How can I make a webpage open only during certain hours of the day in a given timezone? I'm using Wix, as I am not smart enough to learn any kind of legitimate programming.
I wouldn't think that's possible with something like Wix since they usually have set-in-stone templates. Most website creation sites I know don't allow you to add custom code, and as a matter of fact it might be taken literally as part of their motto:
"Easy to customize. No coding."
Also, just to clarify I signed up for Wix and checked it out...
In short, I don't think that's possible. You'd need something like Javascript/PHP to accomplish that. You wouldn't be able to use HTML blocks or a Flash file (.swf) and those are the closest kinds of customizations (drag and drop blocks) they offer for your site that would get you there.
I would look into hiring someone to design it or buying a program like Rapidweaver (which is what I use) to create a website on a domain you already own.
Please Bear with me as I know It needs research from my side but still want to ask as It would make things a lot easier for me.
Here is what I want to implement.
An online shop where I would configure admin areas for different store owners (vendors). The store owner can belong to same area or different areas. Using the admin area, each store owner can select from pre-configured list of products and define prices for the products in different locations where they have a physical store. The end user can browse the products listing based on his location (area). If multiple vendors belong to same area as customer, the customer will see the product with multiple prices from different vendors. If none of the vendor configured the product of that area, customer will not see the product.
Now the question is, what would be the appropriate option for the above requirements.
Magento, Opencart, nopcommerce or something else?
This is based on my experience. My advice, if you want sth that goes beyond minor tweaks and a couple of new features, stay away from opencart for the time being.
First of all, you will have to pay (not little...) for extensions and mods of often low quality and crappy support. You should also feel lucky to find one that will cover all the features you want and interoperability between extensions is just non-existent. And if you ask for more features chances are you will have to pay again. There are some free extensions but most are a joke. Like, put a link in your footer or disable sth.
So your next option is coding. Opencart is easy to learn if you know basic php and you can start writing code fast. But.. Opencart lacks a solid mechanism for extending it (until v2.0 at least) and after a while it gets both chaotic and frustrating. Also, you will often need to implement stuff that needs some basic backend functionality from opencart but which is either offered in a way that is useless to you or with basic needed features absent. As a result you will find yourself creating your own "library" of functions that will allow you later to focus on your extension. Moreover there is actually no framework on which you can rely. Sure there are some functions and some methods that you can use, but that's it.
Another thing. The opencart community is not one of the easiest to go along with. I don't mean they are bad or that they will bite you, but people there try to make money and do not find it easy to share things with you, be it advice or code. Also, they are competitive. And they do not accept criticism, even suggestions, gladly. And there is a scent of eliticism in some threads that can upset your stomach.
This is how I have experienced opencart. I have to admit that I like opencart itself and I find pleasure in coding for it and even now I am debugging some new extension of mine. But often it reminds me that there is so much lacking and I often spend so much time doing trivial stuff that it makes me wonder if it is worth it.
I do not know about magento. It feels similar to opencart to me.
I would suggest drupal to anyone wanting to implement something custom. There is all a framework and powerful free as in speech extensions and a great truly foss community. There are a couple options there for building an eshop but I would go with the commerce module. It takes a while to get used to all the concepts but you can achieve what you want with just mere clicks. You won't even have to write code if you don't want to.
Again I repeat, avoid opencart if you need sth too custom (as you do). If not, opencart is one of the fastest to deploy.
I need a very lightweight discussion board for joomla 3.0. You should be able to enter a topic, name and message. I want people to be able to comment on the topics too. I do not want a full-fledged forum, just very basic.
The extensions I've found are all too advanced.
I'm thinking of two way to do this. Either by a custom form which submits an article in which comments are allowed, then i show them in a category listing. That would be great, but I'm not sure where to start to make that happen. I have some basic programming skills if needed.
The other way would be with a content creation extension I think? But since the ones I've looked at cost money I cant just test them and see if it works.
Any ideas?
A forum is definitely too heavy for what you need. You might be better off looking at the Blog category on the Joomla Extensions Directory. As you're using Joomla 3.0, you are a little more limited as to which extension you can use, however there are still a few:
Commercial:
EasyBlog
RSBlog
Non-Commerial:
CjBlog
JUBlog
As a second resourt, you could try using Komento
Hope this helps
We've got a non-profit site that's been up for over 10 years; though it's gone through various redesigns, it's showing its age and needs to be revamped -- inside and out. This includes the layout of the pages as well as the internal structure of the site.
As part of rebuilding the site and designing it structure, we'd like to create a site map that's effective and efficient. In other words, we want to be able to follow best practices for building a site. The site will ultimately reside in a Magnolia CMS, and so we need to know what pages are top-level, what are secondary, etc., while also ensuring that we provide the fastest/most intuitive route to our content.
