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Ecommerce Templates > Newsletter > July 2009
Welcome to the July edition of the Ecommerce Templates Newsletter where we bring news of the feature packed release of Version 5.8 of the Ecommerce Plus templates along with some css tips on blending in the cart and search pages with your design.
Version 5.8.1 is probably our most feature packed release to date. As you’ll see from what’s been included we’ve acted upon some of your most popular requests and we’re convinced you’ll be as thrilled as we are with the results.
Updaters as always are available from www.ecommercetemplates.com/updaters.asp - it doesn’t matter which version you are currently running, you can always update to the latest and greatest without going through all previous versions first.
5.8 is now out of beta and includes the following features
Thanks page and email confirmation rewrite.
You can now spice up your receipt page and email confirmation making
your most important first contact with your customer so much
more professional. See our css
page for some examples we have
set up for you.
Dynamic Tabs For Product Descriptions.
This is a great new feature that allows you to integrate your product
information into dynamic Adobe Spry Tabs for the product detail
page. You can dynamically include your product description, related
items and products reviews as well as manually adding new tabs
to the layout. We felt this feature was so cool that we decided
to use it ourselves on ECT
More information and help on this feature...
Wish lists and Gift Registry Functionality.
Gift registries are a powerful tool to keep customers purchasing
from your store. With a simple switch you can add a link just
below the buy button so the customer can start creating their
own birthday, wedding, anniversary list that can be sent on to
friends and relatives to purchase items for them. It also allows
the creation of a personal wish list, allowing the visitor to
come back later and purchase the products.
Store Product Page Results Filter.
Great on larger stores, the "Filter Results" functionality
for the store products pages allows your customers to refine selections
by keywords.
Recently Viewed Items Feature.
Another feature we’ve added to ECT is the "Recently
Viewed" items box which allows your customers to quickly navigate
back to items they have been browsing. This is a really handy feature
for those making comparisons between several different products
on your site. Visit a few of our product and product detail pages
and you’ll see how useful it can be.
Link Previous Orders To Customer Account.
This is a great “housekeeping” tool that means you
can add orders made after or before the creation of a client login
to the customer account.
Google Analytics Integration.
We know that a lot of you are using Google Analytics so we’ve
made ecommerce tracking simpler for you with this snippet.
More images from buttons.
Due to popular demand all the form buttons created by the software
can now be replaced by images. For the full list, visit here
for the ASP version or here for PHP
Alt Prod ID feature extended to multiple purchase options.
The multiple purchase options have proved very popular so we’ve
extended their functionality by allowing you to give each their
own product id
Other goodies.
If you are using related products you can relate the items reciprocally
so automatically if A is related to B, B will be related to A.
Hopefully we’ve halved your workload with that one!
You can now set the link on the thanks page to the one of your choice with a simple addition to your includes file.
If you want your customers to log into their account or affiliate area over a secure connection, that’s now available with this addition to includes.asp or includes.php
For customers with very large stores we’ve added some parameters to help speed up the public and admin searches so you control the search criteria for ASP or PHP
The unit price is now available on the printable invoice.
In previous newsletters we’ve talked about blending items like the mini cart into your design flow. Perhaps the biggest change that can be made in this respect is with the table backgrounds of the cart, search and client login. The default gray provides a neutral look that fits with most designs but you can take this much further with a few tweaks of the css file.
We added the following to the css file for those colors
table.cobtbl{
background-color: #e69d01;
}
td.cobhl{
background-color: #fdedc9;
}
td.cobll{
background-color: #FFF;
color : #333;
}
And we have some more examples here
If you are going to use the wish list feature, you’ll see the pop-out links to the lists also use the same classes.
As we said earlier, we were so happy with the new features in 5.8 that we quickly integrated them into our own site. Integrating the Spry Tabs means we can now provide a lot more information on each of the template designs we offer as well as suggesting related services like the site set up or database connection. Another tab we enabled was for reviews, which by editing the default text has changed the emphasis to customer testimonials. Have a look at what we’ve done by visiting our Dreamweaver, or CSS template pages, and if you have a moment, please feel free to leave a comment and a link to the store you are using the template on.
If you have any questions about this feature or anything else we have covered in the newsletter, please feel free to post your comments on the support forum.