68 Classifieds Blog

Site Showcase - Horse Options

HorseOptions.com is a comprehensive horse classifieds website for anything and everything horse related. The site is well organized, yet very detailed, complete with advanced, sortable search options for ALL listed ads.

Text ads are always FREE. Be sure to check out our monthly discounts on photo advertising packages. Ads can be for horses for sale or lease, equine services (such as boarding, farriers, vets, lessons, chiropractors, massage, hauling, rescue, stud services, tack shops, etc.), farm/ranch supplies and equipment, real estate, riding apparel, trailers and want ads….basically anything and everything horse related.

Whether you’re looking to buy or sell or are a horse enthusiast, be sure to visit www.HorseOptions.com and add us as a favorite horse site.

HorseOptions.com - Horse classifieds…with options!

US Zip Code Search v2.2 Released

We have found a few bugs in the US zip code search module and have made a new release to fix these.

The new module is now updated to fully work with v4.1 and also adds in a few new features.

1. Now the zip code is stored in the listing table instead of the user table. This gives listings the ability to have a different zip code than the user.

2. It ads a new zip code field when adding and modifying the listings.

These new features are only available if you are running 68 Classifieds v4.1.

v4.1.0 is now released

V4.1.0 is now released and is available from our customers section. This release has a lot of new features and here are some of the highlights:

User Notes

The user notes system had a big overhaul and now you can make notes public or private. Public notes will show when a user logins and visits their user index page. Private notes only appear in the administration. Another nice feature is to make them important or not. Important notes appear at the top of the page in administration. When you are viewing the user, order, or listing.

Custom Administration Folder

Another new feature is the ability to rename the administration folder to something else. In order to do this you would have to manually edit the admin/includes/params.php file but we have a post outlining how it is done here.

Template Settings

Now from the administration you can upload your site logo and change the site title and description. We had a lot of people having trouble uploading a logo and this new page should make this a whole lot easier.

Listed below are some of the other big changes.

• User Notes
• Add jQuery Thickbox
• Ability to rename the administration folder
• Added paging to userbrowselistings page. For folks with lots of listings.
• Added version comparison so if your version is out of date you are warned.
• Added new Template Settings page.
• Added check for initial install to display a link to a quick start guide.
• Added ability to search by date extra field.
• Added usergroups and active/inactive for products.
• Reworked forgot password routine. Now it sends an email to confirm the change and another with the new pass once they have confirmed.
• Changed module system. You will need to upgrade all your modules if you are upgrading from any prior version. Also you will need to check with the module vendor to make sure it is compatible with v4.1
• Full Change Log

Upgrading:

If you are upgrading please follow our Upgrading instructions.

If you are upgrading from v4.0 we have added a new page to outline most of the changes you will have to make:
Upgrading From 68 Classifieds v4.0

You will also need to upgrade all your modules if you are upgrading from any prior version. Also you will need to check with the module vendor to make sure the module is compatible with v4.1

Almost all files have been edited in some form or fashion. So you will need to replace all files.

In the templates we have added jQuery, new forms, and a new logo feature.

Notes:

If you find any bugs please post them to our bug tracker here:
68 Classifieds Issue Tracker

The download is available in our customers area:
68 Classifieds Customers Area

Included in the download is a changelog between v4.1.0 RC4 and this release.

Are you ready? V4.1 preview

68 Classifieds V4.1 is coming soon and to get ready for the release Mike-N-Tosh has written a blog post outlining some of the great new features that are going to be included. Check out his review here 68 Classifieds v4.1 Review.

US Zip Code Search v2.0 Released

We have just released a new upgrade for the US Zip code search module. It is now available in your customer area if you have purchased it before. If you haven’t purchased it you can buy it here.

What’s New

This release is now compatible with 68 Classifieds v4.1.x and includes an updated zip code table. It includes a whole lot more zip codes than the previous release.

Installation and Upgrading

To install the module just download it and upload it to your modules directory. Next visit administration and activate it.

To upgrade you will need to remove your original zip code module. You can do this from administration and then deactivate it, and finally delete it. Next upload the new files to your modules folder and then visit administration and activate it.

If you run into any problems we have a page in our documentation that outlines most issues.

5 Apps to speed up your website

While doing the redesign for 68 Classifieds site I found lots of useful tools that helped me speed up the site. Some of these tools are so great I felt the need to share them.

PHP Speedy

PHP Speedy is a script that you can install on your web server to automatically speed up the download time of your web pages. PHP Speedy automatically joins together all the appropriate files and compressed them, greatly reducing the load time of the page. This does take a little work to get it setup properly but I seen a big improvement.
» Visit PHP Speedy

Smush It

Image optimization is an art that not many people master. There are many good image editing tools that allow us to get the best visual result for a certain file size but “under the hood” a lot more optimization can be done.

Smushit.com is a service that goes beyond the limitations of Photoshop, Fireworks & Co. It uses image format specific non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images - without changing their look or visual quality. You’ll get a report of how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images and all the changed images as a single zip for download.

Saving bytes has never been so easy - you point us in the right direction, and we’ll do the rest for you. A ZIP archive with optimized images will be generated for you.
» Visit Smush It

Clean CSS

This is a css compression tool that will take a style sheet and compress it into an almost unreadable compressed form. If you do use this always keep an uncompressed version of the file in case you want to make changes later.
» Visit Clean CSS

YSlow

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool.
» Visit YSlow

Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. This extension plus the web developer tool bar are two that I use on a daily bases..
» Visit Firebug