Tag Archives: Themes

Sass support upgraded for Spiffy Stores Themes

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This is a quick “heads-up” for all our Spiffy Stores web designers and developers out there who are customizing and building fantastic themes for their customers.

As you already know, Spiffy Stores has always supported the use of Sass (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) to ease the development of stylesheets in your themes. It’s a great productivity tool and makes the whole job of building and managing your CSS styles a whole lot easier. In fact, at Spiffy Stores, we’ve been using Sass almost from day one, well over ten years ago.

Since it’s such a great productivity tool, we were a bit concerned to learn that our current implementation was being deprecated in favour of a newly developed version called Dart Sass, and that this version would be the basis of all future development going forward.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve just built a bridge to the new Dart Sass that can be used by all existing themes and any new themes without any change, ensuring our long-term commitment to the Sass language and environment.

We’re aware that another ecommerce platform has decided that supporting Sass is too difficult, and has chosen to withdraw support for Sass from their theme platform, requiring instead that all stylesheets be coded using native CSS. Booooo! As web developers ourselves, we’d be pretty unhappy about something like this, so if you know anyone who has been affected by this change, then please let them know that Spiffy Stores is fully behind Sass and it’s continued importance in the web development stack.

If you have any questions about the use of Sass, or developing themes for Spiffy Stores, please let us know at support@spiffystores.com.au.

Vintage: a fully responsive theme from Spiffy Stores

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We’re proud and delighted to announce we’ve given birth to a new theme for Spiffy Stores. And it’s a cracker!

Vintage-theme-devicesVintage, our most flexible theme yet, is a fully responsive design. The layout will automatically adapt to the screen size it’s viewed on, whether that’s a smart phone, a tablet or a laptop. In fact, it will always look its best on any screen width from 320 pixels to over 2500.

The Vintage theme gives you 6 elegant styles to choose from: Cupcakes, Fresh Linen, Natural, Vintage Velvet, Mellow Yellow, plus a bonus “Not So Vintage” style.  You can re-colour each of these styles to get it looking exactly how you want too!

And we’ve included a bucket load of customisable features such as…

  • 4 levels of drop-down menus so you can make really specific product categories
  • Cool 5-image homepage slideshow, with 3 different transitions, captions and links, so you can tailor each one to a different message
  • 24 funky heading typefaces and unlimited colour schemes so you can style it just the way you like it
  • Customisable product pages with custom product fields, dynamic image zoom and related product up-sells
  • Display featured collections on your home page with support for collection images (new feature!).
  • Featured collection pages with support for collection images (new feature!) so you can show off your different product categories on one page.
  • Social media integration to grow your audience on your Facebook, Google +, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn pages
  • Newsletter integration with MailChimp, Campaign Monitor or Mad Mimi so you can sign up visitors to your email list through our simple form.
  • Built-in icons for payment methods like PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, and Bank Deposit.
  • Matching checkout styles with your logo and colours.

Sound good? Why not take a look around this baby in the Vintage theme demo store we’re building. While you’re there, try clicking and dragging the bottom right corner of your browser window in and out. You’ll see the seamless and dynamic resize in action!

If you want to apply the Vintage theme to your store, just navigate to the “Design & Assets > Theme gallery” section of your Toolbox and update your templates with one click. Don’t forget to save your current theme by downloading it first so you can restore it later if you’d prefer to use it instead.

Instructions on how to make changes to the Vintage theme to get it to suit you perfectly, along with previews of the different built-in styles and fonts can be found in the Vintage theme guide in our Knowledge Base.

Easy theme editing using WebDAV

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We’ve always believed in pushing the technical envelope to provide advanced technical solutions to make life easier for our store owners.  This is way more important to us than the hype and gloss that you may find in the rest of the industry.

Over the past year, we’ve been talking to loads of web designers who use Spiffy Stores to create online stores for their customers. Although they love creating new e-commerce shops using our software, the resounding feedback we’ve been getting is that whilst the current Theme Editor in the Toolbox is great for small changes, it get’s a bit more difficult when designing an entire theme for a store.

For larger theme updates it’s really necessary to download the theme files to your computer, edit them and then upload the new files to the server. Using the Theme Editor to do this is a bit cumbersome, and makes the design process more difficult than it should be.

We’ve listened to these concerns, and have spent considerable time and effort working on a solution… so today we’re very proud to announce a major new capability which allows all your theme files and assets to be edited directly from your computer using WebDAV enabled editors such as Adobe’s Dreamweaver, and Panic’s Coda.  If you’re on a Mac, you’re even luckier, as WebDAV is built right into OSX, and can be used in conjunction with TextMate and Taco.

To use this new feature in Windows, all you need is a WebDAV enabled editor or a utility such as NetDrive which allows WebDAV files to be mounted on your computer as a local folder. This means that you can use your favourite editor to edit your store’s theme files directly from your computer.

If you’re using a WebDAV enabled editor such as Dreamweaver, you also have access to some advanced features such a file checkout and locking so that you can work in a team without having to worry about whether someone else overwrites your changes.

If you’re a web designer and your current e-commerce software doesn’t support WebDAV, then you should seriously consider Spiffy Stores for this feature alone, as you’ll find your theme development time slashed significantly.

For more info about using WebDAV to edit your store, head over to the WebDAV section of our knowledge base.

Related articles

Store of the moment: Midgee Moo

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The Midgee Moo online store has a gorgeous range of quality, traditional puzzles, games, pretend food, craft, special needs toys, kinder needs and so much more… sourced from around the globe for kids from newborn up to 6 years old to enjoy.

Their store is based on the Georgia Theme for Spiffy Stores, and they’ve added a super-cute custom designed logo, background and banners designed by Restored 316 Designs.

Seattle Theme. Now Available.

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We’re pleased to announce the release of a new Spiffy Stores theme!.  The Seattle Theme for Spiffy Stores includes a host of features including unlimited colour schemes, Facebook comments, wish lists, social media integration including Google +1, customisable slideshows and 9 different font options.  Read on to find out more about this theme. Continue reading →

New design for Hair Fairy Clips Store

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We’ve just finished a re-design of the Hair Fairy Clips store using the new Georgia Theme.  If you’re interested in getting us to modify a theme for use in your Spiffy Store, it can generally be done in about 2 weeks and will cost you from $70 for a few changes up to $450.00 for a complete overhaul.

Contact us today to find out about our store design service.

The minimal theme just got spiffier!

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New Spiffier minimal theme for Spiffy StoresWe’ve just updated the minimal theme so that now it can be re-coloured in your theme editor.  You can now easily add your logo, add images to your slideshow, change your store background colour, the colour of your navigation, your links, as well as your text, footer background, and footer text.

The best thing of all is that all of your colour changes are also reflected in your checkout, which also exactly matches the colour scheme you’ve created.

It comes with a few different colour schemes built-in as well, which you can see by clicking on the image to the right.

New Theme Customization Options

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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.

Continue reading →

Give us some feedback!

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It’s now been just over a month since we launched Spiffy Stores to the general public.  In our first month, we’ve had an overwhelming response in the number of new signups (a fantastic start!), but haven’t heard much from anyone!  Our goal is to make Spiffy Stores really easy to use, and even faster to set up.  To do this, we need some feedback from everyone that has signed up.

During the past month, we’ve been working on adding new features here and there to improve the functionality.  One of the biggest features we’ve been working on is adding new options to customise our themes.  If you have any ideas about what we could do to improve our theme customisation, or what we could do to make it easier to set up your store… please phone us on 1300 727 334 to discuss, or you can email us at studio@spiffystores.com.au