nopCommerce Tips: Creating a Virtual Gift Card

Last Updated on Tuesday, 18 December 2012 12:00 Written by Carole Bennett Tuesday, 18 December 2012 12:00

Gift cards are a huge part of today’s retail world; one thing that it does for your e-commerce presence is give you “cash before the sale”, which in turn, can allow you to provide a better range of merchandise for your customers. nopCommerce supports the ability to generate unique gift cards, and activate them.

Log into your nopCommerce site as an admin, and navigate to the administration section of the site. Under “Sales”, select “Gift Cards”. Click “Add New”, and then fill out the fields. If you’re testing this for the first time, unclick “Is gift card activated”. Once all other fields are filled out, click “Save and Continue Edit”; you’ll now see a “Creation Date”, and “Is recipient notified”, which by default is false. You’ll also see a button that’s labeled “Notify recipient”; once you click that, nopCommerce will generate an e-mail to the recipient of the gift card.

How To Create a Contact Us Menu Item in Joomla 2.5

Last Updated on Thursday, 13 December 2012 12:00 Written by Milton Parada Thursday, 13 December 2012 12:00

This tutorial is about how to create a contact form in Joomla so that users can send messages from the form.

1. In the Control Panel, click on the “Components -> Contacts -> Contacts”:
2. In “Contact Manager: Contacts” , click in categories:

Creating PDF (or any other file type) from SQL Reporting Services using .WSDL (VS2012) Part 2

Last Updated on Tuesday, 11 December 2012 08:53 Written by David Bauernschmidt Tuesday, 11 December 2012 12:00

If you have been following along in Part 1 you know that by now you will have a web service ready to be consumed in your project. Let’s continue on with this example and create a report that is hosted at Arvixe. (Concepts apply to most vendors). One thing to keep in mind with Arvixe this that testing your code report link is different than when you deploy it. I will get to that in a minute but let’s continue on.

Right click on your project and select ..”Add New Item” (figure 1)

Figure 1

Select Generic Handler and name the file something like ….”SSRS.ashx

mojoPortal Tips: Creating a Custom Skin, Part 2

Last Updated on Tuesday, 20 November 2012 12:09 Written by Carole Bennett Tuesday, 20 November 2012 12:00

In Part 1, we covered the basic elements involved in designing a modern website; today, we’ll begin examining methods of creating a mojoPortal skin.

There are two basic ways to begin a custom skin for mojoPortal; modify an existing skin, or create one from scratch. Even with the “from scratch” route, there’s the school of thought to “hand-code everything”, or use an automation tool to handle some of the more tedious aspects of design. If you’re faster at writing your own .css code from the ground up, by all means, do so – for me personally, that’s far too time-consuming, so I use an automation workflow to address some of the more tedious aspects of this phase.

mojoPortal Tips: Creating a Custom Skin, Part 1

Last Updated on Sunday, 11 November 2012 04:25 Written by Carole Bennett Friday, 16 November 2012 12:00

Creating a mojoPortal skin is relatively easy, as CMS systems go. However, it’s not just pick colors, click a button, and go. There are various considerations to keep in mind, and steps to go through in order to achieve maximum results. Today in Part 1, we’ll cover the foundation elements for creating your mojoPortal skin.

If you’re an experienced designer, you’re probably already familiar with the 960 grid system; the good news is that you can still use it in designs for mojoPortal skins, so don’t try to constrain yourself to the 3-column layout that is the default for mojoPortal; we’ll cover how to implement layout variations in later parts of this series.