68 Classifieds Blog

Translaters Wanted

We are looking for some people that would be interested in translating a file from English to your language. For anyone that translates the file we will give you a $100 coupon good for anything on this site. We are mainly needing the following languages:

• French
• Spanish
• Dutch

If you are fluent in a different one then we can probably extend the offer to you as well. Please contact us before translating to make sure someone else hasn’t already started.

Here is a link to the file.
Here is a link to instructions for modifying it.

68 Mods Grand Opening

We are proud to announce that 68 Mods has just been redone. The sole purpose of the new site is to help you find third-party developers, modifications, modules, payment gateways, and templates for 68 Classifieds. The new site is built entirely of 68 Classifieds v4 with a few modules added in.

The goal for this site is to help centralize all the mods in one place and making searching for a particular mod easy. Another nice feature is the ability to rate and review both modules and developers. So if you have worked with a particular developer or module then rate it so other users can see what to use and what to avoid.

Site Showcase - LabSales

1. Can you tell us a little about you or your site.

LabSales.com.au is the first of many planned websites under the same label, some of which will be in different languages. It is a “Scientific Classifieds Marketplace” where people can buy and sell scientific equipment. We have a huge number of categories, over 400 in fact and our goal has been to simplify as much as possible the process of buying and selling. I think we have achieved that.

2. I see Hills Web Design in the footer did they design your site?

Actually, I am “Hills Web Design” and this site has been developed for my client. We are a small, growing company and have been operating for just over 1 year now and this project has been probably the largest we have taken on. Using and modifying 68classifeds has been the easy part, the time consuming aspect from a web developers point of view has been the constant cries from the client, “can the site do this?” and the answer has almost always been “Yes!”

3. Since you are Hills Web Design do you offer design or modification work for 68 Classifieds?

Yes, I would be happy to do some design and/or 68 Classifieds modification work. Just visit Hills Web Design and get in touch.

4. What made you choose 68 Classifieds?

Well, there wasn’t really many classifieds systems to choose from and I initially chose this system because of the active community of people using it. The site has been quite heavily modified from the “out of the box” package, and 68classifieds lends itself very well to being modified.The support from the developers and other users via the forum is second to none. As a web developer, the flexibility of this system and the support that has been provided has made my choice of 68classifeds a good one indeed.

5. Are you using any modules with your site?

Yes, we are currently using numerous modules, some of which were developed outside of 68classifieds. We are using, Ad reporting, Incomplete listings reminder, a “Banner Advertising” module and a “Bulk Upload System” which allows to inject ads in bulk directly into the system, this is a must for a large classifieds site like this one.

6. Any additional details you would like to share?

Thanks for the support from the developers and the community! I look forward to building more sites with your software and I will be purchasing numerous licenses from you guys in the near future as we expand our operations internationally.

Would you like your site showcased? Click here to find out how

Stepping into Smarty - Conditionals

Smarty Templates include a whole host of features and in the post I will go over some Smarty conditional statements. Conditionals are basically a way for you to selectively show certain things based on some value.

Lets say for instance that you only want to display advertising to people visiting your site that are not logged in. This way it would give people that take the extra time to register an incentive. So if we write this out it would look something like this: “If you are a guest then show ads”.

To convert this to a Smarty conditional then we could do this:

{if $smarty.session.userlevel == 5} put your ad code {/if} 

What this does is check the users session and if the userlevel is 5 (which by default is the guest user group) then show your add code.

Now that we have the basics lets get into a more complex conditional statement. For this one lets say: “If you are logged in then display a greeting. If not then display a generic welcome message”.

This would be written as:

{if $smarty.session.username<>'' || $smarty.cookies.username<>""}
Welcome {$smarty.session.username}
{else}
Welcome to our site.  Why not join?
{/if}

The first part says if they are logged in and the username is not blank then display “Welcome Name”. Next if that condition does not run then display the else. “Welcome to our site….”.

I hope this helps you better understand Smarty conditional statements.

References

• Smarty.net

Administration Refferer Check

Inside the administration of v4 we added a new check to prevent people from making post requests to your administration unless it comes from your domain name. This check was added as a security feature to prevent trying to bypass any forms. Although this was added for safety you can by pass it by adding this to the connections/classifieds.php file:

define('NO_REFERRER_CHECK', TRUE); 

Best practices when moving your site

Have you ever wanted to move your site to a new domain or to a new hosting provider? If so or if you plan to in the future then I recommend visiting this Google Blog Post that is a best practices guide to moving your site.