CRELoaded – osCommerce – WordPress Templates

Posted on June 7, 2007
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Integrated design and templates – WordPress eCommerce

Its interesting! In the past 4 months after people reading my posts around the web about making osCommerce and WordPress sing together how persistent the questions keep on rolling in.

I put together a little tutorial over on www.livedemosite.com in the articles section of Joomla which I’ll make live and it covers some of the key steps you need to consider and keep in mind in order to pull it off.

I’m 95% designer and 5% everything else (sort of) so much of what I’ve done has everything to do with the look and feel of the integration. This poses problems for those that want custom coding because up until this point almost no one ever asks for it when it comes to sharing the user database and such. Well that is about to change.

I hired a programmer to complete a bridge so I can bring together WordPress and either osCommerce, osCMax, or CRELoaded users together. It will basically be a simple login replacement form for either of the loaded variants of osCommerce replacing the existing one. The logic is simple and I’ll disclose more on that later.

I’ll keep you posted in more detailed rant later.

HTML Tables to CSS conversion

Posted on May 31, 2007
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Convert that HTML Table layout to a CSS XHTML layout

Seems to be a common request of me in recent days the conversion of tabled layouts to CSS. In the last week I’ve converted plenty of static HTML Table layout sites to the more lean and mean CSS type layout and one thing I always tell people is that if you are coming from a static type situation or even ASP, JSP, PHP, etc you can preserve your links and site structure with the use of Joomla and sometimes with the use of WordPress providing provision is setup in advance for such things.

Now what this means is in the event you have a site with great PR and indexing in Google and decide to move to a more dynamic database driven setup like Joomla you can keep your page rank and your existing link structure without risking loss of PR or rank. How, cleverly and if you ask me for examples I’ve got plenty.

osCMax osCommerce Templates

Posted on May 29, 2007
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osCMax osCommerce Template Foundations

Looking through my inventory late last night to clean up my auto archive drive I discovered I had created 5 different versions of osCMax template foundation masters ranging from all CSS layouts (heavily modified content tpl files) to variable width and and column layout masters. After testing them at about 1AM this morning on my demo domain with a few flavors of osCommerce, I was able to get all 5 versions of template masters working as drop in solutions. Now CRELoaded, which I also have master layouts for, I did not test as of yet. But if you are a web designer and or site owner this foundation set will be a beautiful little resource that can save you a spank of money.

Custom osCommerce and osCMax Templates for $30?

When you consider the costs of the average template for osCMax or osCommerce is in the neighborhood of $140 then compare it to the price of customization which can quickly reach $1,500, $30 almost sounds like a typo. Well its not and here is why.

To begin with, my colleagues in education and I have been working on the Rapid Template Design Series with every spare moment available in order to have it ready for the printers and in college bookstores by Fall Semester 2007. osCommerce has never been part of the objective in teaching template design for largely because of the hard coded nature that osCommerce requires for creating custom designs. In fact many of the variant ideas we had for the RTDS have been dropped because the concern for showing bias has always been forthright on our minds. So that lead up to a proposition in the structure of the RTDS in general. You can go almost anywhere on the internet and find some sort of template kit for some application that may be what you are looking for, but none of them have the same academic agenda from its conception as the RTDS does.

The beautiful thing about the entire RTD Series is that ANY instructor (college, high school, university, or trade school) can publish supplemental materials using the publishing features in the series and simply add them into the bundled syllabus expanding the course almost effortlessly without the need for costly alternatives.

When you consider that our competitors product from the current educational industry publishers, instructors are pretty much grid locked into a particular format for books and learning material. I mean the alternative is what? Write a book, build a course, maybe make a few power point slide shows? Not very exciting but none the less required for any unique application to a course. With the RTDS this is moot as our system has core components necessary for expanding or adding on to the course materials in what the industry simply calls supplementals.

So, I’m going to release this template foundation for osCommerce and osCMax with guides as a supplemental release. Price? $30, and will be the only supplemental in our series that is actually downloadable and not physical delivery as the RTDS is. So I’m calling this supplemental “Open Source Commerce Builder” RTDS supplemental

What does the Open Source Commerce Builder include?

It includes the 5 master template foundations for osCMax, a small collection of code snippets, a PDF manual, 38+ minutes of FLASH SWF or FLV format tutorials, and an assortment of other elements needed for the creation of a custom theme / template for osCommerce or osCMax without having to pay a designer like me a thousand dollars for your design.

How do I get it?

So simple I feel embarrassed for not using a PayPal button or order form. But this site is my personal NON business blog not one of my commerce sites so simply send $30 to sales – at – jaredritesigns.com (it says Jared’sDesigns) and delivery will be via download link sent to the email address I receive in the PayPal notification. Delivery date will be June 4th unless you don’t care about the audio quality of the tutorials then I’ll email it the following day. My audio person only does freelance on weekends for designers and animators so I’ll have to wait until he can clean up the voice overs for me. If this isn’t important, I’ll send the following day.

