2008 …with a vengeance

So far I’ve done pretty well with the new year and haven’t yet signed a check, written a letter, or added code to a module with the wrong year. Dreamhost did. Badly. And it’s a nightmare for them, despite the forthright and somewhat amusing blog. Check out their Um, Whoops! here.

37signals, the Rails people, used this as an example of why it’s a good idea to not kowtow to “flexibility” when developing–don’t add a feature just in case someone needs it.

ELM5 Scheduled for release in the New Year

ELM5, now renamed Pulse will be released as a public beta in early January. The module has been rebuilt from the ground up to take advantage of the superior database power available when using mysql. As such, the module will not be available for mivasql stores–the overhead and limited functionality of dbase just does not make sense for a data intensive module like this. If you’re not sure which database you are using, click on Main in your admin and in the top right corner, you’ll see something like:

Production Release 3
Miva Merchant Engine v5.06
Database API: mysql

mysql is the magic word here. If you’re not using mysql, you may want to take advantage of the free Miva Merchant mysql conversion tool.
If you’ve used ELM Stats previously and there’s something you felt was missing from it that you’d like to see in the 5.x version, please let us know in the comments.

The Efficacy of “Click Here”

The Efficacy of “Click Here”, Site Redesigns, Getting Physical and Whatever Happened to Urchin? 

Click here for an interesting post on the power of using “click here”.

Inc.com has a good analysis of two sites that were modified to improve conversion rates. And here’s an account of a popular online store that has gone brick-and-mortar.

Arstechnica looks at what happened to Urchin after it was bought out by Google.

Simple Pay/Simple Ship for Phone Order Manager 5 and cURL for Soft Goods

This week we managed to knock out a couple of improvements to existing modules: the Simple Pay/Ship that we supply with Phone Order Manager 4 are now included with the 5.x version also.

With the restrictions some hosts place on php, particularly with regard to (the admittedly dangerous) allow_url_fopen, some store owners were unable to use Soft Goods. We have now release a download script that uses cURL instead.

Time breakdown of modern web design

Sources are mentioned here.

Ultimate Web Development Cheat Sheet Guide

Here’s a handy list of cheat sheets for CSS, Javascript and more: Ultimate Web Development Cheat Sheet Guide

Exciting New Design Tool

Image creation is about to become a lot simpler with this incredible new software. Checkout this amazing video for the details.

Top Ten Mistakes of Shopping Cart Design Revisited

The Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State has an interesting article in their Usability News journal entitled:  Top Ten Mistakes of Shopping Cart Design Revisited:  A Survey of 500 Top E-Commerce Websites

It’s a follow up to their earlier report on the same subject. There’s a link to that within the article. Definitely worth reading.

Under Development

Next up on the code mill:

ELM 5

Payment module with configurable fields (a/k/a/ BROK_XTRAFIELDS) 5

Followed by Affiliate Manager 5 and Soft Goods 5.

Update, 8/13/07: We’re expecting ELM5 to take 6-8 weeks, as it is being rewritten from scratch (and a lot has changed in Merchant 5 with regard to the logging functions so we need to do a lot more manual capturing of parameters). Mike is returning from vacation today so I’ll follow up with news on Affiliate Manager 5 once I speak with him

–Bret.

USPS Advanced 5 BETA release

USPS Advanced 5 is finally ready for a beta release. Grab it now and help us work out any kinks. (Hey, it’s 7000+ lines of code and has all the complex functionality of our FedEx and UPS modules so there are bound to be some issues!)

We will have the documentation available for this next week (August 6 +)