The question was:

1. Where is the best placement of OPEN and CLOSE loop elements for a repeating table row?
- Inside the TR tags?
- outside TR tags?
2. Where is the best placement of the LOOP controls?
- Whether the controls are placed AUTOMATIC or MANUALLY they display inline at the top of the table, which is confusing to the user.

And the answer was:

ad 1.: Outside the TR tags – the loop should surround the table row

ad 2.: When placing the loop start in a position where now content HTML is allowed (like between the TABLE and TR tags) then you should set the control flag to MANUALLY and insert the little PHP code snippet for the controls (as listed in the Menu Element’s reference) elsewhere – e.g. at the beginning or end of the table cell (right after the TD or before the /TD). You might want to enclose that in a DIV and give that a nowrap via CSS so the buttons are kept in a separate line.

And I added:

Just used this tip and thought posting the code would save someone else time:
<?php $webyep_oCurrentLoop->showEditButtons(); ?>

Original Forum Article is here: LOOP – TABLE; repeat TR, controls placement

Normally my clients use DreamHost for hosting, and they usually just sign up for a regular old shared hosting plan. So far, I haven’t had anyone who has the need for more bandwidth than their regular hosting plans offer.

However I did switch my own website hosting plan over to PS around a year ago as an experiment. I was having enough downtime to bug me, perhaps getting notifications that my site was down from Web-Stat a few times a month. I also knew that how often my website went down was heavily dependent on which server I was on. I think I asked to be moved, which they did, but for some reason, I still was having downtime that bugged me.

So I switched to PS, which did indeed cut down on my downtime. It’s a bit more expensive, but since my business is web design, having a website that’s up as much as possible is important to me.

However, I also have other clients who pretty much never have downtime and they have a regular hosting plan – so I do think that it depends on who your server neighbors are and what they are doing to impact your server’s performance.

So I told my client that if he was experiencing downtime that bugged him, he could give the PS a whirl, but otherwise to stay where he was. The PS does require users to check their usage and to make adjustments, which for most of my website clients is the last thing on their minds. If you’ve moved from standard DreamHost shared hosting to PS, let me know what you think.

You embed or add a pdf document much the same way you add an image:

1. However instead of clicking on the first “Add An Image” icon, you click on the last one “Add Media”. It looks like a little dot with spikes, like a star.

2. Next, just like adding an image, you click on “Select Files” and navigate to your PDF file.

3. Change the title to something obvious like “Click Here to Download Blah”, so that folks will know what will happen when they click on the link.

4. Be sure to click “File URL” under the “Link URL” section.

5. Then click “Insert Into Post”.

Here’s a screen shot of the “Add Media” window with the important parts circled in red:

One benefit of using this mod is that it has the ability to send out emails recursively. This means that if your hosting company has a limit specifying how many emails you can send out per hour, you can set the mod to make sure it doesn’t exceed that limit. For example, if your hosting company has a 100 email per hour limit, you can set this mod to send out 9 emails every 6 minutes (90 per hour). Pretty cool feature.

You should make sure you know the rules of your hosting company so that they don’t blacklist you as a spammer. One common rule is that people can opt in or out of your newsletter, meaning you can’t just send it to whoever you want. Some hosting companies have very complicated rules, and this is one reason why many clients, even those with ECT online stores, will use a monthy fee-based service. Another reason they use these other services, is that often they have really fancy tools that make it easy to format pretty newsletters. This mod is a very basic, kinda do-it-yourself newsletter program. It does not have any bells and whistles, but it is inexpensive.

Once you’ve purchased and installed this mod, you can follow these steps to send out a newsletter to the people who have added themselves to your email list inside your ECT online store.

From the store’s admin page, click on “Home”. At the bottom of that page, you should see a line for “Mailshot” with a link that says “Admin Page”. Click on the link.

You should now be looking at the newsletter admin screen. It’s recommended that you first send your newsletter to yourself before sending it out to everyone. Follow these steps:

1. Put in an appropriate number (“6″ is recommended) in the delay box. This is a very, very, very important step. Your batch size and delay must not exceed the limit set by your hosting company.

2. Put your own email in the To: field
3. Enter Subject:
4. Click “Design View”
5. Create your message.
In the message, you must put in how to unsubscribe.
Here’s the code

http://yourdomain.com/store/cart.php?unsubscribe=##Email##

Replace yourdomain.com with YOUR domain and make sure the path to your online store is correct.

