Software Development

Developing software is an important aspect of the work we do. Many software packages contain what is sometimes known as ‘bloatware’. Bloatware simply means to take a software package and fill it to overflowing with every possible option available. The problem is the package then becomes unusable or to use it takes a very steep learning curve. So to get around this we develop software.

WP Shop

Shortly to be released wpshop is a plugin to the Wordpress CMS. This shop contains many attractive features and a demo will be available to view. There are a wide variety of options to be set including a variety of currencies and taxes. The shop also has a marketing manager.

WP CRM

Now released
WP crm is a plugin to the Wordpress CMS. CRM stands for Customer Resource Manager and in its simplest form is an application that allows you to manage your customers through letters, emails and dating times of contact. It will have a very handy contact form, which when completed by a customer will store the details directly in your database for immediate management use.

Serving the needs of Lostwithiel

Cregy is a web design company serving the needs of Lostwithiel. We are also keen to give back to the community. Hence the reason behind the WP Shop. We will also be developing the concept on further with the creation of crm software for Wordpress. This will give web designers and small businesses a real chance to develop an online business.

Slow Down

And if you get the chance, slow down and watch some paint dry, some snails race and just chill. If you’ve got a wife, daughter or son, go and tell them you love them.

Customer Relationship Management WP Plugin

** Stop Press **

Version 0.2 Beta of the Wordpress CRM Plugin Now available

Here is the next version of the plugin. It is now capable of being populated by both users and administrators from the front-end and back-end. It has snail mail capabilities using .txt files that are available to download or view. The sorting/searching functions have been beefed up.
You can edit any part of the information. You can manually add contact information per record. I have split the creation and management into two main tabs. You can create a user from the one of the plugin pages rather than going over to the users tab. The back-end forms are equipped with a pull down menu of current users to populate that field easily.

Features of the CRM

• Create any type of form/s with any fields needed
• No html form knowlege required - although a little wouldn’t hurt!
• Create and edit forms and fields using AJAX
• Validate form fields using six different parameters
• Form specific success messages
• Dynamic form generation
• Add, edit and delete CRM categories
• Assign one or multiple form results to categories for email purposes
• Manually add form results from previous contacts
• User ID capture during form submission
• Create email or newsletter templates for reuse
• Dynamic personalization of email and newsletters during delivery
• HTML or plain text mail (text alternative is sent along with the HTML version)
• PHP mail() or SMTP server email methods
• Dynamic inline upload for attachments and images
• Javascript image and attachment functions for addition to templates
• Mass mail capabilities
• Sort contacts by category, year, month or day or all options at once!

This plugin has been developed in association with Web Dezine.

A quick preview of the features that will be included in the first rewrite of the plugin:

*shop front highlighting newly added products (sounds familiar?)
*ajax shopping cart
*sidebar category(product) and product menus
*unlimited products
*unlimited categories
*customizable pagination for product listing
*multiple images using “greybox” technology
*template system
*paypal payment gateway utilizing Instant Payment Notification(IPN)
*customizable shipping options
*customizable tax options
*viewable orders in the admin
*integration into the existing WordPress user registration system
*single page checkout (keep your fingers crossed for this one!)

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it. However, WordPress is more than just blogging software. It can also become a full content management system (cms). Through the addition of plugins you can extend Wordpress to include a shop, customer management, contact forms, forums, the list is endless.

A web content management system has features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to web sites.

Web content management systems are often used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing ecommerce, news sites, blogging, photo galleries, sales guides, and marketing brochures. A content management system may support the following features:

• Import and creation of documents and multimedia material
• Identification of all key users and their content management roles
• The ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different content categories or types.
• Management of shop stock and sales information

If you want to get started with WordPress, contact us and we can arrange to set you up with a site.

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it. However, WordPress is more than just blogging software. It can also become a full content management system (cms). Through the addition of plugins you can extend Wordpress to include a shop, customer management, contact forms, forums, the list is endless.

A web content management system has features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to web sites.

Web content management systems are often used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing ecommerce, news sites, blogging, photo galleries, sales guides, and marketing brochures. A content management system may support the following features:

• Import and creation of documents and multimedia material
• Identification of all key users and their content management roles
• The ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different content categories or types.
• Management of shop stock and sales information

If you want to get started with WordPress, contact us and we can arrange to set you up with a site.

Antique Plugin

Plugin Name: Antique Shop
Description: Easily manage and display your Antique Products within your WordPress site.