We have literally thousands of static pages that were created using Dreamweaver templates; many of these pages are "dead" -- nothing points to them anymore. The current site was designed and built piecemeal: A hundred different people put in requests for links and other items to appear on the home page, so there's no coherent vision -- more a collection of links anywhere and everywhere, along with various modules that were added over the years anywhere the developer could fit them.
We'd like to start fresh -- leave the past behind, design the site with brand new links and structure to effectively meet our users' needs. This is in an organization where people hate and fear change, rather than embrace it even if it helps them. Any advice or recommendations you have will be much appreciated as we undertake this process. Thanks.
First bit of advice, take your time! Sounds like you have quite a large project ahead of you, and it definitely takes a lot of time to do it right. You'll need to do some research to find out what exactly your users are looking for from your site, and how you will provide it to them. Analyze your current traffic to see what is most popular, and reach out to some of your customers to see what they feel is missing.
You'll need to organize everything your site will have into a small set of sections, which will be your main areas of the site. Then you can break those down further from there. You don't want to go too deep so everything is accessible within a few clicks. But you don't want to have 20 links on your homepage either. Get some input from users outside your business to tell you what is important to them and what should be most accessible. It's hard sometimes to view your company from the outside looking in. You may be well off hiring a consultant to at least help you get started to give you a fresh perspective.
And finally, I will say you won't please everybody so don't even try. Get input from the various departments in your company that need a web presence, but then once you decide how to lay it out, that's it, don't go back to them to make sure it's ok. I know this isn't always possible depending who has how much pull in the company, but if you can get away with it, it will save you many headaches in the long run. Sorry to ramble on, I recently went through a similar situation at my current company and it is definitely a huge undertaking. Good luck!
Semantically-speaking, it should be built using nested lists:
<ul>
<li>Level One
<ul>
<li>Level Two</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Level One
Level Two
Magnolia will create google sitemaps for you
http://www.magnolia-cms.com/home/magnolia-cms/evaluation/features.html
Go to the second instance of sitemap on the page
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I want to find an ecommerce solution for my little shop. My friend tells me that Prestashop is very easy to use and develop modules for, but some say Magento is better. Can anybody tell me which is better for developing modules and why?
Having looked under the covers of both of these beasts I can't say that I actually like either of them as they're both rather ugly when you pop the bonnet and something like OpenCart is actually a much nice and easier to work with solution. However, from a feature perspective OpenCart is nowhere near either Magento or PrestaShop and unlike PrestaShop it doesn't have a team of developers behind it. However having said that it is much easier to understand and modify for anyone with a basic knowledge of OO PHP. It is much better structured. PrestaShop is actually a bit ugly under the covers and CSCart (which is an open source, but not free alternative) may also be a viable solution as it only costs like $300 so not that much. I'd have to say I'd personally go for either PrestaShop or CSCart as they do have a lot more features than OpenCart and at the same time also don't cost anywhere near Magento to setup and run. Magento is an absolute nightmare if you're looking to change anything even if you really know what you're doing... Too many layers.
Another cart I would suggest to anyone who isn't fussed about technology is nopCommerce. It's a ASP.NET based shopping cart and it's very well architected and full of features. It is also very easy to modify for anyone with ASP.NET experience.
I fully agree with the opinion that MAGENTO is to "heavy" and consumes too much CPU and memory. If you have your own dedicated server you may try MAGENTO.
But if you can afford shared hosting only use lightweight PRESTASHOP. Much shoppers do not need complicated functionalities provided by MAGENTO and therefore don't like it. More doesn't always mean better - sometimes simpler means better.
Moreover there is large set of PRESTASHOP extensions available free and commercial ones. so every shop owner may choose what he needs and wants. Every potential market gap is filled immediately e.g. if somebody noticed there is no fast checkout option in the guest mode buying. This kind of extension appears immediately on the market.
I haven't used Prestashop but I have recently deployed a Magento store. As others have said, I wouldn't suggest it for small, simple stores. Also, if you are on an economy server, you're likely to have sluggish page loads.
The good news is that (after a steep learning curve), it's incredibly flexible and powerful. I personally think the templating system is great.
Magento is S L O W. It has a very specific list of server requirements that have to be met, and even then it may not work 100%.
Also, using Magento on a shared hosting environment can be VERY insecure as Magento likes to have things writable on the file system. If your hosting company does not have iron clad security another user on that system can make changes in those writeable areas.
