Latter-day Village Square

For some time now, we have not been able to get our knowledgebases indexed by the major search engines. Due to our membership management system, which restricts access to our subscription areas, anyone or anything (e.g., a search engine-indexing spider) without a login password cannot view the knowledgebase content. That software company tried to provide a programmatic fix, but it has never really worked. With no access to the article pages, the major search engines do not know of all the wonderful content we have available.

As we became increasingly aware of the importance of keywords and search engine placement as part of our site marketing efforts, I finally worked out a solution. Our membership system has a protection method designed specifically for PHP files, which powers our knowledgebases. I finally figured in during one night of tossing and turning over this issue, that I had enough PHP troubleshooting (very different from actually writing code) experience to give the method a go.

I was finally able to make the change work, although there is one hiccup. The first time a registered member visits a newly configured knowledgebase (KB; e.g., Seminary, Primary, Primary Music, Sampler) they will see an obscure error message. This is due to the new handling of the information in their login cookie. If the member hits backup and tries the article link again, they should get a good response. I have not been able to find a solution for this; however, the workaround is easy enough to figure out; Go back, retry.

The result of this change is that non-registered users can traverse the category trees of the KBs mentioned above, where they can view up to 400 characters of the article contents. Previously, they could not even see the KB home page. These same article previews (almost 7000 counting all KBs) should now eventually appear in the major search engines, increasing our visibility and search page ranking accordingly.

Today, April 1 (this is NOT a joke) we switched to a new online store and shopping cart system based on Zen Cart, a popular open source product. After an exhaustive search we determined that Zen Cart’s flexibility, extensibility, and feature set made it our best choice, even better than some system was evaluated that cost thousands of dollars. One of our main criteria was the ability to support and even expand our drop- ship and download sales capability. We believe Zen Cart fills the bill.

NOTE: the new cart system requires that every shopper create an account. Rather than integrate this cart with our membership management system and create a login for all of our members, we chose to keep them separate. Why? Simple, we have many store customers that never register for our other site features. We felt it was not necessary for them to create a full site membership simply to shop in our store.

However, creating a store account does have some advantages over our old cart system:

1. Customers can log into their store account and check that status of any order.
2. Customer who purchase download products can login and re-download a product, up to five times or for 14 days, whichever comes first.
3. We will offer account holders special discounts and can transfer gift certificate values to their store account.

Some additional Zen Cart benefits.

• Better classification of products. We revamped the store category system to make it easer for shoppers to find what they need. You can find most products using more than one category.
• A list of Artists / Brands allows shoppers easy viewing all of the products that we offer for a particular vendor.
• We display specials and reduced items on the main page, in the side boxes, and with every category page displayed. We are committed to aggressive pricing and this new interface allows shoppers to more easily find our bargains.
• Email lists – we can inform you of specials and discounts based on your purchase history. We promise not to constantly fill your email inbox, and you can always unsubscribe.
• Gift Certificates - we will be offering gift certificates, which we believe will expand our sales opportunities.
• Permanent Cart - Any products added to your online cart remain there until you remove them, or check them out.
• Address Book - We can now deliver your products to another address other than yours! This is perfect to send birthday gifts direct to the birthday-person themselves.
• Order History - View your history of purchases that you have made with us.
• Products Reviews - Share your opinions on products with our other customers.

Finally, we will be expanding our product lines by adding more and more manufacturers. There are also many other Amazon like features (e.g. others bought this and similar items, purchase items together and save) we will be adding as soon as we have the cart tweaked for maximum performance.

I hope you take a look around.

http://latter-dayvillage.com/store/

Warning, this is still a work in progress, so you may see missing images and a few warts/knots here and there. Do not hesitate to write us about your impressions and with any questions you may have.

I had the server maintenance all worked out for very early this morning. Our data center staff was going to install a secondary hard drive in our server to give us more backup room. We are selling so many digital downloads that the hard drive space required for the site on the web server has grown exponentially. We now have over 10GB of files in Latter-dayvillage.com alone. All of the sites running on our server, e.g. our personal sites and some others we host, are backed up nightly to a separate location on the hard drive. From there, they are backed up to a secure disk storage array in the data center. But those 10GB of files are so much larger than we ever anticipated, that we decided to install a secondary hard drive just for backup.