6. How to add an image from a product in your store (optional):
First you will need to know the exact URL of the image. Navigate to the product and then put your mouse over the image you want. Right click and select “View Image” and you should see just the image all alone. The image URL is now displayed in your browser. It might take the form of “https://yourdomain.com/store/prodimages/imagename.jpg”

Copy the URL. Now back in the Newsletter area, put your cursor where you want the image to go, and click on the little “Insert Image” icon that looks like a tree. Paste in the image URL.

7. Click Send email. Don’t worry, this only sends it to you, if you clicked “Test” earlier.

8. You should receive the email. Check it over for errors.

9. Now you’re ready to send out the real thing! Uncheck the “test” box.

10. Put your cursor in the To: field and click the “Insert in the To Field” little icon. It looks like a little envelope with a lightening bolt. It will put this: ##Email## in the To Field.

11. Click “Send”. Do NOT refresh your window or close it – it needs to stay just as it is until it’s finished. It may take several hours.  One of my favorite clients uses this in her store and it takes about 20 hours to send it to her huge database.

If for some reason it stops in the middle, do whatever you can to avoid refreshing the page and starting over, as it will send it to your readers all over again. If you accidentally log out, for example, open another window in your browser and log into your store.  Then in the Mailshot window, click “Pause” and then “Resume” and it will continue where it left off.

A detailed description of the Advanced Newsletter/Mailshot admin area is here:
http://www.ectmodifications.com/installs/mailshot/Mail_Interface2.html

This article is written for clients who may have just had their ECT (Ecommerce Templates) online store upgraded to a new version. One of the wonderful things about using ECT for your online store, is that they are very dedicated to continually improving their product, and come out with updates (newer versions) on a very regular basis. How do you, as an ECT store owner get the most out of your upgrade? Read on.

The ECT online store is a very complex application. There are hundreds of files, some with thousands of lines of code in them. Each time a new version is released, a subset of these files are updated.  Click here to learn how to have ECT notify you of new releases. Once your web developer has updated your store to the latest version, it will be important for you to do a review of what’s changed so that you can make the most out of your improved online store. It’s also a good idea to take this opportunity to review what ECT can offer, because there might be a wonderful feature you store already had that you weren’t aware of.

The first thing I’d recommend, is that you know what version your old store was, and what the version of the new store is. This will help you figure out what’s changed. Your web developer should give you this information. If you log into your store’s admin area, the version number appears at the top of the screen.

Once you know the old and new version numbers, it’s time to scour the ECT website to see what might have changed. Keep in mind that some changes will be bug fixes, while other changes will be new features.

Here’s a list of links inside the ECT website that I recommend visiting to look for what might be different in your new version:

http://www.ecommercetemplates.com/support/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=21
Click on every release that’s beyond your old one up to and including up to the new one.

http://www.ecommercetemplates.com/phphelp/ecommplus/parameters.asp
This is a list of parameters that can be set. Often ECT will highlight the most recent ones.

http://www.ecommercetemplates.com/phphelp/ecommplus/about.asp
This is a features list, review them.

http://www.ecommercetemplates.com/help/admin-help.asp
Look on the right hand side under “Admin help” and click on each one.

The best way to get the most out of your ECT online store, is to really spend time looking around and reading about all of the features. Most clients won’t need to utilize all of them, but there are certainly always new features with each version upgrade, so take the time to learn and discover!

I work on website redesigns, which means I often work in a temporary subdirectory. When I’m ready to launch the website, I move the files from their temporary home, into their permanent home, typically under the root of the website. But if I’ve installed WebYep on a client’s website, moving these files will break things, and since I can’t find this on WebYep’s FAQ page, I’m posting it here in the hopes of helping others.

If you’ve moved your WebYep file or changed the page name, you have broken the link between WebYep and it’s data, and it’s a simple matter to fix this. Follow these steps provided by WebYep Customer Support:

I’ve renamed my page’s file or folder – now all my data is lost!
——————————————————
Whenever you rename a page or move it to another folder, the link between the page and its WebYep data is lost, as WebYep can only identify a page by its URL (filename and path).

But you can re-link the page to its data:

Open the file webyep-system/data/documents – a text file, containing pairs of paths and document IDs. Locate the file in question and correct its file or folder name. Then WebYep will find the document’s data again.

And, if your Web Yep pages were inside a subdirectory, called for example “newsite”. You’ll need to also modify this line at the very top of all your Web Yep pages:

from this

include(“newsite/$webyep_sIncludePath/webyep.php”);

to this

include(“$webyep_sIncludePath/webyep.php”);

Easy solution – but hard to find!

