Planet OXID

Screencast: Attribute in Oxid richtig verwenden

2010-07-30T14:55:47+00:00

Ich habe wieder einen Screencats erstellt, den Ihr auch im Oxid Wiki sehen könnt:
http://wiki.oxidforge.org/Screencasts/Attribute_erstellen_in_OXID_eShop
Heute geht es um das Thema Attribute.

Der Screencast zeigt an einem Beispiel, wie man jedes Produkt mit eigene Attributen versehen kann.
Diese Attribute gehen über die reine Artikelbeschreibung hinaus und erlauben es einzelne Produkte näher zu spezifizieren.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Viel Spaß mit diesem Screencast.
Bei Fragen freue ich mich über eine Mail…

kostenloses Oxid eShop 4 Template Theme amazonasgrün

2010-07-26T16:00:11+00:00

Die Installation des kostenlosen Oxid eShop Template Theme in Amazonasgrün ist relativ einfach: entpacken Sie das Zipfile. Kopieren Sie den gesamten, entpackten Template-Ordner ins Verzeichnis /out/ihrer Oxid eShop Installation Ändern Sie die Variable $this->sCustomTheme in Ihrer config.inc.php und passen Sie Namen an den des Template-Ordners an.Beispiel: $this->sCustomTheme = “basic_nobrand_Amazon” Dieses kostenlose Oxid eShop Template ist eine [...]

Selfish and Selfless Tweeters

2010-07-24T12:27:04+00:00

Many Tweeters post messages just for the sake of the passing on information that they have found interesting or userful, in very much the spirit of sharing the information with their “followers” . On the other hand, most business-users of Twitter use the social-media platform for a specific marketing purpose, for example making an announcement or announcing [...]

OXID Modul tabsl|SEO

2010-07-17T21:44:14+00:00

tabsl|SEO

Mit der Extension besteht die Möglichkeit, den <title>-Tag des OXID eShops nach Belieben zu erweitern bzw. anzupassen.

Folgende Features stellt das Modul zur Verfügung:

individueller Titel-Tag für jede Kategorie

individueller Titel-Tag für jedes Produkt

individuelle Trennzeichen (Standard: | )

Anzeige des Kategorie-Namens auf der Artikeldetailseite

Anzeige des kategoriespezifischen Titel-Tags auf der Artikelübersichtsseite

Anzeige des kategoriespezifischen Titel-Tags auf der Artikeldetailseite

Anzeige des produktspezifischen Titel-Tags auf der Artikeldetailseite

diverse Anzeige- bzw. Sortiermöglichkeiten

Bearbeiten des <title>-Tags der Startseite

Bearbeiten von Shop-Suffix und Shop-Präfix

Das Modul gibt es für 49,00 € zum Sofortdownload im OXID eXchange:

http://www.oxid-esales.com/en/exchange/extensions/tabsl-seo

Alternativ auch per eMail (tobias@merkl.eu) – ist mir persönlich lieber

76% of Internet Marketers Plan to Use Facebook as Part of Social Media Strategy

2010-07-17T05:49:42+00:00

According to a recent survey of 476 marketers conducted by the e-Commerce Optimization company SeeWhy, 76% of them plan to use Facebook for driving sales as part of their Social Media Strategy. The exact split of statistics is: 76% plan to use Facebook as part of their Social Media strategy 2% have no plans at all 20% are not [...]

Verliert langsam Email Marketing ihre Wichtigkeit?

2010-07-11T08:52:15+00:00

Verliert langsam Email Marketing ihre Wichtigkeit? (polls) Share this on Facebook Post on Google Buzz Tweet This! Add this to DZone Share this on Technorati Buzz up!

OXID e-Shop Private Sales

2010-07-08T07:23:42+00:00

Private Sales are a great way to restrict your shop to a selected group of members who have pre-registered. This is a great feature for example if you are running a B2B shop and would prefer to expose offers only to pre-registered members. Watch this quick intro video understand how private-sales works in OXID. What do you [...]

OXID eShop 4.4.0 with Private Sales, Live Shopping and Facebook Features

2010-07-01T13:49:38+00:00

I am extremely excited to announce the immediate availability of our latest release: OXID eShop 4.4.0. It allows small, medium and large businesses to leverage innovative dynamic sales models on the Web and tap into the word-of-mouth marketing power of social networks. Oh yes, version 4.4.0 rocks :)

Innovative Dynamic Business Models

With the new release, you can create members-only shops, offer one deal a day, set a basket expiration time for live shopping sites, get products recommended on Facebook, and more. All of which in combination with the existing, typical eCommerce functionality, allows shop owners to more easily and better:

Retain and attract new customers with persuasive social eCommerce
Provide purchase incentives with limited time sales and restricting catalogue browsing
Raise the visibility of your shop through viral marketing and minimize overall marketing spend
... and ultimately raise revenue by lowering costs with innovative new business models!

