage when you are in the Library eh?)

4) Go back to Scene 1 and drag this button onto the stage. Give this button an instance name of “LauraBtn1“

5) Then change to the size selector tool and drag the box so it completely covers the area of the movie. We want the whole movie to be a clickable button

6) Then in Properties for the button change the Color Alpha to 0% – voila a transaparent button covering the whole area!

Now for the Actionscript:

In the actionscript frame you created earlier copy this code:

this.gotoAndStop(1); //this stops the movie the first time it is loaded

LauraBtn1.onRollOver=function(){
//this plays the movie everytime this movie is rolled over
 //trace ("LauraBtn1 rolled over");
 _root.gotoAndPlay(1);
}
LauraBtn1.onRollOut=function(){
//this stops the movie everytime this mouse moves off
 //trace ("LauraBtn1 rolled off");
 _root.gotoAndStop(1);
}
LauraBtn1.onRelease = function() {
//goes to the selected url on button click
 getURL("team.php", "_self");
 //trace ("LauraBtn1 clicked");
};

And thats it!

There are probably other (better) ways of doing this – so if you can improve on it please let me know!