It’s an important decision as your business will need at least the basic features, and probably a few more, and to best sell and manage your products and orders. 

Since we’re talking about small business, our aim is to provide rock-solid proven solutions that out-of-the-box will provide all or just about all the basic features you will need to start selling online.

Our eCommerce solution web firm, Coding Capital, has worked with all the below ecommerce solutions as well as many others that didn’t make the list.

But these are the best and one in particular, which we define at end of article, is our favorite and what we put most of our clients on these days.

Top 3 Open Source Ecommerce Solutions 

(in no particular order)

• OpenCart
• Prestashop
• ZenCart

A Quick Note …

They all start to sound the same, and some kind of look similar which isn’t a bad thing as a familiar eCommerce layout is best for your customers, but there are other similarities which we recommend. 

We’ve installed, configured, designed and customized most of the carts and we have whittled down these carts because:

• they have proven records
• their popularity is a testament to their functionality
• the have solid software frameworks which is very important because a complicated cart, like Magento, will create more headaches for you and cost more to maintain

OpenCart – 9 out of 10

The code structure is very clean and logical and makes customizations much more easily than many other platforms. This is crucial to your business as it will allow for easier and more reliable site maintenance. 

Might seem mysterious if your not technical but this is one of the most important aspects of your online store. It’s like knowing that under the hood, you’ve got a solid engine…even if you don’t know how to change the oil.

The administration module is clean and attractive and simple to use. So many other carts have terrible admin back-ends, like osCommerce. Everything is ready and available in such a way that is familiar to anyone with any admin experience. And if not, you’ll learn it quickly. 

Some important OpenCart features:

• unlimited categories
• unlimited products
• unlimited manufacturers
• templatable
• multi-language and currency
• product reviews
• product ratings
• SEO friendly urls
• auto image resizing

Prestashop - 8 out of 10

Prestashop is a solid and very popular platform that has quickly grown over the last 3 years. It has an impressive list of features and a straightforward GUI for the front and the back-end, although the back end takes a day to get used to. 

The install and configuration for this one-stop shop is doable even for the web novice.  

Some important Prestashop features: 

• Unlimited categories, subcategories and products
• Product customers’ evaluations and comments
• Quantity discounts
• Wish list
• Featured products on homepage
• Top sellers on homepage
• Product image zoom
• Customer referral program
• Loyalty system (points)

ZenCart - 7 out of 10

ZenCart is a good cart to beginner and small business and those who want to keep their online presence relatively simple. It’s basic framework allows to make minimal changes to design and layout without too much fuss but if you want a very different look or require much more customization in features and / or design, a more sophisticated cart, you’d be better off with one of the others above.

Some important ZenCart features: 

• Quantity discounts
• Easy to install
• Advanced template system
• Merchandise Pricing options
• Products can be marked as free or Call for Price
• Featured products
• Minimum or maximum quantities
• Product attributes

Specifically, there are basic hard and fast principles that you don’t want to break because they’ve proven to be the best route to a clear and meaningful successful logo that identifies your company and serves as its own marketing tool and branding. 

Principle #1 – Clear & Simple

Great logo design starts a simple logo as well as easily readable company name. It’s the K.I.S.S stategy that like most things in life obvious in thought but a little difficult in practice.

The above logo uses a simple clear font and two different font colors to distinguish itself. These same colors are used in the logo design providing clear continuity. the logo matches the sky in a simple geometric shape that is altered to add character.

Principle #2 – Uniqueness

Uniqueness is a must as your logo needs to make its own impression compared to meaningless and trite logos.  The uniqueness is combination of all logo traits: font, colors used, design graphic … but if the logo gives off its own impression, it’s own uniqueness, it will separate your company apart from others which is a must considering all the tough markets there are today. 

Principle #3 – Market Relevance

Above is a perfect example of a logo that has such market relevance, that if the name of the company was spelled backwards, or if it was in Russian, the logo with the 3 circular graphics will tell a story of a company involved in the fitness industry.

There’s no guessing what market this company is in, it’s straight-forward and to the point what relative types of services or products this company serves. A good designer will always find a new relevant design for your company for your market.

Principle #4 – Memorable

Target’s logo is incredibly memorable and fits in with all the above principles.  Sure they have a lot of marketing dollars for us to see ubiquitously all over the place to assist in making memorable by sheer force but who can deny the target logo is simple yet bold with bold red and white and its simpleness and relevance and character, succeed in making it memorable as as result of following the above principles.

Good principles lead to good practices which lead to results.