I’ve had a few clients ask me this question, so I’m posting the answer here – because it wasn’t super easy to find on the internet. When you get to the end of a line and hit “return” on your keyboard – what do you want to happen? Sometimes you want a new paragraph. Sometimes you might just want a line break. This short tutorial shows you how to accomplish this. It works for WebYep and WordPress…and probably for many other text editors that might use TinyMCE or FCKEditor or others.

In HTML, there are paragraph tags: <p>I’m a paragraph</p> and there are line breaks <br />.

Paragraph tags make things look like this:

Paragraph 1

Paragraph 2

There’s a line of space between paragraphs.

But line breaks look like this:

Line break 1
Line break 2

There is no line of space.

How do you get what you want when you’re using WebYep or WordPress or some other application that uses a WYSIWYG text editor?

The answer is easy: If you want a new paragraph, simply hit “return“. If you don’t want a new paragraph and just want a line break, hit “shift return“.

Now, when I was researching this solution, I did find many folks who said you could accomplish this by changing a few lines of code in the TinyMCE initiation file. And this did work…but only on Internet Explorer. It didn’t work on Firefox. So I think the simple “shift return” solution is the best one for my clients to use.

UPDATE: For those of you on a Mac, I have found issues with Safari and this hint – but it works on Firefox for Mac, so give that a try if Safari doesn’t behave.

Website hosting, like many other things in life, is not guaranteed to have 100% uptime. There may be times when your website is down, or loading slowly. If you are using DreamHost as your website hosting company, it’s a simple matter to submit a support ticket to find out what’s up and get whatever may be causing the issue resolved. This article assumes you are using DreamHost.com for your website hosting company. (Note, if you’re reading this, you’re NOT on DreamHost’s website, you’re reading my blog. I am a completely different company, Aldebaran Web Design, I am not DreamHost.com)

Update: DreamHost now offers Live Chat!

Follow these steps to notify DreamHost that your website is down or slow:

1. Log In. Log into your DreamHost control panel at: http://www.dreamhost.com. Enter the email address you used when you signed up for hosting and your password under the “Customer Login” section.

2. Click on Support -> Contact Support. This is on the lower left-hand corner of the navigation.

3. Select “Website” and “Next”. Notice there are other things you select here too. The support is not just for notifying them of website down issues, but everything connected with your hosting account.

4. Select your domain and “Next”. If you have an online store, you may see your domain listed twice. One is actually the “http” version and the other is the “https” version. Go ahead and check both.

5. Continue through the process with “Next” until you get to the Pick a Category.

6. Pick a Category and “Next”. Highlight whichever issue fits your situation. Site down or site slow are good choices if your site is not coming up.

7. Submit Support Ticket and “Send Message Now” . Fill out the following info: Name, Email, Subject, Message, Relevant URL, Request Type (be truthful here, if your site is down, the “OMG, People are Dying” is appropriate, but if it’s not this serious, then pick a less dramatic type).

You should expect to get a response from DreamHost anywhere from a few minutes, to a day…depending on what day and time you submitted your support ticket. I’ve had extremely good luck with this system, and literally every single support request that I’ve submitted for myself, or on behalf of my clients, has been resolved in a timely manner.

Phone Support:

DreamHost offers phone support. If you check the box for phone support, they will charge you a monthly fee of $9.95 and they offer a fixed number of calls per month. Note that they call you, not the other way round. Typically I don’t need phone support because their email support is fast and often resolves my issues. But if you want to talk to them on the phone, you need to click this option and fill out the times you want them to call you. If you’ve activated this, remember you’ll need to deactivate it after your issue is resolved, otherwise you’ll continue to be charged the extra monthly fee.

(Note to people who read this blog article and call my business: DreamHost does NOT HAVE A PHONE NUMBER you can call. If you call me demanding a phone number, I can’t give it to you because they don’t have a phone number to call. It doesn’t exist. Follow the steps in this article to contact them online and submit a call-back request. Even if you ask me for the phone number three times, I can’t give it to you because, again, I don’t have it, it doesn’t exist.)

One of the most wonderful things about having your WordPress blog hosted on DreamHost, is the ease of keeping your WordPress blog up-to-date. This is a quick tutorial on how to use the DreamHost one-click-installation feature to keep your blog version current. This article assumes you used the DreamHost one-click-installation to install your WordPress blog using the Advanced Mode.

1. Log into your DreamHost control panel: https://panel.dreamhost.com.

2. Goodies: On the left hand side, click on “Goodies” and then on “One Click Installs”.

3. Select A Method: Click on “Upgrade or remove previously installed software – Advanced mode”.

4. Upgrade: Under the column “Actions” you’ll either see “Already…” meaning you’ve already installed the latest version, or you’ll see “Upgrade….”. Click Upgrade.

5. Finish: DreamHost will upgrade WordPress to the latest released version, and send you an email when it’s completed. There will be a link in the email you need to click on, that will upgrade your blog’s database if needed.

6. Plugins: The upgrade process may deactivate your plugins, so it’s a good idea to log into your WordPress admin area and check to see that all the plugins are activated. Sometimes not all plugins are compatible with all versions of WordPress – so it’s good to check this out. The new version of WordPress (2.5) has a auto plugin updater – which make this process really simple.

When you change from one website designer to another, it’s important to change your FTP password. FTP stands for “File Transfer Protocol”, and its the way web designers upload and download files between their personal computers and your website server. When you change website designers, it’s important to prevent the old designer from accessing your website, whether you parted on good terms or not – better safe than sorry.

Here are the steps:

1. Log into your DreamHost control panel at : https://panel.dreamhost.com.

2. Access the User Accounts section. You can do this either by clicking on “Users” and then “Manage Users” in the left hand navigation. You can also do this by clicking on “Create User Accounts” in the main area.

3. Manage Users. At the top of the window, it should now say “Manage Users” and typically you’ll see just one user listed.

• Username: This is found under the column labeled “user”.
• Password: Click “Edit” and you will see fields for new password, or to let DreamHost pick a password for you. (I recommend letting DreamHost do this for you so the password is nice and secure). Simply enter the new password, and click “Save Changes”.

If you simply want to know what your current FTP password is, you’ll need to send DreamHost a support ticket to turn on this display. Once they activate it, your current FTP password will show up in the “Edit” area under Manage Users.

Remember that to access DreamHost servers via FTP, you don’t  need to put the “ftp://” just the domainname.com will work. (This is at least true for DreamWeaver, not sure for other FTP programs). Also remember that DreamHost stores website files in a subdirectory that’s the domain name: “yourdomainname.com.”  So if your website is mywidgets.com, the folder name is mywidgets.com

Here are step by step instructions for setting up PayPal Website Payments Pro with your ECT (ECommerce Templates) online store. “Pro” allows you to accept credit cards directly in your online store without sending your customers through PayPal – it communicates with PayPal in the background. Note, you MUST have PayPal Website Payments Pro fully activated – if you only have Website Payment Standard, this will not work!

Please follow these steps very carefully. You will need to have two browser windows open at the same time: one to view the admin area of your ECT store, and another to view your PayPal account.

1. Log into your admin area and select “Payment Providers”

2. Select to modify the PayPal Direct settings:

3. You’ll now see a window that looks like the image below.

Fill in how you want this payment method to appear to your customers via the field labeled “Show As”.

Put a checkmark next to “Enabled”.

4. Now, we need to get the rest of the information from your PayPal account. Leave the ECT admin window open and open a new window in your browser and log into your PayPal account.

5. After you’ve logged into your PayPal account, click on “Profile”.

6. Under the left-hand column titled “Account Information”, click on “Request API Credentials”.

7. Select Option 1 and click on 2. Set up PayPal API credentials and permissions.

8. On the right-hand side, click on “Request API Credentials”.

9. On the left-hand side, click on “Request API Signature”. (Do not select “Certificate”).

10. You will now see your API credentials. One at a time copy and paste the following into the corresponding fields in the ECT Admin area for PayPal Direct:

API Username (paste this into field labeled “API Account Name”)
API Password (paste this into field labeled “API Password”)
Signature (paste this into the field labeled “Path to certificate”)

11. In the ECT Admin window, set the API Method to “API Signature”.

12. In the ECT Admin window, set the Transaction Type to “Authorize Capture”.

13. In the ECT Admin window, leave Login Level as “No Restriction”.

14. In the ECT Admin window, click “Submit” and you are now ok to log out of your PayPal account.

15. You’re all set up. You should now do a test purchase to make sure everything’s working right.

Troubleshooting:

First make super duper sure your PayPal account is set up for Website Payments Pro – if it’s not this won’t work!

Next, make sure you follow these steps very, very carefully. This methodology works, I’ve used it on over a dozen online ECT stores – if something’s wrong, and you’re getting an error code, it’s either because your PayPal account is not set up correctly, or you’ve not completed these steps and copied and pasted the wrong information.

Windows XP

• Image Resizer – Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP (direct link to download)

Mac

• A list of image resizing tools for Mac
• EasyCrop for Mac OS X

If you’ve got a page in WebYep that’s got a large amount of content, you may want to help your visitors get quickly to the section they’re interested in. In order to do this, you need to add an “anchor” to the section you want them directed to, and you need to add a “link” to the anchor at the top of the page. This tutorial assumes you have WebYep installed and have a “Rich Text” element already configured on your page.