There are exciting times ahead of us and that includes not OXID eSales, the vendor of OXID eShop, but also you, the users of OXID eShop who constantly seek for new revenue streams or optimizing existing ones. Nothing stops you from starting right away:

Freely available advanced eCommerce features: All new features, such as Private and Group Sales, Live Shopping as well as Facebook Integration are included in our Community Edition and thus freely available.
Reliable platform for new business models: The new features make OXID eShop the Open Source eCommerce platform of choice for those who want to implement social commerce business models that are both radically new as well as ready for mass adoption.
Speed up innovation while reducing risks: Now, you can significantly speed up innovation and separate your shop from the competition without the risk of huge upfront investment.

Modular Social eCommerce Features

Let me walk you through some of the highlights of the 4.4.0 release and I am sure, you'll share my enthusiasm:

Private and Group Sales: Using the private sales feature, merchants can implement shopping clubs or group and event shopping. Registering to the shop, the member for example now can reserve products. He can see which products there are in the cart and when his product reservation will expire.
Facebook: Using the Facebook integration in OXID eShop, customers can log in to the shop, recommend products, discuss and comment about them. They may share their most favorite products with their friends via the "Like" button.
Promotions: The feature "actions and promotions" enables merchants to better respond to their clients preferences. In the administration panel, it is possible to configure discounts for certain products and to control time frames and addressees of the promotion.
Invitations and bonus points: The invitation function includes a credit point system: merchants can reward their clients that recruited other online purchasers to leverage viral marketing tactics. He can individually and flexible configure how to refund this credit points.

These are just some of the great new features included in the latest release. You can combine all of them in multiple variations due to the modular, flexible and open architecture of OXID eShop. There's no need to decide whether you want a traditional Online Shop or a membery-only Shopping Club. Just take the bits and pieces of functionality that match your business model as well as target audience. Feel free to build custom functionality on top of the Open Source code to add unique value for your customers.

Start today with building a unique and innovative eCommerce site: Learn more about OXID eShop 4.4.0, download it, try it out.

New Quality Report

By the way: Along with the new shop release, we also published the latest Quality Report. It clearly shows that we never sacrifice quality for adding new features. The code coverage by automated Unit Tests for all editions of OXID eShop increased again at over 90%. Thus, our product's quality is significantly higher than the 80% advised by experts for critical enterprise projects. Download the detailed OXID eShop Quality Report for free.

OXID eFire Transaction Costs

2010-07-01T06:44:45+00:00

Transaction costs for OXID eFire services can be found in the following PDF. OXID e-Fire Transaction Costs Share this on Facebook Post on Google Buzz Tweet This! Add this to DZone Share this on Technorati Buzz up!

Standard OXID Pages for Web-Design Companies

2010-06-28T07:27:29+00:00

If you are a web-design company creating templates (in Bitmap/Photoshop/GIMP or Vector/Illustrator/Inkscape formats), the following 6 pages will serve you as guildelines. These 6 pages can then be used by OXID e-Commerce companies (such as euroblaze) to produce a functional-template. You may also download all these 6 screenshots in ZIP format. Share this on Facebook Post on Google Buzz Tweet [...]

Alternative Newsbox Darstellung in OXID !

2010-06-26T21:24:50+00:00

In Oxid 4.2x und 4.3.x ist es immer so das die Newsbox, die man (meist auf der linken Seite des Templates) einschalten kann, keine Überschrift darstellt. Der angeteaste Text ist außerdem komplett verlinkt. So kannte ich das bisher nicht…und so mochte ich es nicht, also mußte eine Änderung her.Generell mussten in dem Template nur zwei kleine Sachen angepasst werden. Weiter unten im Artikel habe ich das komplette Template als Download zur Verfügung gestellt. Ein besonderer Dank gilt an dieser Stelle Christian.

Das Ausgangstemplate liegt im Ordner : basic/tpl/inc und hat den Namen cmp_news.

Leider gab die Templatedokumentation nichts her, woraus ich hätte schließen können was man ändern muss. Die Überschrift fehlt ganz, der Text ist nach 100 Zeichen gecroppt und komplett verlinkt. Außerdem ist darunter der “weiterlesen” Link platziert!