Why wait until the following day to send? In the years I’ve been building templates for template clubs I’ve learned that all of them wait a day to deliver digital goods like these largely because when accepting PayPal its a good idea to make certain verification has been provided.

Rapid Template Design Series

Posted on May 27, 2007
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Rapid Template Design Kit Renamed

Today I opened my mail sitting on the counter for three days and discovered that one of the colleges that use my RTDK (Rapid Template Design Kit) requests that I change the name.

An unusual request but valid none the less as I’ve long considered it myself, so here is the skinny on the pending updates. The reason behind the request is that it should reflect its use in various courses that use the kit such as PhotoShop for Web Masters, Introduction to Web Design, Graphics Design Games and Web, etc. All of these are non credit courses.

So after meeting briefly with the other three instructors who were responsible for the development of the instructional materials, we agreed we would change the name to Rapid Template Design Series. I wanted to name it Photoshop Design Series but there is a book with that title and a company that publishes a magazine also uses that name as well. I don’t want to tangle with big publishers so Rapid Template Design Series is what its now called.

A Little History of the RTDK

For those who don’t recall or may just be tuning in especially you who are educators and instructors, here is where the RTDK came from. The RTDK in part, started out back in 2003 as a small collection of tutorials on designing templates for a product called OpenRealty that I offered free of charge on my old site jaredritesigns.com. Just shy of 1,800 copies in total were downloaded while it was available. Then…

In 2004 I was contracted to convert an existing K12 school districts static html website to a CMS which we chose Mambo after comparing it to more complex solutions available at the time. Part of our agreement was to provide three years tech support and a collection of instructional videos for the staff whom will use Mambo to administer the schools departments. Departments included for example physical education, math, english, the library and so on. Mambo CMS was a sure win because of its categories and sections way of organizing content. This became the second part of the mix.

Then the template kit materials became available in November 2004 and sold in the schools book store as nothing more than a shrink wrapped set of instructional papers, all pre punched for a three ring binder, two CD’s, the class syllabus, and a collection of assignments for use in a NON credit class on web design. Who the course was marketed to isn’t important, but the first kit was the precursor to our more lofty idea. Maintaining support materials for the half dozen schools that use this little instructional packet is quite simple as we only update the label on the cover per semester and update the versions of any tool included on the CD.

After NON students begin to buy the materials after having read my posts on my community college teachers blog, a few of us figured it might be a good idea for an online product. The materials in the bookstore are not self contained meaning that they require instruction. So the plan then was to provide instruction by video with an instructor to accompany the materials. A full blown course compliment was born.

Where is the template design kit?

Well if you attend colleges in Western Washington State you can likely get it in the book store. They DON’T DO mail order and if you need the course ASAP as a college then Packet Publishers and Distributors will have it in their catalog this summer. TCP will have it and so will Amazon in November of this year if deadlines are met. The online ordering version will be available on the site http://www.templatedesignkit.com this late summer and will be ranging in price from $9.95 to $149.95 depending on series (print, web, etc). Schools and colleges are discounted 70% on all series above the intro series and resellers and web site owners who sell the material will receive a generous price break as well. This is a physical delivery product because of weight, volume and number of computer files included with the printed guides.

If you have questions, contact me but please keep in mind that the current version does not have an ISBN as of yet so if you are from a school or college requiring ISBN numbers for your catalogs you should list it as supplemental materials until our application returns from the government. All materials are copyright 2004 – 2007.

Real Estate Listing Plugin – Pre Release Update

Posted on May 21, 2007
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Ok it looks like its pretty much unavoidable. Have you ever noticed that nearly all plugins for WordPress don’t require you to edit and or add a database? It was obvious from the get go that our plugin would require a full blown install of the listing manager database and that the plugin would be the WordPress part that provided the interface and display of the listings.

Well today it looks like a few things are not going to be able to be avoided right up front. Here is the news I got from my programmer first thing this morning.

A ) The database will have a separate installer built which will be simple on the first release and subsequent releases will ask you a series of questions about the field names you want to have of which those necessary for normalization will be required such as State, Agent, City and so on as these things are entered only as many times as needed and not duplicated.

B ) Manual editing of tables is required first release as stated before but as mentioned before we told you that using the WordPress Loop in regards to PAGES and not just posts is how you will control the layout of the listings details page. So for example if you had say 3 or 4 different Listings Details Pages you wanted to use for various property types (rentals, luxury, condo, residential) you could have a custom layout per each. Thats the good news. The silly issue we are encountering is the widgets display of featured listings either 1 up or up to 6 up and rotating them from the database. Not a problem per se but people are likely going to want to install this on existing sites and THAT is a problem because it WILL NOT WORK.

C ) ONLY ONE Search Results Page can exist and at this point and the layout changes so far MUST be made in the functions.php file of the WordPress theme of which I’ll supply a pair, an unedited generic no images bare naked one for designers and a default one from my design inventory.

I’ll keep you posted. In the mean time get your FREE Real Estate Blog by emailing me and I’ll set you up with plugins and pre-mods already configured for you.

