Wowza, A New Website – Part III

Hi, I’m Sean and this is part three in a series on the new website and talks about Woocommerce, an ecommerce plugin for WordPress.  For most of the life of the SA website, Magento, another shopping cart solution was used, however, it was overkill for the small number of products that are sold here on Salsaddiction.

For our user, the shopping cart provides a lot of useful features:

 

  • First, you can find a complete list of all the classes being offered in one place.
  • It offers a simple but obvious interface, for example, if, while on the registration page, you click on “Add to cart”, it will quietly add the product and let you continue shopping.  A little bit of custom javascript was added to make sure you know when something is in your shopping cart:
  • It also includes reviews and if you look closely at the bottom of the page, a breakcrumb was added in case you want go back to see subcategories of classes, like just Cuban, for example.

 

Woocommerce is one of three top WordPress shopping cart solutions and after a lot of research, was chosen over the others.  Probably the formost reason is because it is under active development and closely mirrors Magento, the environment the previous cart was built on.

It has also proved easy to customize as the Registration page has been built from the bottom up to give you a clear list of all the classes going on at any one time.

Cheers,

Sean.

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Wowza, A New Website – Part II

Hi, I’m Sean, the website guy here at Salsaddiction and this is the second in a series of blogs about the new website.  In the first blog, I talked a bit about WordPress, the carousel and now plan to introduce the sliding drop down.

This is where a lot of interaction with the website will happen and includes:

 

  • (A) Logging into your account or (B) registering
  • (C) Checking your newsletter subscription
  • (D) Sending any of our instructors an email
  • (E) Checking your orders
  • (F) Updating your address
  • (G) Searching the website

 

And here’s a little secret – if you click anywhere on the background of the drop-down it will scroll back up!

The amount of technology that goes into making the drop down is quite amazing, all of it pretty much open source and free:

  • First, jQuery, that awesome javascript library is used everywhere, from sliding the panel down, to the secret click on the background to make it scroll back up, and is used heavily by the code that support the rest of the goodness below.
  • The sliding panel was original created by WebKreations but then converted into a WordPress pluginand then heavily customized to use a bunch of other plugins like:
    • FS Contact Form for the contact form.
    • Woocommerce for the shopping cart solution and customer management (more in a later post)
    • WP Mailman, again, heavily modified for our own use and it takes care of the subscribe and unsubscribes and integrates with the Mailman mailer.  (More in a later blog post)
  • And lastly, Tooltipsy which is used for all the helpful tooltips found around the site.

 

It is pretty crazy how much javascript gets loaded in the background.

Cheers, Sean

Send me an Email

 

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