Hier das Original:

<strong id="test_LeftSideNewsHeader">[{ oxmultilang ident="INC_LEFTITEM_NEWS" }]</strong>
<dl>
[{foreach from=$oxcmp_news item=oxcmp_news name=newsList}]
<dt>
<a id="test_newsTitle_[{$smarty.foreach.newsList.iteration}]" href="[{ oxgetseourl ident=$oViewConf->getSelfLink()|cat:"cl=news" }]#[{$oxcmp_news->oxnews__oxid->value}]">
[{ $oxcmp_news->oxnews__oxlongdesc->value|strip_tags|oxtruncate:100 }]
</a>
</dt>
<dd>
<a id="test_newsContinue_[{$smarty.foreach.newsList.iteration}]" href="[{ oxgetseourl ident=$oViewConf->getSelfLink()|cat:"cl=news" }]#[{$oxcmp_news->oxnews__oxid->value}]">
[{ oxmultilang ident="INC_CMP_NEWS_CONTINUE" }]
</a>
</dd>
[{/foreach}]
</dl>

Jetzt zum Endergebnis:
Die Änderung liegt ca. in Zeile 5. Es wurde statt der oxnews__oxlongdesc das Datum der News und die oxnews__oxshortdesc eingebaut.

<a id="test_newsTitle_[{$smarty.foreach.newsList.iteration}]" href="[{ oxgetseourl ident=$oViewConf->getSelfLink()|cat:"cl=news" }]#[{$oxcmp_news->oxnews__oxid->value}]">
[{ $oxcmp_news->oxnews__oxdate->value|date_format:"%d.%m.%Y" }] - [{ $oxcmp_news->oxnews__oxshortdesc->value}]
</a>

Das Endergebnis zeigt jetzt das Datum sowie die Überschrift. Der Inhaltstext wird in meinem Beispiel gar nicht mehr ausgegeben (Ich hab diese Variante aus Platzgründen gewählt-so kann man auch mal 5 News untereinander darstellen). Der “weiterlesen” Link ist nachwievor an derselben Stelle.

Hier die neue Darstellung:

newstemplate oxid

Das komplette Template als Download findet man hier:

»cmp_news.tpl

Sollte es Fragen geben, stehe ich Euch jederezeit zur Verfügung.
Viel Spaß mit dem geänderten Template

Applying VAT to Shipping Cost

2010-06-24T10:59:48+00:00

It is possible in OXID to apply a VAT amount on not only product price, but also the shipping rate you wish to charge your customers. This configuration can be specified in the /admin are under: Master Settings > Core Settings > Settings > VAT > “Enter Shipping Costs as net Price (plus VAT)”. Share this on Facebook Post [...]

OXID eShop: Modul TMP löschen

2010-06-17T12:11:24+00:00

Wenn ihr regelmäßig mit dem OXID eShop arbeitet bzw. entwickelt, kennt ihr sicher das Problem, dass Änderungen nicht direkt im Frontened angezeigt werden.

Erst nach Löschen des tmp-Verzeichnisses und somit löschen des Caches, sind die Modifizierungen sichtbar.

Matthias von den Musterdenkern hat da bereits ein kleines Modul geschrieben, welches bei jedem Seitenaufbau das besagte Verzeichnis löscht.

Nachdem dies bei wirkliche jedem Aufruf der Fall ist benötigt dies zwar ein bisschen Performance, jedoch sollte dies – vor allem in einer Entwicklungsumgebung – kein Problem sein.

Leider ist bei oben genannten Modul ein kleiner Schönheitsfehler vorhanden. Es wird immer das Verzeichnis /tmp/ geleert. Jedoch kann man in der config.inc.php auch ein anderes Verzeichnis dafür hinterlegen. Ich habe das Script nun soweit angepasst, dass immer der aktuelle Pfad aus der config-Datei genommen wird.

Download: http://blog.tabsl.eu/public/mude-dev_02.zip

Artikel Anlegen in Oxid

2010-06-17T06:33:02+00:00

Da es für viele User zu kompliziert ist ein Manual zu studieren, habe ich mich auch immer gefreut, wenn ich im Netz ein Video Tutorial gefunden habe. Oftmals möchte man sich ja auch nur mal eben über ein anderes System informieren, um zu schauen wie dieses funktioniert. Da ich für Oxid nichts dergleichen gefunden hatte, habe ich einige Screencasts für Oxid erstellt. Die Screencasts sind alle in der Version 4.2.x oder neuer erstellt worden.