As far as code quality, I'd say it's pretty good. It's also more complicated than it needs to be. They completely ignored the K.I.S.S. principle (Keep It Simple, Silly).
To sum up, Magento is good if you are interested in an expensive server and complex development. If you want straight forward, it's not for you.
Magento is more polished, but also a beast to modify, in my experience. After using Magento for a few shops, we switched to Prestashop and are much happier. It took a bit more customization up front (French-based development left some quirks in the address forms, for example), but it is much, much simpler to wrap your brain around and to develop custom modules.
I am not a programmer, so I am confined to noob-like needs. At first I tried Magento, and found it to be difficult. It also "crashed" (not sure what word to use) a couple times, the last time beyond something I could figure out. I began to wonder if the entire thing was created just to get me to get in so deep that I'd need pro support to fix it when in a pinch.
So as I searched the internet looking for a decent alternative, I stumbled upon PrestaShop. I gave it a shot, since my Magento site was still RIP. Found it to be much easier to use, and I had a shop up and running (STILL up and running) in a day.
So I'm not sure what it all means, but hands down I liked PrestaShop better. I did like the options to create multiple shopping experiences within Magento, but I figure I can just use multiple PrestaShop installs to accomplish the same thing. Either way I'd have to customize 'em, anyway.
So that's my two cents, for what it's worth. Hope it helps someone.
Magento is a very complex solution for large shops that require good hardware base to handle more than 500 products. Although even though there is a lot of resources to start with Magento.
I have personally found out that building themes is really easy once you find your way around few annoying things like XML layout dependencies (there is barely anything documented on XML, which is the base for making good themes for Magento) and objects in PHP (some functions and data is not accessible from certain parts of the template just because).
I'm very comfortable with working and writing my own apps in OO PHP but stuff that Magento pulls off sometimes is really annoying and also directory structure and the way themes are being handled is awkward...
On the other hand, PrestaShop is fast (after few tweaks), but still requires some work in the back-end. I am developing a lot of back-end modules to help people get the most out of this system as it's worth it. Plus the community is growing and developers are fixing everything they can.
One more thing: writing both, back-end and front-end modules for Prestashop is incredibly easy, plus using SMARTY for templates is a good choice.
Edit: Magento is very easy to break during or after deployment (especially between localhost and a hosted space) and maintenance in SVN might be a pain for inexperienced devs.
I tried both, first I use magento, which is powerful but also very require a good php setting for the server.
prestashop is more easy to use, if you are small store you may choose prestashop.
Magento is a very complete solution in order to have a big shop, with more than 500 products.
But, for newbies, it's very difficult to load and modify it.
Today, I have a website on magento with more than 20,000 products, and we still have issues.
It very difficult to configure it, and without a nice optimization, you will have very slowly website.
I advise you less than 300 products to use prestashop.
Like you, i am NOT a programmer but a store owner. So i hope my view point helps you, i have used both PrestaShop and Magento.
Magento i didn't like, boat ware!
Prestashop is good, pretty templates but the good modules are not free and to get an online shop with the features you need can end up costing 1000s
I also use Zen Cart, while it has the worlds ugliest standard template, if your CSS knowledge is average you can make it look pretty much like anything you want. It has more features built in than the Magento £11k pa has and all modules on the site are free and also a better community too as the forums are open source focused.
Hope it helps.
PrestaShop is your best bet. The only problem with PrestaShop is that uses smarty template engine and rather than write clean PHP without the need of loops etc, in smarty they have made it a very great deal of effort for the average person to theme.
I will stand behind PrestaShop 100 percent if they get rid of smarty and implement a simpler templating system such as a main html file with includes that you can just embed PHP template tags into.
If it is for a 'little' shop don't bother using magento.
It's now getting to the point that PrestaShop has a lot more features than the free version of Magento, so I would if you want to spend thousands a year to get the best, get Magento. If you want a great community which releases all sorts of modules and themes for free (along with a bunch of great paid ones), PrestaShop is the way to go.
One big thing that I want to do is give people vouchers/coupons, so if I meet them or sell them something, they can use the coupon on another purchase. It's built into PrestaShop, but with Magento you need to give them a lot of money in order to use that feature. Albeit you get a lot of features for a lot of money, but for a lot of small businesses, it is a lot cheaper to use PrestaShop and pay professionals to work on it and pay for some modules than shell out a lot of money every single year to Magento.
Oh yeah, when you pay for Magento, you are only getting a one-year license. I was really into Magento until I found this out, now I don't give a damn about the company or it's faux open-source project that they have swept underneath the carpet.
I used Prestashop, it is really good one. As an programmer can customize and make required changes in it. Also Prestashop having good modules which are available for free.