There are really four steps to this process:
1. Create the upper content that will link to the lower content
2. Create the lower content that you want the upper content to link to.
3. Create the “anchor” just before the lower content.
4. Create the “link” in the upper content.

The following video will make this more clear:

If you want to add on-page anchors, but the upper link and the lower anchor are spread across two elements, then the name of the lower anchor won’t automatically appear in the pull down menu. In this case, you should refer to the image below:

In the video, since the anchor link and the upper link were part of the same WebYep element, the name of the anchor link would appear under the pull down menu for “Anchors”. If the anchor link is NOT within the same element, then you need to manually add it. You do this by typing “#” followed by the name of the anchor in the field marked “Link URL”. In the above example, the anchor link was called “groundcover”, and so in order to have link go to this location, I typed “#groundcover” in the “Link URL” field.

WebYep is a great content management tool, but sometimes clients get unexpected results when they copy and paste content from other applications, like Word. (Other applications like WordPress Blogs behave the same way). If you’re composing in the WebYep window, you most likely won’t have any issues, but if you try to copy and paste content, like text, from other word processing applications, or even from your internet browser window, you might run into issues.

The “Rich Text” Window in Web Yep
Web Yep has two views for entering content. The view that opens first, is the view that won’t show you any HTML. At the very top of the window, it might say “Rich Text”.

The “HTML Source Editor” Window in WebYep
Now, another way to see your content, is to show the HTML. This is done by clicking on the HTML blue button that’s at the end of the second row of icons. This will open up a second window, where you can see the HTML code. At the top of this window it will say “HTML Source Editor”.

The “View Source” Window in your browser
Yet another way to see your content, is to use your browser’s “View Page Source” or “View Source”. This will open a window to show you the HTML code as your browser sees it.

Troubleshooting Unexpected Results
If you copy and paste into the first “Rich Text” window, all may look fine, but there may actually be hidden HTML tags that will mess up your page. It’s always best to either enter content directly (by typing) or from pasting from a Plain Text Editor. (Word is NOT a Plain Text Editor. Plain Text Editors are “WordPad” or “TextEdit” or “NotePad”.) If you are using Word, you should always paste into the “Paste As Plain Text” using the little icon that looks like a yellow clipboard with a T on it. This will strip away any invisible HTML.

Take Home Message:
Don’t paste from Word or any other non Plain Text Editor tool directly into the WebYep window, and this includes copy and pasting from the Internet. If you are going to paste, make sure it’s from a Plain Text Editor like “WordPad”, “NotePad” or “TextEdit”.  If you must, must paste from Word, try out the little icon with the clipboard and the “T” (paste as plain text) on it.

It’s advisable to have your product categories set up BEFORE you start uploading products, since you’ll need to add them to categories that already exist.

If you’d like a “live” tour, please contact me and I’ll be happy to schedule a time to go through this in detail with you. Selecting an online store that suits your small business is critical to your store’s success, and getting first hand experience with the store’s administrative area is vital.

This is a short video tour of the ECT online store from the customer’s perspective. It covers the basic hierarchy of the store, how the stores’s categories and products are organized, and takes you through the entire checkout process.

If you only need to sell a few items from your website or collect different sums of money (like I do on my payment page) you could use a PayPal Buy Now Button to accomplish this. You’ll need to have already set up a PayPal Business/Merchant Account before watching this tutorial video.

After fully setting up your PayPal Business/Merchant Account, you’ll be able to log into your account and create the code that makes PayPal Buy Now Buttons all by yourself, using PayPal’s Buy Now Button creator.

Prepare: Item Names and Prices
Before you do this, you should have an idea of what the items are called, and how much you want to charge for them. This tutorial video doesn’t cover setting up shipping or taxes, which can be done via PayPal also. If you need to collect shipping and/or taxes, you’ll need to set these up separately in advance of creating the Buy Now Button in the appropriate Merchant Services section.

To Encrypt or Not To Encrypt
You’ll also need to know whether or not you want these buttons to be “encrypted”. Encrypting a button means that the code (and therefore item name, price, etc) cannot be changed by anyone, including your web designer. If you have fixed items with fixed prices, you should probably select encryption. However if you want to let customers select what to pay (like on my payment page) you won’t want to select encrypted buttons, because the price will be variable.

Here’s the video of how to set up a basic PayPal Buy Now Button:

Here’s the video. It’s based on the ECT store version 5.5, so if you have a different version, some of the fields or choices might be different. As always, if you have questions, please contact me.