Hier nun das erste für Artikel in Oxid.
Der Screencast zeigt, wie in OXID ein neuer Artikel angelegt wird. Für jeden Artikel gibt es eine Vielzahl von Einstellungsmöglichkeiten. Hierzu zählen beispielsweise das Anlegen von Cross-Selling Produkten und das Einbinden eines Lagerbestandszählers oder einer Bestellverwaltung.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sollte es Fragen zu diesem Screencast geben, bitte einfach eine Mail über das Kontaktformular schicken.
Viel Spaß mit Oxid !

Michael

Changing Default Meta-Keywords and Meta-Descriptions

2010-06-17T06:27:43+00:00

Before taking an OXID shop live online, it is necessary to ensure that the correct meta-keywords and meta-description pertaining to your shops and products appear in the <head> section of the HTML pages of your shop. Otherwise the Google & Co. will index only the default values pertaining to the OXID demo-data. In order to remove [...]

Snippets to Include CMS Pages into Product Descriptions

2010-06-16T08:33:36+00:00

Sometimes it is necessary to include some repeating content into article-descriptions repeatedly. For example, if you are selling a particular laptop-products with inbuilt 3G-Cards and wish to describe what 3G is to online-shop visitors, it would be cumbersome to repeat this descriptive information again and again in each article-description. OXID offers a convenient manner to handle [...]

Streamlining OXID’s Facebook Properties

2010-06-15T09:00:55+00:00

Whenever you can reach your community over a social network service, you as the responsible person for community building in your company may consider to enter it. The outcome might become really promising but you have to do certain researches before. In this blog post, I would like to share my experience and the bumps connected to entering Facebook for the OXID community.

Analyzing the status quo, I found three different account formats for OXID eSales that have been created some-when by somebody:

The Facebook Account already had friends, the Group had members and the Page had so called fans.

Accounts and Friends

Using an account for your company or brand seems to be a bad idea, especially when the correct writing of your brand is important. As you can see, it was impossible to write “eSales” as Facebook assumes a natural person with a first and a last name and camel-cases the words. The content was filled up with automated twitter feeds. And although it was shown on your friends walls, it had very low activity that could not even be measured. If you wanted to post using your brand, you had to be logged in as “OXID ESales”. As e-mail address, a collective e-mail account was chosen that nobody felt responsible for.

We decided to ditch this account completely. Thus, I informed all friends of the OXID ESales account via the Facebook message service which doesn’t allow more than 20 addressees at once. It had to be done tick-wise…

Groups and Members

Let us have a look at the Facebook group OXID eSales. What apparently catches our eyes is that the writing of the name is correct in this case. The followers of a group are called “members”. Posts do not appear at your members’ walls automatically, they have to visit the group site to gather the news you want to spread. Due to this, the non-measurable activity was pretty low as well. Also, posts are shown from the person who entered it, branding is not possible (except you are logged in as OXID ESales). Bad premises for our mission and inappropriate. Obviously, a group has to be treated similar to a forum which doesn’t make sense because we have our own

We decided to ditch this site as well by July 1st. The members were informed by a message of the group administrator (me) that unfortunately took nearly 20 hours for delivery.

Pages and Fans

A page seems to be the ultimate solution. As a page administrator, you must have your personal account but writing to the page, your entry is branded! I.e., if I write to the OXID_eSales page, I can use my personal account marco.steinhaeuser and the entry appears as written by OXID_eSales without any hassle logging out and in again. The posts appear on the time line of your “fans” so they can interact immediately. This interaction is measurable: Especially interesting is a graph that also can display who hided your posts.

While investigating, I found an OXID eSales page in the wrong category “local business” that I really wanted to change into “product/service”. Unfortunately, on Facebook it is not possible to change the category after the page was generated. So I had to install a complete new page and to inform the fans of the old page about it. As features for the new page, I just left the “wall”, the information page, fotos (still to equip) and the event application.

Content

Most of the content of the new OXID_eSales page is parsed automatically via the Twitterfeed service, as is:

shops on OXID
every shop owner or developer can post his new shop to the Mister Wong or to delicious.com bookmark service with the tag oxid-shop where a RSS feed is generated and posted to twitter and Facebook
new extensions for OXID eShop
new extensions and modules on OXID eXchange are parsed to a RSS feed and will be twittered and facebooked
news on OXID projects
front page news a project responsible person published on OXID projects
new or updated feature requests for OXID eShop
new entries of OXID planet
blog posts about and around OXID that are implemented in OXID planet
(You are welcome to join, feel free to contact me!)
new blog entries on oxid-esales.com

Facebook User Names

A very interesting feature on Facebook is the so called “user name” for your page which actually means a shortened URL. Every Facebook user can fire up http://www.facebook.com/username/ to get his own shortened URL like http://www.facebook.com/marco.steinhaeuser. If you are a page administrator, you will find a field for your page name there in case you have more than 25 fans. We really wanted to give the OXID page the same format as it is on twitter, (with an underscore) but unfortunately, on Facebook it isn’t allowed as well as a hyphon in your name. Another idea was to name it simply http://www.facebook.com/OXID but the appendix at least have to have five or more characters. At the end of the day, we will call it http://www.facebook.com/OXID.eSales but this name is still occupied by the OXID ESales account and will be cancelled by July 1st.

