Hope everyone is doing well in these “interesting” times. Has anyone else noticed that Netflix seems to have fewer decent movies than ever? Are they taking advantage of the fact that some of us are trapped in our homes?
Netflix bitching aside, I should get to the real purpose of this article… which is to let everyone know that we’ve added a new wysiwyg text editor to stores that allows you easily lay out your text, make text bold, italic, differentcolours etc.
That’s not it though… you can change alignment, add bullets, add links in, and do pretty much all of the other stuff you can do in common desktop editors.
Oh… and you can also add in images and rotate & crop them inline… as well as adjust the size, brightness, contrast, and a bunch of other stuff.
Just to make sure the new editor doesn’t break stuff that you’ve created using the old editor, it only shows up on new products, pages, and articles that you’ve created in the last week or so.
We know this feature has been around for ages, and it may seem that we’re a bit slow bringing it to our software. Conversations about the editor usually ended with someone screaming “x#$%&* no way! it makes the code too messy!”… which is exactly why we have delayed this release.
The text that you add for your products can be used in many ways… such as when you connect your store’s product catalogue to Facebook, Instagram, or one of the shopping portals we support. They don’t want to deal with messy code, and neither do we. The great news is that we’ve almost perfected cleaning up this code so products aren’t rejected.
The editor is still a work in progress, so please let us know if you run into any issues with your product feeds, or with the editor in general.
Over the past months, the Spiffy Stores team have been flexing our creative and technical muscles hard to bring store owners and developers a simple but full featured new Spiffy Stores theme.
Now, we’re excited to introduce you to the result of all that hard work — and open up a whole new set of possibilities to stretch your creativity.
It’s called Simple – and it’s the newest premium Spiffy Stores theme available for free on all Spiffy Stores plans.
Simple is designed to be exactly what it sounds like – super simple.
Simple represents years of feedback from store owners and developers of all types who want more flexibility and control when it comes to themes, as well as keeping the overall look as clean as possible… but still containing the features built in to our other themes.
That’s a delicate balancing act!
Feature overview
The real power of Simple becomes obvious once you apply the theme and see the options available in your Theme Editor.
Here’s a roundup of some of the highlights of the Simple theme:
Advanced mega menus without an app: We know that mega menus are a key way to not only to “show” your shoppers around the store but also get out your marketing messages — so we’ve expanded the mega menu functionality in our other themes to create our most flexible setup yet.
A beautiful slideshow, with customisable size, colours, transitions, and fonts.
Customisable Instagram feed to show off a gallery of your product images
Customisable parallax banners on all pages including collection pages, product pages, blog articles etc.
Customisable tabs on product pages. You can break up your product pages into section for displaying different kinds of info, such as videos, size charts, shipping info, reviews etc.
Customisable popups, which are far more effective than just having a subscribe form in your footer.
Display featured products, featured collections, and blog articles on your home page…. along with welcome text, a slideshow, and your Instagram feed. We’ll also soon provide a tutorial on how to re-order and customise sections.
Integration with Yotpo to provide product reviews
Customisable announcement bars to provide important info
Choose from over 50 included fonts, or add your own custom Google font.
Colour options so you can recolour everything in the theme, or choose from built-in colour schemes.
Product sorting, list view, grid view, and unlimited scrolling options
Google reCAPTCHA to protect you from spammers
All the other features, in other themes, such as wishlists, mobile responsiveness, social media integration, image galleries etc.
How to get it
Like our other themes, the Simple theme is available exclusively to Spiffy Stores, and can be applied in the Theme Gallery section of your store’s admin. If you’re switching from another theme, you may want to ensure you download a backup of your current theme first.
You might want to read The Simple Theme Guide, as the theme has a lot of customisation options in the Theme editor, and a lot of the functionality is disabled until you enable it.
The future of Simple
We’re planning on adding a bunch more features to this theme, so stay tuned. Planned enhancements include;
Quick shop popup windows
Create unlimited custom fields on your products
Video in product images
Video in the home page slideshow
More enhanced responsive images
This is only the beginning
Finally, as you start using Simple, don’t forget that this is version 1.0 only — so you might say we’re only in the warm-up phase of pushing Spiffy Stores theme flexibility.
We’re already hard at work on a series of updates that will be released to bring even more features and functionality to this theme.
