Archive for June, 2009

Doodle : schedule an event or make a choice

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Doodle makes it easy to find a date and time for a group event. Doodle is a free online coordination tool which requires neither registration nor software installation. I used it today for the first time. It’s very user friendly and useful. Doodle is also available as Facebook application.

ZenCart configuration tips

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

Default Tax Class :
To set a default Tax Class for new-products, find out the tax class ID number in Admin> Locations/Taxes> Tax Classes and enter this ID in the field Product Price Tax Class Default - When adding new products? in the Admin> Catalog> Product Types menu.

Weights and Prices attributes:
Attribute Prices can be entered with a prefix of + or - or blank

  • + and blank will add the attribute price
  • - will subtract the attribute price
  • When you Price by Attribute, the price you enter here will be added to your base price, whether you define a + prefix or not.

Weight can be entered optionally if it effects the product weight with a prefix of + or - or blank

  • + and blank will add the attribute weight
  • - will subtract the attribute weight

The prefixes are set in the attributes_controller webpage :

ZenCart Attributes

ZenCart Attributes

Attribute flags:
The default values for the attribute flags on the attributes_controller webpage (see image above) are set with the following options on the product type info layout webpage :

  • ARTWORK Attribute is Display Only
  • ARTWORK Attribute is Free
  • ARTWORK Attribute is Default
  • ARTWORK Attribute is Discounted
  • ARTWORK Attribute is Included in Base Price
  • ARTWORK Attribute is Required

Translations and Transliterations

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Making a website available in multiple languages is important, especially if the target audience is international. Google offers two types of solutions to the Translation challenge. One is by straight online translation via a handy translation widget. The second solution is the Google AJAX Language API.

With the AJAX Language API, it’s possible to translate and detect the language of blocks of text within a webpage using only Javascript. With the AJAX Language API for Transliteration, it’s possible to enable transliteration on any textfield or textarea in a webpage. Transliteration is the process of phonetically converting a word written in one script into another. Transliteration should not be confused with translation, which involves a change in language while preserving meaning. With transliteration, it is the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other.

Code examples are available at the Google AJAX API’s Playground. A useful tutorial how to add inline language translation to a website with Google AJAX API has been written by Amit Agarwal.