As a developer, though, i’ve always hated projects involving the setup of an e-commerce store mainly because of the complexity of available web applications. This is especially true when it comes to customize themes, logics and behaviors of the store.

In my experience i’ve worked on Virtuemart, OsCommerce and ZenCart finding them too complex and large for my client’s needs.

On this matter i’ve found really enlightening the Wordpress 2.9 e-Commerce guide by Brian Bondani, which presents the WP e-Commerce plugin for Wordpress which is both a great solution for small e-stores owners and an affordable solution for expert and novice developers.

The guide isn’t intended just for developers, but also for persons with basic computer skills willing to setup their online store. Technical knowledge of Wordpress, CSS and PHP will allow you to further customize the installation, theme and store’s styles even if a basic section of the guide explains the basics of customization for novice developers too.

Contents

The most prominent aspect of the guide is that it covers not just the configuration and customization of the plugin, but even the installation and configuration of Wordpress with a detailed step by step tutorial on compatible themes and options to convert the blog engine into a dedicated e-store system.

On the plugin side, you’ll be impressed of the different options and configurations available to customize and refine your store. Reading the guide you’ll be able to easily setup both digital and physical items, with flexible shipping rates and discounts.

Starting from a vanilla installation the author guides you on a detailed step by step tutorial on the various configuration’s options, like international shipping rates and product variations (different sizes, colors) using a clear language and many screenshots of the actual plugin interface.
This ends up in a no-surprises situation when you’ll be hands-on the plugin.

For more advanced users there’s also a chapter which covers the customization of themes, with technical but clear examples of CSS and PHP code.

What’s extremely useful about the guide is that many chapters move beyond technical explanations of Wordpress and WP e-Commerce plugin, focusing on how to market your store to increase your income.

By covering tools as Google AdSense, the guide serves also as a basic web-marketing reference introducing the most relevant aspects of e-commerce’s promotion which is often an overlooked aspect both by clients and developers.

Whether you are building your own store or you are a developer with non-professional skill on web marketing you’d find these chapters really useful even for other kind of projects.

Another good section of the book covers the most important online payment gateways like PayPal and Google Checkout guiding the developer throughout each step needed to correctly setup and manage these novice-unfriendly systems.

Even if many of these systems are well integrated in the WP e-Commerce plugin, requiring little effort for activation, i’ve found it a good choice to explain their functionality and every step to manage customers’ payments since that’s the most painful task for every online store owner.

The last chapters of the book are devoted to an insight of the plugin’s commercial addon and to alternative plugins. These are usually less powerful systems than WP e-Commerce but may be useful if you just need to sell some simple items.

Last Words

Before reading this guide i would have never thought to Wordpress as an e-Commerce CMS, but the in depth explanation of WP e-Commerce by Brian Bondani showed me how simple and powerful is this platform for every-day stores compared to big and mind-expensive systems like ZenCart.

This makes the overall feeling about this guide as of the discover of a new world, making it a good reading not just for Wordpress developers, but also for others looking for good and affordable ways to build and promote their online stores without having to deal with unneeded complexity.

You may tak check out the guide page at Packt Publishing, as well as the Table of Contents. Then you may also take a closer look at contents by reading the sample chapter.

The guide i’m introducing here, and which i’m currently reading, is Wordpress 2.9 e-Commerce and explores the Wordpress plugin WP e-Commerce which is for sure a good choice for a small shopping website.

The book is intended for Wordpress developers, but i think it’d be a good reading for every developer which is sick of too complex and messed up solutions as Magento and Virtuemart.

If you’d like to know something more on the book, just stay tuned!

Even if a solid knowledge of JavaScript should be a must, a good way to avoid bad practices and headaches is by using a JavaScript library, which will make coding easier and much more beginner friendly.

MooTools is such a library, and offers a lot of methods and patterns for better JavaScript coding.

Introducing MooTools 1.2 Beginner’s Guide

Even if I’m not a MooTools novice, i had the chance to read MooTools 1.2 Beginners Guide by Jacob Gube and Garrick Cheung (Packt Publishing), which turned out to be also an interesting reading to better understand all of the improvements made by MooTools from the 1.11 version.

From this perspective the book, which aims primarily to beginner MooTools developers, may also be a good reference for users of previous versions willing to update their scripts.

That said, the book doesn’t cover all of the methods offered by the library, but is intended by the authors as a step by step introduction to MooTools development and gives a solid knowledge of its undergoing philosophy.

The approach is strongly examples-oriented to better and clearly show how the library works and to give some starting point for developers willing to practice hands-on.

The Good Parts

The guide’s table of contents spans from the core $ function to the plugin’s usage and factoring, introducing the most relevant and commonly used part of the library. Writing is fluent and familiar keeping it easy while accurate.

First of all, I really appreciated the well done part about utility functions which are, in my opinion, one of the library’s key features since they make possible to save lot of repetitive coding: functions like $type, $each or the Browser object grant a cross-browser and risk free development with little effort.

The other aspect which is deeply covered is the Class construction pattern.
By using this pattern every novice developer is able to code JavaScript classes with syntax similar to other programming languages like PHP, thus filling the lack of real classes in JavaScript and avoiding global object pollution.

Also well documented is the animation chapter about FX classes, which still are the best choice for performance and browser rendering (FX has been the first part of the original library).

