We do custom scripting, development of shopping carts. Something I have noticed many times that requirements of shopping carts and ecommerce websites for different clients vary . While some may like a feature rich website along with a feature full admin panel, there are some clients who are more at ease with a simplistic approach and do not always very high end web store necessities. For clients who have a fixed idea on what they want, and even know of ready made shopping cart software such as osCommerce and Zencart or xCart etc, we do not usually offer a custom php mysql shopping cart solution. We rather suggest that we customize their open source application to match their look and feel or make it work as they want with maybe even some plugins and modifications / contributions.  But that was yeaterday , or last year .

With the advent of Magento , with its amazing look and feel , frontend , backend and readymade featuresets, I am totally blown off – have very little thing to say – why someone should not have it . Whatever I can say or something you may hear elsewhere , I can say is less ; It’s features speak volumes of its amazingness. With allready 500,000 downloads completed in January, and being mentioned in various developer blogs worldwide, over 115K registered community users, support forums in over 10 languages it would be foolishness not to follow it more closely and actively participate in its growth and build up one’s portfolio on the platform. And thats exactly what I have taken up to do .

Magento Ecommerce

As i mentioned in my previous post , that I have been reading extensively about search engine marketing , and also watching various videos – one of the best videos i saw was a seminar by Avinash Kaushik – the from Google Analytics team . The full session was full of various insights on quite a few topics such data analysis , creating a data driven culture in a organization, checking ones web site’s bounce rate, and internal site search analysis and visitor intent . I spent the whole of sunday afternoon watching the videos , which were as i said before fascinating and insightful.
I have decided to using Web Analytics to the most , as possible .
And to start with that , I have have been toying with the idea of using either Google Site Search , which has the free and paid versions or creating our own custom internal search.

The pro’s of using Google’s Site Search is that
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CaRP is a free program which helps you get automated content for your website from RSS feeds on external websites. I have been using it for the past 2 years now – mostly to get blogs feeds or even directory rss on my website’s homepages.

RSS feeds are data feeds that usually contain headlines and excerpts from news stories, blog posts, etc., and a link to the full content.

It is , as the owner Antonne Roundy says, a script which converts RSS headlines and brief description / content into nice looking HTML to fit on your website, which could be made of HTML , PHP etc. I have also used it on the web design website, recently , but there i came across an odd situation.
Initially when i had used CaRP – the free version, which i downloaded when i had much less php knowledge, I could install it myself and configure it as well, without any hitch. Before CaRP , I had also used Magpie RSS feed parser for converting blog feeds at DiscussTV. Carp has provided somewhat much more functionality, includes good documentation along with a Video for help . Yet , even then if you can’t get it to work for your site, let me know – I can help out for a fee. Anyway, after enjoying a free software, I recently went back to the website , after receiving several of it’s subscribed email newsletter. The site , which nicely showcases all the various other scripts and services made me eager to try out their paid Jawfish service – which provides RSS to Javascript conversion.

Why I wanted that ? because even though I want to display external blog feed, i did not want to use any framed page – as i felt , it could be unhelpful for my seo attempts. So the only option was to get the feed via javascript . CaRP website said, the only way i could get this was by subscribing to Jawfish – and here is something I DONT recommend from GeckoTribe.
Why : Because they will provide you with a snippet of code , including their javascript source , and more often than not , there is a lack connection between your server and geckotribe’s server . Quoting the owner , Antonne :

I can only guess that the problem you’re seeing with Jawfish is caused by some recurring temporary internet problem somewhere between your server and mine.

The problem with Jawfish i faced : I had paid them for 1 year of the service and it specifically mentioned that there won’t be any refund .
The solution : As i did not receive any sayable service – I emailed the owner ( as their support ticket section was not manned , and only after waiting for 10 days i understood ), and I received his reply . He promised to refund the money ,

Current Status : I have not yet received the refund yet , but I am hopeful i will.