Remember these principles as get a team like Coding Capital’s logo team to give your company a logo and branding that is memorable.

If the entire site involves different application frameworks, this usually means that these applications have different code bases and different databases which warrants signing into each application..

If true, you will soon see the need to have a single sign-on capability for the entire site. Meaning simply, you sign on one time and don’t need to sign in again to access different parts of the site.

We are currently working on a PHP custom web development application for a client. Since this is a social networking application, the client requested a forum to be added and integrated seamlessly with the custom application.

We are a frequent user of WordPress and now that since a recent review of bbPress, are very confident that the basic forum functionality of bbPress will be a great fit for our clients needs.

Maybe someday we will have the time to wrap this functionality as a plugin, but for now, we kept our bbPress login integration as simple as possible by straight-up coding in the changes.  We assume you have already installed bbPress onto your site.

#1 Create bbPress user account with db Insert

What to do:  First thing to do is to create a bbPress user in the bbPress database. Unlike other application that need numerous inserts and settings making registering complex, with bbPress, we can take the short cut of creating a bbPress user by inserting a record into the bb_users table that bbPress creates upon install.  

You just need a screen name, email and a md5 password, usually from your registration form from the custom application.  

You need to take the password and change into a md5 string using md5 function like this:

$pwd = md5($_POST["password"]);

After the user submits the new registration in the custom application and your code creates a new user in your application, you then would take same info and insert into db like:

$sql = "INSERT INTO bb_users (                                          custom_account_id,                                        user_login,                                          user_pass,                                         user_nicename,                                         user_email,                                         user_url,                                         user_registered,                                         user_status,                                         display_name                                    )                                     VALUES (                                        '$account_id',                                        '$screen_name',                                        '$m5_password',                                        '$screen_name',                                        '$account_email',                                        '',                                        '$now',                                        '0',                                        '$screen_name'                                    )";

to tie the bb_users table to the custom account table we have for the custom application, we have added a new column to the bb_users table: 

custom_account_id  int  11

… this way we can perform updates on bb_users with our own account_id. 

#2 Create custom bbPress user login page

What to do:  There are different ways to accomplish this, but again we went for a simple way since bbPress is on the same server. We created a new file at the forum root and called it login.controller.php. We looked at the bb-login.php at same root to analyze what the code does and what includes and functions it uses to login a user. 

This file includes bb-load.php which is a base php file that sets up a lot of includes and global variables needed for the two bbPress function calls we need:

1) bb_login($user_login, $password, $remember_user) and …

2) bb_logout()

We create a header redirect with the user login (our screen name) and password and a mode for login or logout.  We send our variables via a GET call.  While my example does not encrypt any variables, you can add some extra security measures like encrypting/decrypting and checking referring url, etc.

Download sql and custom php login page:   bbpress-new-login.zip

Send comments if you have any questions and I will try to help!

Happy Coding!

PHP

Since our goal for this how-to is to display latest posts as a list in php, I’ll assume you know how to add html where you need it:

<?php
$recent_posts = wp_get_recent_posts(10);

foreach($recent_posts as $post){
    if($post["post_status"] != “draft”) {
       echo “do your output here”;
    }
}
?>

This code will get the 10 latest posts (which is default) into your array for looping.

I also added a condition to make sure the post is not a draft, as I’m using this code as the posts loop on the home page of this blog.

That’s it for now … more to come later.

Happy coding!

Be an alcoholic instead!

Well … just kidding about that last part but being a webpreneur and working for yourself (even if just part-time for now) means working and working and working. And sleep and more work. Es demasiado!

Sometimes you just need to chill out … and I’ve got the best recipe for that.

The beauty of the Pomegranate

From ancient Persia (Iran), ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, the pomegranate is an ancient fruit known historically to those regions in text, culture and cuisine but has become recently popular in the western world over the last decade.

It’s health benefits are numerous from anti-oxidants and anti-cancer abilities to reducing cholesterol and cleansing the arteries.

It has a wonderful taste that the more you study it in your mouth, the more complex it can be.  It has a beautiful color, a dark rich red, that is matched by it’s touch of bitterness that is strong at first, but balanced by its mild sweetness. Roughly close to cranberry juice … but different.

You will enjoy this drink for its taste and its history – all in your mouth. Cheers!

Best Ever Pomegranate Martini recipe

Ingredients:

• 2oz Belvedere Vodka
• 1oz freshly squeezed lime juice
• 1oz simple syrup (or Cointreau)
• 3oz pomegranate juice

The incredible purple-reddish color will only be surpassed by the taste.

You only live once (or is it twice?), Mr. Bond. Drink well.