For developers who are interested we have produced some software for Wordpress. The latest release is wp-products. It is for displaying products with multiple shop owners. However, it can be used for standalone shops as well. Examples of it in use can be found at WEADA (multiple shop use) and Uzella Court Antiques (single use). It doesn’t have any payment integration yet but it is in development. Download WP Products.

We have developed two other products an online shop with paypal integration and also a crm both wordpress plugins. Currently development for these products has been sidelined. Download wp-shop and crm by clicking the links. The software is not complete and you will find some bugs.

Plugin Name: Antique Shop
Description: Easily manage and display your Antique Products within your WordPress site.
Version: 1.0
Author: Glenn Ansley

Tested with WordPress series 2.1.x thru 2.2 May work with versions as old as 1.5

Plugin Description

This plugin is designed to easily manage and display your Products within your WordPress site.

About and Credits:

Antique Shop was created by Glenn Ansley for Cregy Web Development.
It is based on the WP Photo Album plugin created by R.J. Kaplan.
If you need any custom WordPress theme or plugin work, please consider Glenn Ansley.

Plugin Admin Features:

You can find the plugin admin section under Manage then submenu Antique Shop.
Manage and create Product Categories
Move products to and from different product categories
Upload and delete individual products
Adjust thumbnail and full view photos sizes of your products (set default max sizes for each).
See Cornwall Fine Art to see the plugin in action.

Installation and Usage:

1. Download the plugin!
2. Unzip and upload the antique plugin folder to wp-content/plugins/
3. Make sure that the folder wp-content/uploads/ exists and is writable by the server (CHMOD 755)
4. Activate the plugin in WP Admin -> Plugins.
5. Create at least one Product Category in the Product Categories tab
6. In the uploads tab, you can now upload your products

Creating your Products Page

Create a page like you normally would in WordPress. In my example, we’ll give it the page title of “Shopping Cart”. In the Page Content section add the following code:
%%antique%%
Also, make sure under ‘Page Template’ you are using ‘Default Template’ as some WordPress themes have an archives template.
Press the publish button and you’re done. You’ll now have a “Shopping Cart” page.
You can also create a custom page template by dropping the following code into a page:
antique_productcategories()
In order to work properly, this tag needs to be within the WordPress loop. For more information on creating custom page templates, click here.

Adjusting CSS and Template Styling

Antique Shop comes with a default layout and theme. To change the style and layout of the shopping cart, copy them/edit antique_theme.php and theme/antique_style.css to your active theme’s folder, and edit them. Antique Shop uses a system of template tags similar to the WordPress theme system. To view a list of available tags, please read tags.txt

Plugin Support And Feature Request

If you’ve read over this readme carefully and are still having issues, if you’ve discovered a bug, or have a feature request, please contact me via my contact page.

Licence

Antique Products is released under the GNU GPL licence.

Software Development

Developing software is an important aspect of the work we do. Many software packages contain what is sometimes known as ‘bloatware’. Bloatware simply means to take a software package and fill it to overflowing with every possible option available. The problem is the package then becomes unusable or to use it takes a very steep learning curve. So to get around this we develop software.

WP Product

The plugin is a showcase for products. It’s particular use is to allow multiple users to display their products and amend without having to see any other users products.

WP Shop

Shortly to be released wpshop is a plugin to the Wordpress CMS. This shop contains many attractive features and a demo will be available to view. There are a wide variety of options to be set including a variety of currencies and taxes. The shop also has a marketing manager.

WP CRM

Now released
WP crm is a plugin to the Wordpress CMS. CRM stands for Customer Resource Manager and in its simplest form is an application that allows you to manage your customers through letters, emails and dating times of contact. It will have a very handy contact form, which when completed by a customer will store the details directly in your database for immediate management use.

Organise

Organise - order, stock, customer and accounts database is a Mac only product which I use extensively to manage my business. Take a look it is brilliant.

Serving the needs of Lostwithiel

Cregy is a web design company serving the needs of Lostwithiel. We are also keen to give back to the community. Hence the reason behind the WP Shop. We will also be developing the concept on further with the creation of crm software for Wordpress. This will give web designers and small businesses a real chance to develop an online business.

Slow Down

And if you get the chance, slow down and watch some paint dry, some snails race and just chill. If you’ve got a wife, daughter or son, go and tell them you love them.

I recently received an email asking for some Wordpress advice on making posts show up in columns just like on 9antivirus.com and thought I’d share one way of doing this.