Current Status with my requirement : I am using free and friendly Carp which i have got working with iframe with the customizations i wanted . Google does successfully crawl iframes / frames , as I found by doing a site:www.websys.co.in.

The headline says it all

Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire MySQL. Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, developer of one of the world’s fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 billion in total consideration.

After reading about the news actually first on SitePoint’s Tech Times, i visited MySQL.com, which was happily displaying its latest press release . So the news is surely confirmed , what remains to be seen , what are SUN’s plans to do with their new acquisition . MySQL being one of the key components of the LAMP platform , will surely continue remaining as open source but it would be surely interesting to track how SUN help towards the betterment of the 10 million strong community of users.

osCommerce is a versatile shopping cart script used by hundreds of websites. As a shopping cart script with numerous pre-built functions, plugins ( or user generated contributions) it is undoubtedly comprehensive. However , just to exemplify, some of the key features include :

• web based install
• supports unlimited products and categories
• includes options for physical goods and e-products
• includes taxation as an option
• accounting and invoicing
• customers and transaction reports
• newsletter subscription module
• product reviews
• banner management and statistics
• payment processing using several credit card and web payment options

and many many more .
In my opinion, it has too many options to be able to be listed , even though some of those functions or options might not be necessary for a website owner who requires a shopping cart system for his website. Now, not all of these are advantageous to a basic website operator / owner , and he may even be bit overwhelmed seeing so many options , and requiring to ensure that the ones which are not required are turned off / disabled. As the service provider / web developer / programmer , we often have to ensure that most of these options are turned off or in cases which can not be turned off from the Admin panel, are removed from the php files .
One of our recent osCommerce projects involved several customizations on the base script – one part of which was ensuring around 40-45% of the default osCommerce features be removed from being available in the admin panel , based on instructions given by our client. One of the major customizations we also did was , by default osCommerce allows one cart / shop inside it , but in this case the requirement was to setup 2 separate carts and ensuring that they be administered from one single admin panel. Now this is not a default feature , nor is any proper contribution could be found for this. So it had to be programmed totally from new. The end result was undoubtedly quite nice , as we gained quite a bit of experience in doing this. The end users / visitors to the site would login to the website and find a wine shop as well as a news and magazines shop and wherever they went or registered, they had to login only once and also on check out or buying, the admin would be able to track the customers or the orders from inside the same panel only.
below are screenshots .
Cart 1 and Cart 2.

PHP is a impressive coding language, and is widely used in major part of our projects. Using the php language with mysql databases hugely successful websites around the world have been created. Every day newer developments are made to make PHP a more robust and secure solution for coders and website owners.
However , recently we have embarked upon converting / adding certain parts of older projects / websites into using AJAX – sometimes on request by the website owner , and sometimes we have offered to convert where we felt using AJAX would give better usability to the project.
One such project involves a Voting / Rating application which was made almost an year ago . The site featured a rating where the current AJAX enabled system would make the voting much more user friendly, instead of the form submit . This would allow the end user to participate in the voting / rating many more times than before – which is the theme of the website , thus keeping him more interested and loyal .
Another project involves enhancing a backend admin panel, which involves various options such as creation of categories, sub categories, and users . The admin backend page usually loads with little bit of time , and for an admin who needs to create around 65 categories , making 65 page loads / refresh was little painful. But the way it is being developed now , creating a new category would be somewhat like , as you find inside the Wordpress admin area . This would provide better usability – this time to an admin , not just an end user .

