To say I'm pleased with the progress of StoreSuite NX would be an understatement! In my last post I told you that we've re-commenced development of StoreSuite and since then it's been all systems go - we're really making solid progress. Here's an overview of the progress we've made in the last week:
  • The entire front-end template and rendering engines are finished and all panels on the StoreSuite main page are now live and dynamic. StoreSuite runs on the same simple template system as ArticleLive and HTML is separate from PHP, so if you're a designer you can focus on customizing the HTML and wont have to deal with PHP.
     
  • Pages are done. The site's navigation is fully dynamic and pages can have multiple sub-pages. Pages are fully SEO optimized with their own titles, meta data and on-page SEO tweaks. We decided to remove the right column of top selling and new products on all content-driven pages to give more room for the page content. Here's how a sample page looks anyway:


     
  • We've just finished the first part of dynamic promotion placement for StoreSuite. It works in the same way AdSense blocks work for ArticleLive: you can enable the placement of a promotion anywhere in your StoreSuite store with one click, and then upload the promotion image and specify a link. Here's how it looks in the control panel (so far the promotions are only implemented for the home page):



    As you can see, you can enable/disable the placement of promotions in different locations on your StoreSuite site. When you choose to enable a promotion you can upload the image and specify where it should link to. Here's how some sample promotions look on the front end:


So why would you use dynamic promotions on your StoreSuite ecommerce site? Here are some ideas:
  • You want to clear excess stock, so you create a promotional image and link it to that product's page
  • You want to advertise a special or seasonal discount on a specific product or category
  • You want to show new visitors you have a special discounted shipping offer
... and the list goes on. We will be implementing dynamic promotions throughout the entire application. By default of course they are disabled, but you can enable any/all of them as needed with just one click. This is just one of the many features we'll be adding into StoreSuite as development continues.