EDIT: Real Estate Plugin and K2 Sidebar Modules

BTW I forgot to mention that even though the K2 Sidebar Modules are more powerful and work better when developing templates themes in the past following the methodology of the wordpress loop, too many people are going to have issues with this so Widgets is the direction for displaying featured properties and short links to listings. I’ve always been a fan of the K2SBM as many of my themes were based on it but I see no way around this.

The Difference Is In The Details

Posted on May 18, 2007
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Even though I changed my slogan from “The Difference Is In The Details” a few years back to “Where Beauty Meets The Web” I never forget how very important both statements are in articulating quality of design and coding.

As I cruise through archives today I noticed all the projects I’ve done have now exceed 250+ sites, layouts, and letterhead or print documents in the past three years. I’m amazed to notice that a large percentage of them were what I’m now calling Design Rescues because they almost always had something to do with me being hired to fix what should have been done in the beginning. I also noticed that a good quantity of these projects were conversion requests where existing bulky HTML sites were to be converted to cleaner and lighter CSS / XHTML projects as people become more and more SEO minded.

Designers forced to face a global Walmart mentality

As I go into my weekend preparing to complete a few projects that have been long and semi drawn out on a personal level I’ve decided to revive the entire project for www.CodeFreelance.com after abandoning the idea more than a year ago. CodeFreelance was my answer to all the design jobs being sent outside of the US, Canada and Western Europe where the technologies were born. Fear of being considered a bigot had been a motivating factor of me shelving the project in addition to the code base not being completed until recently.

I respect coders and designers the world over and make no judgment about others in disparaging terms but time and time again I find good designers working for dirt pay in order to compete with the massive migration of jobs and project revenue being sent over seas as a result of this apparent belief that you can buy a Ferrari at the price of a Hundai which contradicts common sense in many areas. My design kit was assembled to try and level the playing field for designers in the US and Western Nations seeking to stay competitive without living in subject poverty.

United States of America – Made In China

Early this morning I updated the code base on CodeFreelance.com a accepted commitment by individuals willing to babysit the site after it opens. My intention is to open it as a 100% free (no fees) freelance bidding site to designers and project managers who share the same ideology as we do. When I say we I mean designers and coders that would love to be hired by their own people and not side stepped for this Walmart mindset. Jobs leave this nation, Europe, Australia, Canada and Mexico at break neck speeds and evidence of this exists more so than ever before as one only needs to lift the corner of the United States from the tip of Florida what you will see is the label “United States of America – Made In China”

CodeFreelance.com is yours free of charge to post, share, bid and hopefully to prosper at no expense to you for the service.

Joomla and SEF Advance Replacing this blog

Posted on May 12, 2007
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Well this is one of my last posts of its kind in this blog as I decided that my purchase of SEF Advance and Joomla would better serve my objectives. So the blog will be moved to /blog and further posts not product or WordPress plugin related will go on one of my other blogs around the web.

I had wanted to post a portfolio and code snippet inventory here for others to use but I do so very little design work on an individual basis that it would be almost moot. However I’ve started publishing code snippets over at DaniWeb.com and I’ll make available the downloads here later in the week.

Drupal Templates -Template Design Kit

Posted on April 24, 2007
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Drupal Template Design Kit

I’ve avoided the idea of adding Drupal to the mix of available template design kit variants and after doing dozens of sites I realize that the popularity of Drupal is such that its certainly worthy of adding it to the inventory.

I contracted a third party to lay the foundation based on our inventory of CSS masters and with any luck it will be released shortly after the others.

FREE OpenRealty Templates (Forked)

Posted on April 20, 2007
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A Handful of Beautiful OpenRealty Templates

I took OpenRealty and forked it along with all of our old designs converted to work in both the existing build of OpenRealty and this forked variant. I’ve been building OpenRealty sites since it was a product released by Jon Roig many years ago and I still do IDX / RETS integrated sites with OpenRealty. Its a good entry level product for most offices and agents. But cleaning out my archives I found dozens of designs I abandoned over the years and will make available if anyone is interested. YES, YES, YES I know the Open Realty Template Design Kit Read more

Joomla Template Design Kit

Posted on April 20, 2007
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Joomla Template Design Kit RELEASE June 1st

I think we are going to separate these. The template kit has grown to just shy of 4GB and I think that a lot of people would end up purchasing the kit solely on the basis of its Joomla related facets. Because of this I think a stripped down Joomla only version of the Template Design Kit will be released as well.

We will just label it as the Joomla Template Design Kit and then offer updates free of charge for version 1.5 of Joomla including template updates. Beautiful Joomla templates are more common now today than the early days of Joomla. So many powerful and beautiful web templates have become available over the past year that a section in the Template Design Kit will feature a segment dealing with color schemes and a full run down of the “Rapid Template Design” method used by large template houses such as Template Monster and Broderbund.

I’ll post screen shots of the Joomla Template Design Kit this weekend.

Thanks for all the emails I’ve gotten in the past month.

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