68 Classifieds Blog

List of Great Resources for 68 Classifieds

Here is a list of 19 great resources for working with 68 Classifieds:

Design

1. 68 Classifieds Basic Structure for Design Part 1
2. 68 Classifieds Basic Structure for Design Part 2
3. Smarty Templates and You
4. Template design tutorial!
5. 68 Classifieds – The Power of Includes
6. 68 Classifieds Auto Loaded Search Fields
7. Featured listings by category

Tutorials

8. How I Reduced Most of My Abandoned Listings
9. Add an RSS Feed to the Seller Store
10. Using the RSS Feed
11. RSS Management with FeedBurner
12. 68 Classifieds and Google Apps
13. Classifieds and Spammers
14. Understanding Images
15. Custom Administration Folder

Development

16. Import Listings into 68 Classifieds
17. Building a news module – 68 Classifieds
18. 68 Classifieds and Smarty Caching
19. Stepping into Smarty - Conditionals

If you find any that are missing and you have found useful please post in the comments and I will add it to the list.

Yes, You Can White Label 68 Classifieds

A common question or concern about 68 Classifieds is whether or not you can white label the script. We have a very liberal policy on our copyrights and you are free to remove any mention of 68 Classifieds in both the administration and your sites front end.

A white label product or service is a product or service produced by one company (the producer) that other companies (the marketers) rebrand to make it appear as if they made it.

The only requirement is you must keep the copyrights in the php files. Which would generally not be seen by anyone except those doing physical work with the files.

I know we have never really outlined any information on how to change this and this post will go over how it is done.
Read more…

The Tortoise Or The Hare?

I am sure we have all heard the story about the tortoise and the hare. If not let me give you a quick recap. The tortoise and the hare are in a race and the hare takes off like lightning but quickly tires out and the tortoise passes him and wins the race. The moral of the story is slow and steady will always win against something fast that quickly tires out.

The reason this story came to mind was because as web site owners we tend to want to be like the hare when we should really strive to be a tortoise. To me this seems to be very common in folks just starting out, a lot think they have the next million dollar idea and after a few months of being unsuccessful they give up. When in fact their idea maybe the next big thing but they didn’t plan or wait long enough in order to reach that goal.

As a prime example I have seen people work on a site for months and months and never launch. Or after they do finally launch don’t see the initial response they had hoped. Which would cause any of us to loose that drive. A better option may be to get started with something or really anything and then gradually build it up. By doing it slowly you can build your customer base and also receive feedback on what your customers like and dislikes. I can honestly say this is vital in my opinion and if I would have only considered my own ideas for 68 Classifieds then it would have never reached what it has. Customer feedback is one the easiest and best ways to find out what is needed and what isn’t.

What do you think? Is it better to be a tortoise or a hare?

Benefits of the Smarty Template Engine

68 Classifieds uses Smarty, the PHP Template/Presentation framework. We have used it for several years now and personally I really like the system. It has so many advantages to suit both beginners and advanced programmers.

I just read an excellent Smarty tutorial over at the In the Woods blog and thought it would be great to share with you.

This also got me to thinking. Can you think of any tutorials that would help you? Or any tips and tricks for working with 68 Classifieds that you want to share? If so please post in the comments.

Classifieds and Spammers

It seems lately a lot of classifieds sites have been getting hit with spam. For a classified site owner spam can be either someone placing false listings or someone emailing people that have added listings on your site. In the post I am going to talk about email spam instead of fake listings.

First off 68 Classifieds includes several spam prevention measures to help you combat spam. These are captcha, user registration, and private messages. Each of these options have their own positives and negatives and there is probably not one best way for every site.

Captcha systems are more of a deterrent than anything. A real human can get the captcha correct and still send spam. Although most of the time they use bots so they can send hundreds or thousands of messages very quickly. We include by default a captcha system named FreeCap. This system is very basic and because of this I also created a reCaptcha module. The reCaptcha system is supposed to be one of the most secure captcha systems out.

The user registration system in 68 Classifieds is another possible solution. You can force visitors to register on your site and only allow people that have registered to actually contact the listing owners. By going this route you can force email validation and have more details about the person trying to contact someone. For example when someone joins their ip address is logged in their account.

Finally is the private message system. This requires people to be registered users and the emails that are sent just tell the ad owner that they have a new private message. Then they read on your site and can flag it as spam. This has the same drawbacks as allowing only registered users to contact folks. But the benefits are it allows you to have a record everything sent and keeps people coming back to your site to read and reply to the message.

As you can see we offer several ways for you to combat spam and I normally recommend using a captcha system first. If you are still getting spam then go to one of the other methods. Like I mentioned no method is 100% foil proof but you can put measures in place to help.

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