After the data center staff installed the new hard drive, they started up the server again, around 3 am Mountain Time this morning, but did not check to see if the web services were running, only if the box could be pinged and accessed via secure shell. Later this afternoon, I pointed out to the tech I was chatting with that the box was a web server, how could they do maintenance and not ensure that it fulfilled its main purpose? I have not received an answer for that one yet. This is the first time our data center staff has really let us down; however, the problem would not have been as bad had I checked everything earlier.

Why didn’t I check the server earlier this morning? Well I had my own problems where at home. I live in lovely wind-swept Wyoming. We had another cold snap last night, the wind chill was down to -13 and our building pipes froze again for the second time this winter. I heard water running hard at from somewhere outside out apartment at 7:45am. We had very low water pressure and water was coming into our kitchen (we live on the ground floor right next to the utilities closet. It also came into the room where I have all of my computer gear, soaking the carpets and making a general mess of things. At 4:30pm now we still have no water.

So I must admit I was not even thinking about the server. Finally someone sent me a text message asking if the site was down, when I discovered the problem.

I certainly apologize for any inconvenience the outage caused. It is not something we planned or could even imagine. Now where is the bottled water we stored…

You may have noticed a slight change in the site design. Last night and early today I implemented a change in the menu system that displays our main top drop down (horizontal is the correct term) menus.  I first developed the menus using a JavaScript-based software component that plugged into our Adobe Dreamweaver development environment.  Then we upgraded to Adobe’s CS3 development system, which includes a very similar menu system called Spry.  I started to look at the differences between the two systems, finally determining that the Spry system would speed up our page load times, meaning our pages would be more responsive.  Spry also does not use an image background, meaning few graphic files have to be loaded, adding to its speed and responsiveness. Now our top banner is the same brown color as the rest of our boxes and such.  Finally, I felt more confident that the Spry menus would solve some of our compatibility problems:

• Menus looked and operated differently with our knowledgebase software.
• I had to do some kludgy patching of our blog software to get the old menus to even work and they still looked out of sorts with the rest of the presentation.

The SPRY menus seemed to solve all of that, at least in the test pages I did.

Well let me tell you, I should have tested more.  Updating the site menus means that I must cut/paste our page header (the logo, building images, and menus at the top, including any left side navigation or right-side advertisement areas) and the page footer (banner ads, Google tracking code, and bottom of the page links) into ten different software components:

1. Support Desk
2. Support Knowledgebase (Kb)
3. Forums / image gallery (they share the same theme code)
4. aMember (our membership management system)
5. Sampler Kb
6. Primary Music Kb
7. Primary Kb
8. Seminary Kb
9. Shopping Cart
10. Other static pages, like our home page.

Of course I usually get half way through the list and run into a problem. Last night was no different.  The new menu JavaScript code did not want to play nicely with the Smarty template system used by our Kb software. So that meant that four different parts were all broken. Fortunately, the Smarty system is open source software, which in many cases means better support and documentation than purchased software. This is not always the case, but a widely used system like Smarty had more than enough information; I found a solution and soon had the menus NOT blowing up the Kb software.

Finally, may I please tell you how much I HATE Internet Explorer (IE). More hacks and workarounds have to be used simply because Microsoft makes its own standards, expecting everyone else to just march along behind them. Our new menus looked dreadful when viewed with Internet Explorer.  I normally use Firefox, which is more secure, more feature-rich, extensible, and faster.  I only use IE to test login problems.  However, this time I didn’t test the menus in IE very well. They looked DREADFUL, like something hacked together by an amateur like me.  Again, back to the Dreamweaver Spry support systems, where I found only a single reference to the blotchy and misaligned display I was seeing.  A Spry update was suggested.

After I installed the update and compared the new Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) file with the old one, I was able to experiment with some of their updated CSS adjustments and get the menus to work equally as well in Firefox and IE.  Yeah!  Finally success, but achieved at the cost of sleep deprivation.  Sometimes with my head down I can work a problem for hours and lose track of time.  So sometime after my wife and son left for work, I finally felt the site was stable enough that I could nap.

So, there you have it; a day in the life, or since I work mostly the graveyard shift, should I say, night in the life of a web developer. Now where’s my pillow?