I’ve set up a demo blog showing how it looks after the code is implemented.

There are two theme files to be edited: index.php and style.css. I have just edited the default Kubrick theme, so adjust this to suit your own theme.

The basic idea is to add a “switch” so Wordpress knows if you’re looking at a post which will appear in the first or second column.

View How to organize posts into two side-by-side columns in Wordpress

Wordpress Reports - Google Analytics and Feeburner

This is a brilliant plugin. Quite simple really - it tracks your Google Analytics and Feedburner reports without you having to login. They are contained within your Wordpress install. Makes the whole thing so easy to view. Thanks Jo.

From his site:

WordPress by default doesn’t come with any sort of web site reporting tools (and it really shouldn’t). So if you want to know how many people visited your site, which pages they viewed, or where they came from, you’ll need to either rely on your raw web logs or use an online tracking service provided by a third party. There are many different third party web tracking services out there, but the two free and popular third party solutions that I highly recommend are Google Analytics (for web traffic) and Feedburner (for syndicated traffic).

• Abstract

  1. The stock module allows you to manage a database of clients, a database of products (shared by the store front) and send different kinds of messages to your customers. It also allows to make invoices, delivery notes, reminders, and receipts in both html as pdf format.
  2. Currently the email features are not implemented, but the framework is present so the overhead is little to actually add those features.
  3. The stock module interfaces with the product database of the Store Module but does not update the stock amounts.
  4. Additional features can be implemented on request.

• Campaigns

  1. We call promotional actions « campaigns ». Basically you select what customers will receive the mailing, what products will be on that mailing and how the mailing will look. The system will generate pdf documents that contain those mailings. It will put a maximum of 5 clients in one pdf document and will put everything in a zip file if more then one pdf is generated.

• Invoices & Delivery Notes

  1. If a customer replied to the mailing and placed an order, you can prepare an invoice. You can select all the products of the mailing or manually select those products and quantities that are required. A delivery note is also generated and added as a new page in the pdf document.

• Reminders

  1. If your customer did not reply within a suitable time, then you can generate a reminder very easily by clicking the button. The system will generate a document that will remind the customer that an invoice was sent at specified date, and for proper form, will include a duplicate of that invoice.

• Receipts

  1. After payment has been received, you can finalise the transaction and the system will generate a receipt. This receipt will also attach a copy of the invoice, with a big stamp PAID on it.

Getting started

• Configuration of the Stock Module

  1. To configure the stock module, log on as admin, then click the menu, and select Stock -> Settings.
  2. The configuration screen will show you a long list of options and many ’save’ buttons. Those buttons are there for your convenience so that you don’t need to scroll down each time if you only want to change a few things.
  3. You should note, however, that all ’save’ buttons save the entire page, and will also force validation of the entire page.

• Campaign Settings

  1. These settings allow you to tweak the generated pdf document. Note that the page format is A4 and cannot be changed.

PDF Prolog

This text will appear on the first page of the mailing. You may use the following codes:

• %name% Will be changed in the customer’s name
• %firstname% For the customer’s first name

PDF Margin Top

Set the top margin of the mailing. The unit is points (pts)

PDF Margin Bottom

Set the bottom margin of the mailing (points)
WARNING: if you use to big values for top, and bottom margin, then the system will get stuck in an endless loop while trying to make sure that everything is on the pages (header, contents, footer).

PDF Print Header

If you are using stationary, then you are better of replying ‘no’ here so that the system will not print out the store address.

PDF Print Customer Address

You may choose to not print the customer’s address on each page because you are using a template that already prints those details.

Download the application and install via www.yoururl.co.uk/installer.php. The password for the installer should be brown all lower caps but is not working at the moment. The application was built to work with php 4 but I need it to work with php 5.2+ and obviously I need the installer to work. I also need for you to prepare a list of changes you would suggest.

The project has these specific goals:
1. CMS
2. With online shop
3. With stock control
4. With invoice management (for customers and suppliers)
5. With reporting on amounts paid and amounts owing and weekly, monthly, annually totals (spent compared to income)
6. With sales and contact management.

Your role should be to:
1. Make the current version work with php 5.2
2. Suggest style changes to make the application more accessible
3. Cost up and make proposals for the above.

Once completed I intend to open source the project and put up on Sourceforge and build its own website. Links to you will be made available as chief developer and could result in further adoption work.

I need price and timescale for no. 1 initially and then 2 and 3.

Many thanks.