[iSenseLabs Weekly 56] New OpenCart Features & Fixes, Video Tutorials and Latest E-Commerce News
Happy Friday, everyone! To those who are celebrating - happy St. Patrick's Day! We're ending the week with good vibes for the weekend and the usual updates regarding our OpenCart modules.
OpenCart 3.0 is coming very soon and we are continuing to prepare our extensions for the new version.
Below, you can check out a couple new modules we have made compatible with the upcoming update - FacebookLogin and SmartNotifications.
AnyPort 2.0.2 (OC 2.0.3.x - 2.3.x)
New Feature: Google Drive Integration.
Improvement: Better Windows Server support.
Improvement: UI improvements.
Improvement: Google Drive and Dropbox Auth flow improvements.
SmartNotifications 2.2.5 (OC 2.0.3.x - 3.0.x)
New Feature: Assign notifications to Categories.
New Feature: Enable/Disable notifications for desktop devices.
New Feature: Enable/Disable notifications for mobile devices.
New Feature: Set custom names for each notification.
Improvement: We were obtaining the domain name from $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] but we changed it to $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] since it is more reliable.
Bug fix: Fixed small issues in the Live Preview of the notifications in the admin panel.
Bug fix: Random value slider fixes in the admin panel.
Improvement: Added OpenCart 3.0.x compatibility
FacebookLogin 2.3.9 (OC 2.0.3.x - 3.0.x)
Bug fix: Check if we have set access_token in the session before using it.
Bug fix: License fixes
Improvement: Added OpenCart 3.0.x compatibility
LinkedInLogin 2.1.4 (OC 2.0.3.x - 2.3.x)
Improvement: Added OpenCart 2.3.x compatibility.
Bonus Section: Our Favorite Articles of the Week
Is Longer Really Better? How Focused and Comprehensive Content Ranks Better
By Neil Patel
For OpenCart store owners who are into blogging, you might want to see this take on how and why long form content actually helps and what makes shorter articles better (in some cases). There’s also very important info on why Google doesn’t want you to produce content for search engines. Google wants you to produce the content that will be worth showing to viewers, regardless if it’s long or short.
Infographic: How to Avoid a Google SEO Penalty
By Crazy Egg
Anyone owning a website of any sort gets shivers every time they hear the words “Google” and “Penalty” in one sentence. Mostly, it’s because they are unaware of how exactly they can avoid that. There are a lot of guides out there on how to improve your ranking, but avoiding the actual penalty is a less popular subject. Link farms, hidden text, keyword overdose, all of those are techniques that Google treats as a criminal offence. Learn more in Crazy Egg’s infographic.
10 Reasons To Use Open Source Software Defined Networking
By Huffington Post
Open source software has become a predominant choice for businesses and enterprises in the global IT industry. And the reasons for that are very good - open source means freedom, community, flexibility, innovation, and significantly high ROI. Solutions like OpenCart offer advantages that are much more lucrative for businesses such as lack of subscription costs, lack of commission for every purchase, etc, otherwise present in closed-environment E-Commerce platforms.
SEO Backpack: The Ultimate OpenCart Solution for Higher Search Engine Ranking
By iSenseLabs
One type of OpenCart extension we haven’t developed so far was an SEO solution. That’s no longer the case though, since we finally launched the SEO Backpack module. It has a completely new approach to solving search engine optimization in OpenCart and has an extremely easy and user-friendly interface. Learn more about it in the blog post.
iSenseLabs Videos
How to Create User & Database in MySQL - OpenCart 2.x Tutorial
Learn what a database is and how it is used in OpenCart. Create a MySQL database user by following this tutorial.
Pick of the Week
SearchCode is a site where you can search for functions, APIs and libraries for multiple dev languages. There are over 20 billion lines of code you can browse through. Check them out!