WordPress and Youtube are probably the most powerful web ‘tools’ you can leverage to expand your presence on the web. Bringing them together – putting Youtube videos in your WordPress blog – is easy in this How-To embed Youtube videos into your posts.

So easy there are two ways to do this even with limited web knowledge! Here they are:

#1 Embed Youtube HTML Code into your Post

Go to Youtube video page you want to embed and follow these easy instructions:

1. Got to youtube video page you want to embed
2. Click Share button just below video
3. Click Embed button
4. Copy this highlighted html code
5. Go to wordpress post, set cursor where you want video placed in HTML Tab mode (on its own separate line)
6. Now switch to HTML Tab mode, paste code
7. Click update button to right (before doing anything else!)

*** It’s important to click update right after paste. Web word editors are not like MS Word, they can act funny in formatting your text into the appropriate html code. In doing so, the editor can/will make mistakes you do not want. If you save immediately before switching to Visual tab, you lessen this issue.

Enjoy blogging!

Chrome supports it natively and so does Internet Explorer, making the use of HTML5 video tags, something long overdue, not possible with Firefox without a plugin/player … notably done with a Flash player.

The issue is that Firefox and Opera support only Open Source formats and mp4 is not one of them. We’re told that for a browser to natively support MP4 it will need to pay a royalty fee for each browser download. 

This royalty fee (to the developers who are:  Moving Picture Experts Group) has been delayed until 2015 but at some point they will want their fees.

So ultimately this impasse is a loss for all as it’s long overdue for all browsers to support the most popular videos formats and make life just a little simpler for us all by simply embedding video files like jpg’s with easy playback. 

But video is an important part of current and future web use so it’s safe to say this war is not going to get settled anytime soon, if at all.  

There’s seems only 2 ways of getting universal html5 video tag support, the MPEG declares their code Open Source (not happening) or some future video file format comes out as a next generation and that is open source and overtakes mp4 (if at all possible, is years away).

Options for your website

1. Go ahead with the HTML5 videos tag route but export your video to both mp4 and webm/ogg formats
2. Stick with the Flash video player and play mp4 in all browsers

Jquery Fancybox can be found here Fancybox site.  From their website, Fancybox is defined as:  

“FancyBox is a tool for displaying images, html content and multi-media in a Mac-style “lightbox” that floats overtop of web page.”

This is a Jquery Fancybox tip on how to programmatically close the Fancybox. And this is all that is needed to be called in your javascript:

$.fancybox.close();

This assumes that there is already a Fancybox that is open!

Enjoy coding!

It’s not uncommon, for various reasons, to need to hide a post or page after you’ve already published it.

WordPress has at least 3 ways out of the box, via the admin section, to easily accomplish hiding a post and then, at a later time, publishing it so it’s visible to the public again.

It’s just a few clicks away …

#1 Change the visibility to Private

How To:  Go into Edit Post mode. On right hand side is the ‘Publish’ box/widget. Within this widget you will see ‘Visibility’. Click edit and select ‘Private’ radio button. Click OK and then click Publish.

What it does: As admin, you can still see the post but no one else will be able to access the page/post.

#2 Password protect the post or page

How To:  Go into Edit Post mode. On right hand side is the ‘Publish’ box/widget. Within this widget you will see ‘Visibility’. Click edit and select ‘Password Protect’ radio button. A password textbox will appear. Fill it in and Click OK and then click Publish and voilà!  You will receive a password box to enter your password upon entering post. 

What it does: Allows an option to make posts visibility to friends, associates, etc. but can access only by providing these users the password. Good to know option that can come in handy down the road.

#3 Change the status to Draft

How To:  Go into Edit Post mode. On right hand side is the ‘Publish’ box/widget. Within this widget you will see ‘Status’. Click edit and select ‘Draft’ from the dropdown. Click OK and then click Update.

What it does: Takes post back to Draft mode and removes from being seen from your blog.

This is true but the question you’re asking is what options does PayPal offer and which is best for me?

Here’s a review of the 3 different payment methods:

3 PayPal Payment Options

The PayPal back-end experience in terms of reports, search, payments received or paid out, etc. are basically the same between the 3 different accounts. The main difference is the user experience and some tasks you might or might not need to do.

Website Payments Standard (Without Cart)

Whose it for?  For novice e-commerce webpreneurs whose website does NOT have shopping cart software.  You can use this option if:

• you do not have a shopping cart on your website
• have limited products (max 15 – 20)
• do not nor expect to have high sales volume
• know some basics of html (or willing to learn)