Market your Page

There are several ways to make your page visible to others. The aim is to gather as many fans as possible to spread your news to many people.
Facebook offers a planty of scripts that you can implement into your website. In our case, we will use a simple “like” button to be implemented into oxid-esales.com as well as on OXID forge. When a Facebook user visits our official sites and presses this button, he will immediately become a fan with a simple click and our news will appear on his timeline from now on.
Every fan has the possibility to recommend this page to his (assorted) friends which gives your marketing a highly viral touch.
Further, Facebook offers plans for payed ads that I didn’t give a deeper look yet.

Appearance and Usability

A very interesting effect on Facebook seems to be the low barrier for interaction of your fans with your page. Although our visitors saw and knew that the content is generated automatically, they immediately started commenting on the posts, e.g. about a new store online. Of course you have to be present and react on their comments and discuss with them.
In my opinion, the reason for this low barrier can be found in the web techniques: The extensive use of AJAX makes it possible to get statuses changed immediately without the need of reloading the complete page. I.e., for the users it is pretty easy, quickly done and fun to press a “like” button or to leave a shorter or longer comment without any restrictions. For you, as the page owner it is perfect seeing any interaction publically. If somebody pressed the “like” button, he feels comfortable with the content and actually recognized it!

Conclusion

Although Facebook is on the headlines and has to be seen highly critical in a manner of privacy, it seems to be a perfect addition to your existing community tools. For OXID eSales, of course it will not replace other community tools like the forum or OXID forge but it is a nice way to spread our news, to keep people informed and to gather the reactions.

If you want to stay informed about all the OXID news and you have a Facebook account yourself, feel free to like our page:

Free OXID e-Commerce Templates

2010-06-13T12:33:32+00:00

We are happy to be giving away some of our OXID templates (built on CE 4.3). The download page is currently available only in German. If you should need assistance in English, please contact me or “Leave a reply” below. These templates are based on the default OXID templates that shop with the CE distribution. They [...]

Effecting VAT Values in OXID Shops

2010-06-10T12:35:34+00:00

There are 2 configuration settings where VAT values applicable to products in your OXID online-shop can be effected. Default VAT for all Products A default VAT applicable to all products on the shop unless otherwise specified at the product level (see below) Master Settings > Core Settings > Settings > VAT > Default VAT for all Products Product Level [...]

Schnäppchen in Oxid mit Preis

2010-06-10T10:50:09+00:00

Da die Schnäppchen im Oxid CE 4.2.x ohne Preis angezeigt werden, möchte manch einer gerne die Anzeige mit Preis haben.

Man findet die Anzeige im Std. Template unter der Top of The Shop. Wenn man jetzt die Preise zu dem Template hinzufügen möchte, ist folgendes zu tun.Zunächst ist da das Template inc/bargain_items.tpl, welches ohne Preise ausgestattet ist.

Ca. ab Zeile 14 ist folgendes in das Template einzufügen:

[{oxhasrights ident="SHOWARTICLEPRICE"}]
[{if $_product->getFPrice()}]
[{assign var="currency" value=$oView->getActCurrency() }]
<b id="test_Top5Price_[{$_product->oxarticles__oxid->value}]">[{ $_product->getFPrice() }] [{ $currency->sign}]<a href="#delivery_link" rel="nofollow">*</a></b>
[{/if}]
[{/oxhasrights}]

Ab jetzt sollte das Template “Schnäppchen” die Preise anzeigen. Falls etwas haken sollte, sollte man eventuell den tmp-Ordner löschen!

Meiner persönlichen Meinung nach sollte man sich genau überlegen, ob man auch in dieser Schnäppchenvorschau den Preis einbaut, weil man ja den Kunden letztlich gerne in die Detailansicht bekommen möchte.
Das fertige Resultat sieht dann so aus:

Viel Spaß!

PS: Ab Version 4.3.2 sieht es so aus, als wenn dieses Feature standardmäßig implementiert ist (daher habe ich mal die komplettte bargain.tpl aus einem frischen 4.3.2 in den Anhang gebracht !)

>>bargain_items.tpl