68 Classifieds Blog

Customer Area Changes

This weekend I spent some time changing our customers area to hopefully better serve you. We have used a separate ticket system for the past few years now and we really like the system but we seem to always get a few customers that do not receive our replies to their tickets. I imagine this is because the email reply is going to their spam box or just not being delivered.

So now when you login to the customer area it will show you a list of all open tickets and a new “My Tickets” link to show past tickets you have submitted. The goal with this is #1 to make it easier to read and reply to your tickets, and #2 to have a history that you can easily scan through and find old tickets.

Another new change is on the first page after logging is a list of all your downloads. This should help you quickly locate the product you are trying to download and prevent you have to make numerous clicks to get to them.

As always if you can think of something to make the customer area more user friendly please do not hesitate to let us know.

Welcome to the brand new 68 Classifieds

Our main site here has been way over due for a face lift and we are now proud to unveil our new design. The site you see now is the work of a lot of sleepless nights and the help from some great friends and customers. The design work was done by James Paden from Xemion.com. If you haven’t visited his site before then I recommend visiting and subscribing to his blog. He has lots of great articles and not to mention the web designer directory is built upon 68 Classifieds. James is a great guy and has more design and business knowledge than anyone I have ever had the pleasure of working with.

Some changes we have made for the new site is we are featured third party templates and modifications on our home page. These are pulled from our ClassifiedMods.com site and only the ones with the highest ratings are shown. So if you use any third party modification please go rate it. This will not only help new customers find the best things available but also show your appreciation to the developer behind it.

We have also changed our customer section just a little to hopefully make it easier for you to get your downloads. Now on the customer dashboard it lists all your products ordered with a link to download it. This way you will no longer have to go through three steps just to download or change the domain associated with your license. We have additional plans for this portion of our site but didn’t have time to fully integrate them all. Look for those in the coming months.

The forums are also integrated with the new design instead of the way it was before with a totally different layout. I think this makes the site more uniform no matter where you are at or what you are looking for.

Behind The Scenes

The layout portion of the new site was built using the 960 css grid framework and I must say I really like using that framework. It is one that just made sense to me and pretty easy to integrate.

The main site, shopping cart, and customer area is built using the CodeIgniter PHP framework. Actually it has been running that for a while now. This blog is using WordPress and shares the same css style sheet as the main portion.

In Closing

I want to take this opportunity to thank you (our customers) for making us what we are today and with out we wouldn’t be doing what we love. I think it is great to be able to use people that use your product whenever possible and this goes to show that it can be done.

As with any new design it is still a work in progress and if you happen to notice anything out of the ordinary or something that just doesn’t look pleasing please let us know. Also we would love to hear your comments on the new site.

And the winners are…

Now that Thanksgiving is over it is time to get back to work and announce the winners of our Thanksgiving Competition.

I was actually a little surprised at the number of comments (0nly 5) so I decided to make everyone that entered a winner. I have already emailed everyone and will get the prizes out tomorrow.

Thanks again and congratulations to the winners!

Happy Thanksgiving - Win a FREE Template

In the USA tomorrow is Thanksgiving and our office will be closed Thursday November 27th through Sunday November 30th 2008.

Since this is celebrated as a day of thanks I wanted to send a big THANK YOU to you (Our Customers!) without you we wouldn’t be doing what we are now.

As a way of showing our thanks we are going to run a competition and give away two free products. One template and one module.

The prizes

Module - Either the Google Maps or Youtube module from lhotch.
Template - Any one template found at ClassifiedMods.

How to Enter

To enter the competition all you have to do is leave a comment on this post and say what you are thankful for in your life. You must also be a customer or else you really wouldn’t need the prizes. The winners will be announced on Monday December 1st from a random drawing. Comments must be added before midnight Sunday.

ClassifiedMods

We are proud to announce a new website designed to help you find resources for 68 Classifieds. The new site is ClassifiedMods.com and will provide access to Professionals familiar with 68 Classfieds along with a variety of Templates and Modifications specifically designed for use with 68 Classifieds installations. Originally, we used 68mods.com as the primary location for 68 Classifieds resources. From now on, ClassifiedMods.com will be the first (and only) place to look for new modules, templates and resources to extend your installation’s functionality.

The goal of this new site is to offer a central location where module developers and template designers can share their work with the 68 Classifieds community.

Below are some of the important features of this new site:

Rating / Reviews - On the site you can rate and review each listing. It is very important to rate listings. This way it makes it easy to find listings that are of high quality and helps others find the perfect mod for their site.

Mod Review Policy - In order for any type of mod to be listed on the site, the developer has to send us a copy of the files so we can test it and make sure it actually runs and works as described.

Developer’s Code of Conduct - Every commercial developer has to agree to the following Code of Conduct before their item is added. This was added to protect you!

• 14 day money back guarantee on modifications.
• Email responses within 2 working days.
• Complaints referred to 68 Classifieds when and if necessary.
• A reasonable level of support will be provided for the installation and use.

The site already has lots of modifications and some awesome templates.

New Documentation Section

Today we are releasing a new documentation section to our main 68 Classifieds website. Instead of using the knowledge base system we are now moving to a wiki. Specifically Dokuwiki.

Commenting

New to this system is documentation commenting. So you can login with forum credentials and ad comments to documentation pages. This will hopefully be used to share tips and tricks with that section.

Editing

Since this system is a wiki once you login with your forum login you can edit the wiki pages. Only moderators and administrators can add new pages but if you see spot something that doesn’t make sense you can freely change it.

Layout

I have converted all the documentation over to this wiki and it is currently setup in 6 sections:

• Installation & Upgrading
• Administration Control Panel
• Templates
• License Question and Answers
• Troubleshooting
• Developer Documentation

Future Plans

In the future I have plans to add links from each individual page in the administration to it’s documentation page. That way if you need help with a feature it is just one click away.

We are always looking for ways to improve and if you have any ideas to make it even better please do not hesitate to let us know.