Online Calendar with Upcoming Events

July 28, 2010

If you’re promoting events, courses, workshops, timetables or online seminars etc on your website, then a calendar is a ‘must-have’. There are a lot of WordPress calendar plugins out there but my favourite is the Calendar Plugin by Kieran O’Shea.

The Best Calendar Plugin for WordPress

Not only does it display a great looking calendar on any page/post you can also…

Include a widget to show upcoming events in your sidebar (you specify how many days ahead)
Include a widget to show today’s events in your sidebar (only appears if there are any)
You add event categories and assign a colour to each. Events show on the calendar in the color of their category.
You can easily add repeating events by choosing the number of times an event happens and how often. ie. At 7pm, every Tuesday for 8 weeks
Events can span more than a day and you can have more than one event on a day
You can link an event to a blog post/page or another website.
You can give others login access to add events to the calendar

See the calendar in action – Smart Fitness Timetable [Read more]

Filed Under E-commerce, Website Ideas, WordPress Plugins, Wordpress Tutorials · 1 Comment

Stock Control with WP E-Commerce

June 30, 2009

The WP E-Commerce Plugin allows you to set numbers of stock for any product listed in your shop. The system will then count down each time an order is placed until you are out of stock or you can set the stock to 0 yourself when you have run out.

Once this happens, the Add to Cart button beside that item disappears and is replaced with a message stating “This item has sold out”. As soon as you are ready, you untick the limited stock box and you are ready to go again.

How to Limit Stock Numbers

Sell Personalised Products with WP E-Commerce

March 17, 2009

Although the WordPress E-Commerce plugin is essentially an off-the-shelf shopping cart, you can setup numerous complicated variations including allowing your customers to write a personal message and upload a photo.

Download WP E-Commerce Plugin…

Allow Customers to Upload a Photo

This e-commerce function could save you a lot of extra time if you:

Sell advertising – customers can upload logos and images for their ad
Print photos onto products
Provide expertise based on a visual
Creative agencies – web designers, graphic designers, artists, PR companies

Instructions for adding this functionality to a product in your e-commerce shop.

Login to your WordPress website and click on the E-Commerce button
Click on Products in the submenu.
Select the Product you want to have this functionality.
On the right side of the page, scroll down until you see the Advanced Options section.
Tick the box next to “Users can upload images at checkout.
Click on the Edit button at the bottom of the page to save your changes.

E-Commerce Shop Inside WordPress

February 17, 2009

This amazing plugin turns your wordpress website from a self-managed website and blog into a fully functional (and customisable) online shop. Created by kiwis at Instinct, this has to be the easiest way to sell your products on your own website anywhere.

Download WP E-Commerce Plugin

Once you have activated your plugin, an E-Commerce button appears on your admin menu. From here you can setup products to ship, products to download, registrations for courses, subscriptions and more.

Creating Product Pages

You create groups first to categorise your products, then assign each product to a group and simply click on the little shopping cart icon when you are creating a new web page and select that group for it to appear automatically on the page. See an example below on the new website I have just setup for Weekend Gardener magazine.

Sample Product Page

This is a product page showing all the products in the Quarterly Magazines group. The product listing includes a description (this can be extended), drop-down options (in this case whether it is a gift or not), a photo and the price. When you click on the Add to Cart button, your product appears in the shopping cart to the right of the page. From there you can add more products or checkout.

Other Websites Using WP E-Commerce

Backup Your Website Automatically

January 29, 2009

My new year’s resolution is to make sure I send test emails to myself before publishing posts. I upgraded my newsletter today and sent it to you all on the default template. Sorry, this should look more like me.

Hopefully you are already doing it but if not imagine how you’d feel if you something happened to the server your website lives on and all your website content, carefully written blog posts, comments and subscriber database were all gone.

Make Your 2009 New Year’s Resolution to backup your website on a regular basis.

You can do this manually or use the WordPress Database Backup Plugin which you set to email you backup automatically at regular durations. The beauty of the plugin method (apart from not letting you forget) is that it will also backup: