ASPDotNetStoreFront SWF Image Viewer Popup

SWF Image Viewer Demo (this is a live site, so if you order something, you will be charged!)

If you are using ASPDotNetStoreFront for your shopping cart, then you know how the popup image viewer looks and to me, it doesn’t look all that great. After working with ASPDNSF for some time, I am finally starting to ‘get it’ and I thought I would share some of my secrets for working with this shopping cart.

You’re going to need a little working knowledge of ASPDNSF to do this, so if you’re not comfortable doing this yourself, contact me and I can set this up for your site. The code provided below does work, but is not as complete as it could be… (I can’t give away all my secrets). If you need help setting this up and would like the complete package (including SWF viewer), I charge a flat rate of $250 to set this up and it comes with everything you’ll need, plus a few extra tweaks you’re not going to find in this guide.

First of all, you’re going to need a SWF for making a gallery page. I used Zoomify Design as it’s inexpensive, simple to use and works very well. Zoomify Design costs $29 and it’s worth every penny to me. I am going to assume you know how to use Zoomify and if you don’t, read the documentation. It’s pretty easy and once you get it set up, it’s easy to make the files for your call to a SWF popup image viewer.

Create a flash directory to store your files on your server. I created my flash folder inside the root of the website, but you can choose almost any location, as long as the folder is readable.

You’re going to need to have a custom product.xml package. You can just copy one of existing product.XML packages for your products. I used product.SimpleProduct.xml.config Be sure and give your XML a new name, I use product.Flash.xml.config

Edit the XML package and look for this line of code in your XML package. It will appear in several place and it’s best to edit them all.

<xsl:value-of select=”aspdnsf:LookupProductImage(ProductID, ImageFilenameOverride, SKU, ‘medium’, 0, $AltText)” disable-output-escaping=”yes” />

Comment out the code so it looks like:

<!–<xsl:value-of select=”aspdnsf:LookupProductImage(ProductID, ImageFilenameOverride, SKU, ‘medium’, 0, $AltText)” disable-output-escaping=”yes” />–>

It’s better to comment it out, in case you make a mistake, it will be easier to fix. Right below the code you just commented out, place this bit of code to call the SWF.

<a href=”flash/{ProductID}/viewer.htm” target=”_blank”><img src=”images/product/medium/{ProductID}.jpg” /><br /> <center>Multi Image Viewer</center></a>

The areas in red are the only changes you will need to make a change to the code to make it work. Change the href path to reflect the location of the folder and the name of the htm file that calls the swf within the product folder. The {ProductID} pulls the dynamic file name for each image so leave that in tact. This code can be modified to suit your needs. Now upload the product.XML file into your XML folder on your webserver.

Choose the item you want to use the SWF multi image viewer. Each product has a unique user ID number and that’s what you’re going to name the folder that contains the SWF viewer and image files. Process the images per the directions for Zoomify and upload the folder into the flash folder on the website. (eg: upload the folder 2345 to the /flash directory on your website.

Go to your edit product page and choose the XML package you created for the item and you’re done. Be sure and check out the new page to make sure it looks the way you want and everything is working. A few lines of code, a little preperation and you’ve turned your vanilla ASPDNSF image viewer into a powerful and dynamic image viewing system that’s going to increase sales and make your customers very happy.

Here is a working example on a live site.

If you would like to have me do this for you and give you the complete package, with everything ready to go, contact me and I will try and get back with you as soon as possible. Please leave a phone number and a good time to contact you.

Buoy Weather Conditions and Forecasts on Your Cell Phone

In this series, I will try and broach some of the pros and cons of various shopping cart and various ecommerce solutions. We will begin with ZenCart.

Zen Cart is a really nice online shopping cart. Out of the box, it works. It’s basic, but it does work. There’s a beauty to its simplicity, thus Zen. Out of the box, you get basic image handling, easy to use and create templates and built in credit card processing gateways. You also have the ability to add a lot of features that would cost thousands extra for most pay shopping carts, but with Zen Cart, most every extension and contribution that add functionality to your cart are free. $0 is a very attractive price for a piece of such powerful software, but there’s a cost. ZenCart management is not for the faint of heart. ZenCart requires a fairly high level of knowledge to really have a good shopping cart.