A full chapter at the end of the book is dedicated to plug-in development, featuring not only an explanation on how write a plug-in, but also teaching how to design a plug-in starting from existing scripts and reusability requirements.
This part has been an unexpected surprise, since few guides intended for technical audience teach code’s design process with design sheets and documentation guidelines.

Beyond Examples

As of its introduction, the guide is intended as a step by step process in learning the bases in MooTools development; anyway little effort is spent in explaining why using MooTools is not just a smarter way of coding, but also and above all a better approach to JavaScript.

Learning common scripting mistakes is the way to understand that using a library is not just cool and that libraries aren’t vital, but still an affordable toolkit for JS scripting.

Talking about library presentation, it’d be a good idea to explain more in details some DOM manipulation methods, since many developers are used to circumvent (often too roughly) document and CSS limits by cutting and remixing elements with JavaScript.
MooTools has a big list of such methods which often are a better choice than native JS both for performance and browsers’ support.

Conclusions

As a whole, MooTools 1.2 Beginners Guide gives a clear and solid basic knowledge of how the library works, making it possible for a novice developer to dive into the official documentation without feeling lost.

Even if some background thoughts about its development patterns would be appreciated, I’d definitely suggest the book to MooTools beginners (but not to JavaScript beginners for the mentioned reason).
Moreover it’s a quick reference for commonly used methods and classes, therefore a book to keep on your desk.

You may check the publisher website to get the complete table of contents and read a sample chapter or just jump to the book main page here.

The presentation is mainly focused on User Interface best practices to keep interaction clear and direct, and on patterns to think and design interfaces from a user/ customer perspective.

Enjoy it:

Many thank to Postion Absolute for sharing the link.

Changes in this new version are:

1. Updated MooTools Core to 1.2.2 1.2.3 and MooTools More to 1.2.2.2 1.2.3.1
   
2. Added .getValue() to the compatibility file
3. Added .getSelected() to the compatibility file to fix some issues under IE
4. Added Json support to the compatibility file
5. Added window.onDomReady shortcut for DOM ready event
6. Changed MY_Behavior::mootoolsFix(); to handle new MooTools files 
7. Changed MY_Behavior::mootoolsFix(); to correctly render old tooltips format title::text for items with hasTip class (anyway, remember that classes to style the tooltip have changed!)
8. Added a validate.js replacement to fix an issue with changed namespaces. ( this replacement is no more needed)
   

The source code is released in the form of patch: unzip it and upload files in your Joomla root, eventually overwriting files. MooTools library is uncompressed to allow for a quicker debug. Anyway you may minify it with your tool of choice.

Here is the code: Mootools 1.11 to 1.2.2 (71.68 kB)

Update (again): Sometimes i can’t get if MooTools team is too vital or library milestones are not well defined… anyway here is an update to use latest MooTools 1.2.3. No major changes have been made to the fix library, anyway keep reporting compatibility issues. Here is the zipped  file: Mootools 1.11 to 1.2.3 for Joomla 1.5 (72.06 kB)

Update (09/20/09): New version available. Corrected some bugs in the compatibility file and added a loop check to replace MooTools 1.11 when called from a component as custom script. Now the validation core script doesn’t need to be replaced. Get source here (carries the original validate.js as in Joomla 1.5.14:  MooTools 1.11 to 1.2.x (72.88 kB)

Recently, after a version upgrade, i’ve noticed that AWStats main window is not working on my Plesk-based server (version 8.3), returning a 404 Not Found Error.  My first attempt was to login to the the domain settings in Plesk Control Panel and check if Perl support checkbox was tagged.

That said, i’ve digged and solved the problem by logging to the server as root and changing the configuration file located in /etc/psa/psa.conf from

# AWStats
AWSTATS_ETC_D /etc/awstats
AWSTATS_BIN_D /var/www/cgi-bin/awstats
AWSTATS_TOOLS_D /usr/share/awstats
AWSTATS_DOC_D /var/www/html/awstats

to

# AWStats
AWSTATS_ETC_D /etc/awstats
AWSTATS_BIN_D /var/www/awstats
AWSTATS_TOOLS_D /usr/bin
AWSTATS_DOC_D /var/www/html/awstats

Then, i restarted the service by issuing /etc/init.d/psa restart (it’ll restart many services like MySQL and Qmail, so take care).

To check that everything works fine you can issue this command to manually check logs:

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/statistics --calculate-one --domain-name=yourdomain.com

Reference.

In this rambling i want to share some cool websites where i always find inspirations or just a tune to make coding much more smooth and relaxing.

1. Digitally Imported Online Radio: check out trance and chillout channels, and never miss A State of Trance on thursday
2. Essential Mix: since 1993 this radio show features the best electronic DJs and artists all around the world.
3. Deezer: a great online and on-demand radio featuring a lot on genres and some cool french singers, just to grab something different.
4. Jamendo: You can listen albums, random playlists or donwload freely some good independent music from all around the world. Born as a french project, now it’s available in lots of languages and features a great community 2. Check out the electronic’s album list to listen to something you’ll never get in shops.

As last click, here is a great piece by Anders Trentemoller’s first album: The Last Resort titled Miss You. Enjoy it…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DUCKGyojpE

The aim of the survey is to investigate the state of web related jobs on economic revenue, satisfaction and opportunities, to get a clear look on trends in the field.

Last  year nearly 33.000 users took the survey giving a great number of data to work with.

Take a look at 2007 results or go and take the 2008 survey.