Technical Blog – Page 6

If you Buy LightSpeed POS and Web Store Seperately

Common Enough Situation:

You buy LightSpeed POS and then down the road decide you want to add the eCommerce connector (for an online store, using either Web Store or Magento).

The Potential Problem:

After you make the purchase,LightSpeed issues you a revised/new license that includes the eCommerce Connector but until you perform the steps listed below, you’re still using the old license that does not include the eCommerce connector and the privilege of using the Connector doesn’t kick in until you do.

INSTALLATION

(*instructions were written by Babak/A Mac POS).
(Required for LightSpeed Web Store & LightSpeed Magento Connector)

To retrieve your updated LightSpeed Server license, please follow these steps:

1. Go to the LightSpeed Server preference in System Preferences

2. Click the lock in the bottom left corner of the LightSpeed Server
preference pane, and enter your OS X password to authenticate

3. Select your licensed LightSpeed Server from the left-side of the pane

4. Once selected, please click ‘Stop’

5. Click on the ‘Refresh’ button under the Licensing section

6. Restart the computer running LightSpeed Server (your changes will not take effect until you have done so).

**I’m not sure if clients don’t get the exact same instructions from LightSpeed after they buy the eCommerce thing.

Internet Explorer and Z-Index and me

I’m sure you’re already aware of this but IE is a pain in the butt. I just spent more time than I like to admit trying to figure out why my dropdown menu would not stay open (on mouse hover) over my stupid slideshow. At first I thought it was because my stupid slideshow had a z-index value that was too high. So I spent time messing that up. But then I noticed a very curious thing: when I added a background color to the ul, the menu stayed open over the slideshow.

Hmmm.

I had added a background color to the ul but I’d used rgba for a transparent-ish background.Lower versions of IE(less than IE9) ignore rgba and I knew this. What I didn’t know, shockingly enough was that lower versions of IE will create a bug when they have an element with z-index and no background color. So if you want your drop down menus to stay open on hover over another element (no matter if it has z-index or not) you better add a background image or a color or both.

IE is so EVIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Installing LightSpeed Web Store for the 1st time

If you just bought your license and now have to figure out how to connect with the web store database the first thing you’re asked to do is to create a database using your hosting plan cpanel – oh you didn’t know that your LightSpeed connected with a database? And you don’t know what a database is or for that matter what a cpanel is?

OK, hold up. I’m not about to go into all the technical details here. Chances are if you’ve purchased a license for the LightSpeed eCommerce Connector (connects and uploads your product inventory to an online store powered by LightSpeed’s native app: web store or to Magento) you’ve hired a designer/developer to customize the online shop. And chances are also that this designer/developer knows how to install either one.

So you usually won’t have to know what a database is or even have to ever create one, even though it is a snap to do through any modern version of a control panel (cpanel for short). Your designer/developer will probably upload the web store files for you and can even install the web store for you,too.

But someone on your end is going to have to input 2 very important bits of information in LightSpeed following this path: LightSpeed > Tools > eCommerce > Set Up (in older versions of LightSpeed the connector can only connect to Web Store so the path is Tools > Web Store > Set Up). In Set Up you see 2 text boxes: Web Host and Password.

In the Web Host text box input the URL/address of your web site: http://www.mydomain.com Plus the name of the sub-directory where Web Store files are located. So if you or someone else uploaded the Web Store files to a folder called shop you’d also put that in the Web Host text box: http://www.mydomain.com/shop. If the web store is in the main directory of your site (in technical terms the server root) you’d just put in http://www.mydomain.com. That takes care of Web Host.

The Password is the password you chose when you or your designer/developer installed the Web Store. Many of my clients do not install Web store themselves so I end up getting on the phone with someone and walking them through it.The Password is not the FTP/cpanel/database password. The Password is never used by anything else besides the LightSpeed eCommerce Connector. Once the Connector is connected to the server and therefore the database, you may change the Password in the Set Up panel whenever you want. But because the only thing that uses this password is the LightSpeed Connector, this is usually not something you need to do,ever.

Oh, I almost forgot! Make sure to click the Save button!

If everything is correct you should be able to access the Admin Panel by clicking the Admin Panel button.The Admin Panel is where you go about setting up things like your Store Name, your Store Phone what size you want your product images to be and whether or not people can checkout as guests, if they can use the Gift Registry and if you want to show your families ( brands) in the Web Store menu and lots, lots more.

So there you go. Those are the 2 things you need to do to get LightSpeed connected to your web site. There’s a lot more you’re going to have to do and there is a great amount of information about all of that here.

My new design for an online store especially for music downloads (with sample audio!)

Musicians of all types, from Indi-Rockers to Death Metal monsters and even Classic Rock tribute bands need to be able to sell their music online. There are lots of sites they can join that will do it for them like e-music and cdbaby and they make it real easy… But the bands aren’t selling on their own terms, on their own web site, with their band logo and all of that extra nice nice-ness.

So when I was asked by ON to develop an online store for them of course I grabbed a fresh copy of WordPress + wp-e-commerce and got to it.

My 1st challenge was finding an audio player that was customizable with CSS (not Flash!) I was so happy to find this plugin Haiku minimalist audio player. This plugin let me paste a shortcode into the product editor so that before customers are ready to buy they can hear a sample of the song. Customers can add multiple tracks to the cart and they can also choose a format, wav or mp3. ON also wanted to be able to offer the option to download the entire album (in both formats) and/or the option to buy the physical cd.

So on one side of the product page there’s the artist name & photo (the cd cover art as a featured image) and under it there is a list of 3 products: Buy CD, Download Album (MP3) and Download Album (WAV).

The new version of wp-e-commerce makes it easier than ever to mold your product pages any way you need. I really love how much easier it is to handle Variations now. So well done! The best decision GetShopped made was to go with the way WordPress works now – quite a bold thing to do because it required a complete revamp of their plugin. So I have much respect for them. Talk about wanting to be Future Proof. I love that.

Why Beta? Because I used the Product Page template.I should have used the Category Page template. I haven’t yet handled Single Product Pages,either. But its a good start!