Tis the season for updates. Many of our site component licenses renew at this time of year, so it’s an ideal time to make sure the software is current. With all of the security concerns these days, keeping software up to date is a must.

We recently updated our:

• Shopping Cart
• Photo/clipart gallery
• Forums
• Knowledgebases

If you have not taken the time to visit/use our image/clipart gallery, there are over 4000 images/photos and clipart selections available for your use. All that’s required is a free membership registration. Of course any of our paid memberships also include access to this resource.

NOTE: a huge portion of the clipart available came from the open source clipart library, which I (Tim) spent many hours converting from the open source .svg format to the more usable (for Windows) .jpg format.

January UPDATE: One month later and Goemerchant is still spamming me. They are not doing it several times a week, but I still get their lame come one emails.  I hope some other prospective client reads this and realizes what kind of an organization they are considering as a partner. They don’t even respond to unsubscribe emails.

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I wrote previously about Latter-dayVillage’s desire to upgrade our shopping cart to handle more merchants and allow them to make more LDS products available to our customers.

The search has not been very much fun:

• Many carts that meet our requirements are priced so high that only national brick & mortar stores could afford them. Several, including Zoovy, are fantastic, just too far out of our price range.
• One cart in particular (Nexternal) meets ALL of our requirements, except support for downloadable products. That is now such in integral part of our ecommerce model that we simply cannot do without that feature.
• One cart has part of the multi-vendor aspect done right, but has no good mechanism enabling us to accurately pay our vendors their rightful % of sales. This was considered a modification request; sadly their development quote for that ‘feature’ was more than their whole product license.
• One cart vendor (Goemerchant) actually has really riled me up. When I signified on their site that I was interested in getting product information, salespeople started calling me. When I discovered that their product is priced WAY out of our price range and does not include a real multi-vendor approach, I told them I was not longer interested. Suddenly I started receiving weekly email sales bulletins. The first couple of weeks I politely sent an email to their unsubscribe address; however, the emails kept coming. Next, I forwarded one of the marketing puff pieces to the salesperson who last called me, asking for her help in removing me from the list. After one week with no reply, and the marketing emails still coming, I’ve decided to report each and everyone as SPAM through spamcop.net until they stop coming. So be warned, unless you want MORE spam, do not ask GoeMerchant to contact you.
• Open Source options: there are still several open source carts that might still fit the bill. In most cases, for me at least, evaluating an open source solution involves an install and monkey process. I install the software and then monkey around with the settings and such until I can verify it will do what we need. This is due to one of the frequent downsides to open source software; lack of documentation concerning addons or modifications to base systems. There is usually no ‘sales person’ to call and ask pointed questions of; many times you have to dig through discussion forums or use them to get answers from the user community. The help is sometimes there, sometimes not, but that is what you get for free or very-little-cost software.

So here’s the score so far: 43 cart systems reviewed (multitudes don’t make the cut when I cannot find a multi-vendor option in their feature list) with three still in the running for consideration. Two of those are open source and I am down to the install/monkey stage. Of course I am still evaluating carts as I come across them, but the time involved is just mind numbing. However, Debra and I remain committed to finding the best solution for our customers.

This is an exerpt from a message I sent out to our Primary subscribers after our recent Villager Newsletter.

2008 STICKERS! I just added beautiful new stickers to the store with the 2008 theme by Elsa Remund - I also added Super Singer Stickers with Melissa Carter’s cute designs which are on the third page of stickers.

Since the newsletter, I got some messages indicating there were missing files or corrupt files in the new material I have recently added to the Primary Knowledgebase and Music subscriptions.

I am so grateful when someone points this out to me, because I may never know otherwise. I saw that in every case, many people had tried to access these files unsuccessfully before someone finally pointed it out to me. I know it is an extra chore to send me a note, but if you find a mistake or problem, it would be so helpful if you would let me know. Kindly, I do appreciate a gentle notification. So thanks to those of you who let me know of the problems.

There was a missing lesson supplement attachment, and a missing substitute thank-you postcard attachment, both have been fixed. There was a corrupt pdf file that wouldn’t display - the 2008 Music Planner (for full Primary and Music subscribers) which I needed to replace. I am sure I have missed some other things, so let me know if you happen to notice anything.