I have been using ecademy over the pat 4 months or so by now . Ecademy is a Social Network for Business People founded in 1998 now with over 170,000 member profiles worldwide. As one would expect , i was invited to join , by a good friend, who found the website considerably useful . Ecademy , besides being a great haunt for networking people worldwide , also provides a marketplace with both buyers and sellers of all kind – lawyers , doctors, web developers, lecturers, carpenters, office owners as well as students and authors and hypnotists etc. Whats better is , unlike sites such as orkut , or Hi5 where majority is people from India , Brazil , china etc, here we have members from European countries such as UK , France , and America , Canada , Australia etc.
When my friend invited me till now , i have been contacted for different jobs and projects as well have made some interesting contacts and based on that I upgraded my membership to a power networker and once i get some more time , i would be highly interested in upgrading to a BlackStar member ( which my friends have already ) , and gain entry to various locale meetings and come more closer with hundreds of other Blackstars . The way you can think about it – the cost of a Blackstar Membership is around 100 USD a month , so if a person who has upgraded by paying that just to keep in touch with several other like minded professionals and businessmen , they would surely have the budget to pay for some product you can sell or service you provide pretty easily , at a percentage of that cost . Considering Ecademy has around 170,000 members even if you get a 1% of those interested in the service / product … it is worthwhile anyday .

While writing this post , i received notification that i have received a query from another ecademist , this being the 3rd in past 2 days only

Hi Arindra
How much would you charge (roughly) to develop a PHP, MySQL site like TreatHer.com?
Look forward to your reply.
Matt

Last week we got a work of making a php based gallery website with admin panel . Now , this is a pretty basic work and has been done over and oevr again. However, two new things are involved in this . One , the design is not something we will be doing as it is already done, so when we finish making the gallery , we will have to dress it up with the layout the client has provided.

The second part is something i liked , which is the main customization. As all gallery based sites have the typical admin panel from where the admin can create , manage , edit and delete Categories or albums and Sub Categories . It will not have the option of users uploading photos , as that will only be done by the admin and users will mostly be viewing images and if interested, adding it to their cart of sorts. With every gallery , it is reuired to auto crop images and create thumbnails , and sometimes also a watermark to put the sitesname , thus involving GD.

A somewhat new twist will be , there will be some categories which will not be viewable at all to general visitors . The client wanted to manually generate some kind of password and assign it to them manually to each so that with the password , they would be able to view certain restricted categories . i didnt feel that was a handy solution, so I have suggested that we create user groups and assign the specific categories to specific user groups , thus minimizing the work of assigning passwords and the problems of password sharing .

Wordpress is another fantastic tool , which i guess is predominantly used by the world of webmasters. Some use it for SEO i.e web marketing and promotion, some use it as a CMS or Content Management Tool , some use it for the simplicity ( those who dont want to be bothered by building a website with HTML and all that crap ) , and some use it for the complexity – for taking it to another level by developing widgets and plugins and extending its usefullness …… and some use it as a Blog too ( if you can imagine that ) , lol . I started by using it as my Web Blog tool, in all honesty and have once used it as an alternative to building webpages , and currently intend to use it for pretty posting of Updates on this site and also hopefully some SEO .

However, with every Good comes the Bad , and it is no different with the case of Wordpress . Since , wordpress is soo goddamn famous and widely used , it is always a prey for evildoers and pranksters . Inside the Wordpress Admin Panel of any  WP installation, there is the famous “dashboard ” , which from time to time educates the world of bloggers on the cutting edge development news from the makers of WP . And my dashboard recently informed me that the download files of the Wordpress version 2.1.1 were compromised , and compromised in such a way , it makers me shiver on this warm summer night . acc. to the bulletin, i quote

Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately. It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file.

As far as I remember , Wordpress was hosted by Yahoo! , and if the hackers could reach and modify inside Yahoo servers , that is a frightening news. Nevertheless , i have not and will not stop using Wordpress , there is simply too much goodness inside it . What i propose to do is what the developers of Wordpress have asked i.e. lookout for those who have not known of this news and continue to use the vulnerable version, and warn them . And furthermore , I would also like to get into skinning wordpress , maybe not today but soon .

On a sidenote , since i was talking of people extending wordpress , just a few minutes back, i installed a fantastic wordpress plugin , i.e  the Wordpress Sitemap Plugin developed by this wonderful fellow at http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final