Introduction

Xigla offered a nice upgrade to v6 of their .Net News Manager module, so I took the plunge Friday.    The old v5 wasn't the easiest to deploy in AC7 but I think part of it was just wrapping my head around it.  Xigla uses a lot of ASP and JScript and I'm used to .Net code with user controls.  That seems to have changed somewhat for the v6 which was nice to see.

Installation and Upgrade

Upgrading was actually very simple - Xigla did a great job with the install wizard.  I actually stepped on the upgrade install by running the SQL upgrade script before I ran the module install wizard.  Don't do that or the install wizard won't let you proceed because the wizard will try to run the script for you :)

The upgrade itself ran flawlessly - let me build the correct SQL connection string and stepped me through every part of the process.  Each step included error-checks before proceeding.  I'm going to need to dig a little into their wizard code and draw some lessons - few .Net install scripts are so well designed.

New Features

I've done some playing with it this weekend and there are some really nice improvements.  Any zone can be RSS'd now.  That's a huge thing to add and oh how simple it is.  Once again Xigla has relied on the "script generator" concept where all the user-defined parameters of a zone can be generated into the final line of code you'll need to deploy it.  Once you're happy with the zone appearance, you're just a copy-and-paste away from deploying it anywhere in your site.  Within just a few minutes, I was able to add RSS feed support to multiple zones.  Adding full social bookmarking support to all pages in my site took about 60 seconds.  You really can't ask for easier integration of stuff like this.

Juan has gotten far better at holding the site admins hand during configuration and management of features.  Many parts of the admin side now give you additional text explaining what will happen and how it affects other aspects.  The plug-ins section is very simple to use for adding new functionality and features to your news management.  A complete WYSIWYG editor offers all the needed functionality for article creation.

Custom templates can still be designed and now can be chosen via a graphical screenshot view instead of the dull text dropdown choices.  A nice touch for the less-saavy admins in the world.   New advanced display options for zone headers/footers/dividers can be included with a zone definition.  This gives you alot more control over zone customization without having to dig deep into templates.  I'm going to spend more time focused on templates so I can deploy product information zones to many more categories of products within my http://www.Solunar.com site.

Blogging Features

A new "front end" page has been included that offers a blog-style home page for searching articles complete with tag cloud.  Xigla is definitely going the route of blog look-and-feel with this front end design.  Version 6 also includes public comment posting to news articles.  Had I known they were going this route, I wouldn't have spent so much time getting BlogEngine.Net up and running :)

Conclusion

In summary, it's a great upgrade to an already well-designed product.  I highly recommend the v6 News Manager .Net for anyone wanting dynamic and flexible content.  News Manager .Net gives me everything I need to quickly and easily manage the dozens of articles I have on www.Solunar.com. 

You can purchase Xigla News Manager .Net right here or check out http://www.Xigla.com for great product information and demonstrations. 

Well this weekend has proved very productive.  The job scheduler is working extremely well.  My fears of runaway-spamming a customer thanking them for their order may have been unwarranted

Order shipments auto-trigger a 7-day one-time email to the appropriate customer for follow-up courtesy and marketing purposes.  I made it so the admin can configure the number of days to their preference.  I also added an On/Off for people who don't want this particular functionality.

Stock notifications work extremely well.  Visitors simply need to be told to register with the site and add the out-of-stock items to their wishlist.  Once the system detects a product (or variant!) going from 0 to positive stock level, it fires the scan against the wishlist items for that item.  Any matches auto-generate a one-time email notifying the customer with the admin's choice of email template.  I even made the email template create a link directly to the product referenced - turned out nice.
I've also added an On/Off so this particular feature can be disabled if necessary.

All 3 feed files were easy.  All the parameters are saved when you run them normally through the Able menus.  So as long as you've run them manually at least once, you can now schedule them to generate AND upload.  Tough to test on my site though, takes a while to run and upload but appears to be working thus far.

General functionality has taken shape nicely.  Queue management now allows job deletion and "run now" for any specific job.  Also finished debugging the queue pause feature - now you can pause the entire queue processing if necessary.  Some debugging features were added so job tracing can be done.  It spams the AC7 error log, but very useful in tracking down why something did/didn't fire like it should have.  This too can be turned on/off.

The last feature to add will be my most ambitious - "review solicitation with coupon reward".  What I'm wanting is a way to automatically encourage customer reviews on the products they have purchased.  So the trick will be figuring a way to "land" them to a convenient site page for the given product and ready for review entry.  Once the review is received, the customer is assigned a group and given a coupon code for their next order.  I'll be exploring this Monday.

So far, I've managed to still keep all of this functionality so that only a single Able file is changed.  Everything else is new and separate.  That makes implementation super easy especially for modified sites.

* COMING SOON *

Automation is a key ingredient to a smooth running web store.  With our new Job Scheduler module, you will spend more time running your business.

Here is a preliminary feature list:

• Automatically send a follow-up email X days after an order ships.  Great marketing and customer service opportunity for every customer who buys from your store.
• In-stock notification!  Visitors who register with your site can add out-of-stock items to their wishlist.  When that item comes back in stock, a notification email complete with product link is automatically sent to them using the email template of your choice.
• CPC Marketing Feed files for Google, Yahoo and Shopping.com can now be fully automated.  The module will use your saved feed settings to generate the file AND upload it on a schedule you designate.
• Support for one-time and recurring job schedules.
• Easy job management.  See what jobs are queued with quick links to involved products, users and orders.
• Customization possibilities all over the place.  We'll be able to incorporate your class files into new job types.  This will allow you to automate your own custom programming.  A good example of this is electronic distributor feeds that update stock quantities and pricing.  No more daily downloads!
• Automatic Sitemap.xml generation.  No more manually updating the sitemap.xml when you add/change/delete products in your store catalog.

Currently we are doing internal beta testing.  We should have our first beta release available to the general public by the end of December 2008.  Be sure to subscribe to our New Products feed by clicking the icon on our home page at http://www.AbleMods.com

AbleMods.com is proud to announce our affiliate program with Xigla Software.  These guys have been around for a while and have a fantastic selection of complete .Net modules to add to your website.  Check out all the Xigla components available on our site here:  http://www.ablemods.com/Xigla-Software-C14.aspx

For more information about Xigla Software .Net components, please visit them at http://www.xigla.com/

AbleMods.com is now an authorized affiliate for Web CEO search engine optimization and analysis software.  We've created a whole new store category for SEO tools and Web CEO is our first product listed.  More products will be added as their quality and value prove themselves.  You can find the new SEO Tools category at this link:  http://www.ablemods.com/SEO-Tools-C13.aspx