Also, someone made a request I thought would benefit a lot of people, so I added it - in my 2008 Page-at-a-glance Outline, I make suggestions for songs for September-December, I’ve always done that, since the sharing time guide doesn’t list specific songs. But some people might want to choose their own songs for those months, so I added an alternate version with those months blank in both the Primary KB and the Music page.

I also wanted to point out that I have added some new resources or updated resources for lessons for 2008. There are lists of all the songs associated with the lessons - and for the Primary 4 (Book of Mormon) manual, I have added links to the song words at lds.org. There is a Book of Mormon reading program and some other helps added to the 2008 Lesson Helps for each manual you should check out.

I really appreciated an alternate December Sharing Time Idea sent in that I have added to the KB article I had already written. Your ideas are so valuable, and when you share, it benefits a lot of other people, so never hesitate to send in new material you have prepared, or ideas that have worked for you.

Thanks to everyone who sent in photos for the 2008 Monthly Primary Theme Posters. I was overwhelmed by the response to my request - so many sweet pictures! Since we cannot use all of them for the posters, I want to make a video or presentation with some of them - I will keep you informed about how that is going.

I had a lot of fun creating the 2008 Motivational Chart idea for the Music page. I have repeatedly looked for cute artwork of children in international costumes over the years, and I would always find one here and one there. So I bit the bullet and created a set of international paper dolls for this idea. At first I just had the different color cut outs, and then I did the clothes to go on them, but they looked funny without hair and faces - so I went back and added the hair and faces to the dolls, but now they looked like naked children, so I had to add a little jumper to each one. It was all a lot of fun. I hope you enjoy using this chart.

I was hunting the internet for a fun new idea for a 2008 music choose and review. I can’t even remember how I stumbled on it, but I saw a cootie catcher on some family website - and a rush of childhood memories came to me. I had to follow the instructions to make one after all these years, and I made marks on the paper so when I unfolded it, I could see where the various parts should go - then I designed a colorful SONG CATCHER in Adobe Photoshop, and it is just a lot of fun. There is one with all the 2008 CSMP songs and a blank one you can write your own songs on. And it will also work for a sharing time or lesson game if you want.

I want to make a special thank you to Amber Mock. She has been doing the lesson supplements for the CTR B manual for the past several months. She has earned free Download Depot art collections for helping this way - I just know her work is great and much appreciated by me and those who use the supplements.

Sorry this is so long. Thanks so much for your patronage.

God bless,
Debra

I admit it, I’m a big proponent of online shopping. Maybe the biggest reason is that I live in a fairly small Wyoming town that is hundreds of miles from larger shopping centers. Yes, we do have some local outlets, but our small Sears and Radio Shack franchisees are no match for company stories. And the largest big box retailers to move into town are not really big box. Our Home Depot and Office Depot stores are much smaller than the larger locations I was used to in Colorado or Utah. It’s 130 miles via freeway to the east to Rapid City SD and its Rushmore Mall, or 120 miles via single lane highway to Casper. But with my browser, I can shop anywhere and have it delivered right to my door, which does my severe sciatica no harm.

Consequently I see a lot of shopping carts. Latter-dayVillage.com uses a shopping cart we chose almost five years ago. We chose it then because it was compatible with the site design (colored tabs) we had at the time. That shopping cart software has evolved over time, adding features that have helped us grow our business and our ability to help our customers find products that help them in their church callings and family lives.

However, our shopping cart requirements have outgrown that software’s capability. We want to be able to offer more and more LDS oriented products from a single shopping source (LDV online storefront), which we believe is a real benefit to our users and browse-by customers. We are investigating two shopping cart solutions that will allow us to build an LDS shopping mall, if you will. The first is ZenCart, an open source shopping cart that is a branch of the popular OSCommerce project. The other is Xcart, proprietary software that has almost all of the features we are looking for. Ideally, we’d have a selection made and implement long before the Christmas shopping season, but we have not planned that far ahead. However, I will post information here as this project progresses.

If either of these solutions do not fulfill our requirements, we will expand our search until we find the best fit.

I discovered that a setting in our free clipart gallery was blocking anyone from viewing and thereby downloading images.  I am not sure who or when this happened, but the problem is now fixed. All registered users can now view and download any of the +4300 available clipart images. I apologize for the confusion and inconvenience.