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Ecommerce Templates > Newsletter > September 2009
If you have visited the support forum in the last couple of weeks, you’ll probably have noticed we’ve added Facebook and Twitter button to the left hand menu. Ecommerce Templates has finally got a social (media) life!
Our aim here is to keep customers abreast of developments involving Ecommerce Templates as well as hopefully a smattering of tips, coupon codes, industry news and comment. We will still be providing more in depth news through the newsletter, and we still recommend users subscribe to the updaters forum to get immediate notification of releases but with Twitter and Facebook we feel we can keep in touch with you on a daily basis without being too intrusive. You can find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
I guess the goal here for any ecommerce store holder is to get their site and products more widely known. Twitter isn’t a classified ads site and it’s not a coupon repository, it’s all about conversation and networking, opening up new channels of supply and sales.
The theory is pretty simple – you get lots of people to follow you, you follow lots of people and as the network grows, more people become aware of you and what you have to offer. Although the final aim may be to increase sales or find new distributors, the way to get there is through networking rather than listing this month’s special offers every first of the month. By engaging your followers and entering into conversation with the people you are following, Twitter can be one of the most powerful tools in your marketing toolbox.
There’s a great discussion currently going on in the Ecommerce forum at WebmasterWorld that’s well worth a read.
Version 5.8.2 was released last week. This is a round up of important bug fixes for the v5.8 release, and also includes patches for minor XSS / HackerSafe issues as well as some new css classes. If you’re not already getting notification of updates, we strongly advise subscribing to the ASP updater forum or PHP updater forum so as soon as an updater becomes available, you will be notified by email.
Over the last few months we’ve received a lot of emails from store owners who for one reason or another had closed down operations but are now keen to get their store up and running again. In response we are offering replacement software for a one off price of $49.95 for anybody who has purchased from us in the past. You get the original design you purchased running the very latest version. Support and updates if required would have to be purchased separately. The replacement software is available from our upgrades page - just let us know the name and/or email used on the original purchase.
Over on our sister site, The Template Store we are currently running a 5% discount on all sales that are made through the client login system. There’s no strings attached and the benefits of signing up are outlined here. The Template Store offers regular Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Expression Web, CSS and Website templates with prices starting from $11 per template.
Hopefully you’ll be familiar with the tweaks that can be made through the file vsadmin/includes.asp or includes.php. They’re all listed in the User Manual and in the paramaters help page for the ASP Version or for PHP users. These are powerful tools as they allow for important modifications from just one tweak of a line but they can be taken even further if you decide you’d like the change to apply only to one set of pages like products and not to another like search results. Here’s a real life example to show what you can do…
I want my product page to stay as is with the product name, image, id, description, options, price and add to cart button but I only want the search results to show product name, image and description summary – I don’t need a full product listing.
Open the page search.asp in your HTML editor and find the line
<!--#include file="vsadmin/inc/incsearch.asp"-->
Just before that add the following
<%
noprice=true
noproductoptions=true
nobuyorcheckout=true
shortdescriptionlimit=100
showproductid=false
usesearchbodyformat=1
%>
For search.php that would look like this
<?php
$noprice=TRUE;
$noproductoptions=TRUE;
$nobuyorcheckout=TRUE;
$shortdescriptionlimit=100;
$showproductid=false;
$usesearchbodyformat=1;
?>
<?php include "vsadmin/inc/incsearch.php" ?>
You can make similar tweaks to show and hide elements between the product and product detail pages as well as in the cross selling layouts.
If you have any questions or comments about the content of the newsletter, please feel free to post them on the support forum.