We’re pleased to announce that we have a new feature for our theme templates… Theme Settings.
Although the Spiffy Stores Themes have always been highly configurable, this configuration necessarily required some knowledge of HTML and CSS.
Not any more.
The new Theme Settings ability means that theme designers can now create a custom settings form that allows the end-user to simply choose from basic theme configuration options such as colour scheme, custom logo configuration and design layout.
We know we’ve been teasing you a little too much with the delayed launch of this theme… well the Antiqua theme is now available to all stores in your theme gallery. Check out the theme preview site at http://antiqua.spiffystores.com
To apply this theme to your store, just navigate to the “Theme gallery” section in your Toolbox (in the Design & assets section). You’ll see the Antiqua theme there.
If you want to try it out on your site, remember to save your current theme by downloading it first. This means that you’ll be able to restore it at a later date if you’d prefer to use your old theme.
The minimal theme is a modern, clean theme that features a customisable slide show on the home page to showcase your products, and also includes a stylesheet for the checkout pages so that they match the store.
This theme is very easy to customise and has instructions in the demo store at http://getminimal.spiffystores.com
Oh… and before anyone asks… the Antiqua theme will be ready on the 16th of April.
You may have noticed that things have been a little quiet here lately. That’s because we’ve been busy working on a major update to the software, which is pretty huge!
This update includes a complete re-design of the interface, with a lot of attention paid to consistency… so that once you’ve learnt how to do one thing, it’s pretty easy to work out how the rest of the interface works.
There are also a lot of additions to functionality, including the ability to manage products and orders in bulk, as well as the ability to download them.
With this new version, we can also now release the Showtime and Antiqua themes that we’ve mentioned previously. We haven’t been able to release them earlier, as they include functionality that isn’t available in the current release. There’s also a new theme… Minimal. A screenshot of the theme can be seen to the right.
We’re just working through the final testing phase, so it will probably be about two weeks. We’ll post more info here in the coming days/weeks, and send out an email to all store owners when we get closer to the date.
I’ve been busy working on a couple of new themes, and can’t believe how annoying IE6 is. Hours of annnoying bug fixes later, and I just can’t believe that any company can write software so crap. Why are people still using it?
Internet Explorer 6 has always been crap when it comes to building websites. While many of its issues are Microsoft’s fault for ignoring web standards, newer problems have arisen simply because of its age. It’s now eight years old, and many of the cool new tools on the web just didn’t exist when it came out.
Even if not all of IE6’s problems are its own fault, I know I’ll be joining the millions of web designers & developers dancing on Internet Explorer 6’s grave… when it finally dies the slow painful death it deserves. Until then, designing pages around IE6’s shortcomings is a fact of life.
Still… if you’ve ever wondered what sort of cool stuff you’ll be able to take advantage of when IE6 is gone, Sitepoint’s James Edwards has a list of the 10 cool things we’ll be able to do once IE6 is dead.
We hate you, Internet Exploder. You will not be missed.