ZenCart – The Good

One of the best things about Zen Cart is it’s free. Yep, free. Not only is it free, it’s also open source, which means, given enough knowledge, you can make the cart do anything you want it to do. Well, anything within reason or the ability of your programmer. And it’s not just the cart that is free, the source is also free for Zen Cart. Shopping carts source code can cost thousands of dollars, but Zen Cart is free. And when you really need to change a function of the site, the source is, well, the best source. Updates and upgrades are also free and that’s a big plus in the world of ecommerce.

Designing a shopping cart with ZenCart is fairly simple, if you can design a website. Zen Cart uses a great template system. It’s very easy to use and it makes updating the software a lot easier. I really like the hierarchical taxonomic structure of the template system. It takes a little getting used to and it’s not a WYSIWYG system, you still need to code, but it’s one of the easier template systems I’ve used. And let us not forget, ZenCart is free.

Zen Cart – The Not So Good

Product management with ZenCart is both a godsend and a nightmare. The godsend is keeping track of products that are published vs non-published items. Price adjusting and category management. Any system is going to take some time to learn, but Zen Cart provided a wealth of information about your products, all on one page and all easy to update and edit. In some aspects, it’s the best product management layout I’ve used. However, adding variants (size, color, etc..) to a product is archaic. ZenCart’s cousin, OSCommerce, has an add-in that addresses this issue, but not in Zen Cart. ZenCart 3 is scheduled to address this issue, but the schedule itself is 2 years old. There are a few contributions and add-ons that try and address this issue, but the method for adding variants to products falls far short of user friendly and is downright hostile at times.

ZenCart – The Ugly

The downside – you need a real programmer. And every upgrade is going to require some rather extensive work to keep the look, feel and functionality of your site. All the little bells and whistles are going to cost you in programmer fees or extensive amounts of your time. Your cart is going to need a lot of add-on, contributions and graphics to have a nice looking and highly functional site. Images handling is fairly poor, but there are add-ons to make image handling as good as most any other website, but again, you’ll need someone who knows PHP and SQL to get it functional and be able to update your site in the future.

Search engine optimization is going to take a lot of work with Zen Cart. The shopping cart isn’t exactly what you would call search engine friendly out of the box, but that can be fixed with an add-on. So there’s more money to the programmer.

ZenCart – What it all means

Depending on what you’re selling, Zen Cart may be the best solution for your shopping cart. It can handle an infinite amounts of products, but if you have a lot of variants (size, color, etc.), you’ll probably be happier with an easier to use administrator interface for stock and attributes than the one used by Zen Cart. If you’re selling products without variants ZenCart may be a great solution for your web site’s shopping cart.

coming up next… ASPDotNetStoreFront

Tides depend on many factors, sun, moon, wind and some other things I don’t understand. But I do understand tides differ by a set amount of time in most places – usually. I developed this code to work for Folly Beach, but it will work in locations with a 12:50 time difference between high tides. As a general rule, this works fairly well, but you will still need to update the tides occasionally or during time changes.

<!–
php tide by dawhoo
*********************************************************************
© dawhoo 2004
dawhoo.com
This script must be used in whole with credit in tact.
php tide script by philip nicholson

*********************************************************************
do not rely on this script for navigational purposes – serious
*********************************************************************

Instructions:
Paste into any php page an viola! There are the predicted next tides.
1)Change $knowntide to the last observed high tide
2)You may need to tweak the $knowntide to adjust for a server in a different time zone than where the tides are being measured.
–>

<?php
$knowntide = strtotime(‘2007-06-25 18:30′); // known hightide use the sample format
$current = date(U);
$interval = (12 * 3600) + (25 * 60); // 12 hours and 50 minutes between high tides
$num_tides_passed = floor(($current – $knowntide) / $interval);
$last_tide = $knowntide + ($interval * $num_tides_passed);
$next_high = $last_tide + (12 * 3600) + (25 * 60); // 12 hours and 50 minutes between 2 high tides
$next_low = $last_tide + (6 * 3600) + (13 * 60); ?> // 6 hours and 13 minutes between high and low

<?php echo date(‘m/d g:i a’, $next_low); ?> low // change “m/d g:i a” to use a different date format
<br><font color=”blue”>
<?php echo date(‘m/d g:i a’ , $next_high); ?> high
<br></font>
<?php echo date( ‘m/d g:i a’ , $next_low + (12 * 3600) + (25 * 60)); ?> low<br />
<font color=”blue”>
<?php echo date( ‘m/d g:i a’ , $next_high + (12 * 3600) + (25 * 60)); ?> high</font>
<br><br><a href=”http://www.dawhoo.com/script.html”>dawhoo tide</a>