leewillis.co.uk

I’ve run a Joomla site, and a Campaign Monitor subscriber list for around 18 months. For most of that time I’ve manually exported subscribers from Joomla and imported them to Campaign Monitor. Finally I got fed up, and put together a simple Joomla to Campaign Monitor plugin.

The plugin auto-subscribes new users (Whether they register deliberately, or are created by other plugins – e.g. by purchasing from a Virtuemart store) to your chosen Campaign Monitor list.

To get up and running, follow these 4 simple steps:

• Download the plugin
• Install it
• Set up your Campaign Monitor details in the configuration screen
  
  You can find a great guide for finding these IDs here
• Activate the plugin

Obviously, you’ll want to make sure that you have the user’s permission to contact them as part of the registration policy.

Happy integrating.

I’ve been asked a few times about how to split up countries into regions and charge shipping differently to the different areas in WP E-Commerce. This was something that was almost, but not quite possible with one of my existing plugins.

Now it’s just a little bit easier.

What You’ll Need

• WP E-Commerce (3.7.6 or later)
• My Weight / Destination plugin
• Database access to your WP e-Commerce database

In this example we’re going to show how to achieve the following:

• Set of Weight rates for New Zealand (North Island)
• Set of Weight rates for New Zealand (North Island)
• Set of Weight rates for the rest of Asia/Pacific
• Set of Weight rates for Europe

The Plan

To acheive our end goal we’re going to:

1. Create 2 regions attached to the country “New Zealand”
2. Remove New Zealand from the Asia and Pacific continent (So people ordering to NZ see those prices, not the general “Asia and Pacific” pricing
3. Set up per-country/region rates for New Zealand
4. Set up per-continent rates for Asia and Pacific, and Europe

Getting Started

The first job is to find out the “country ID” for New Zealand. Using your favourite database you’ll want to look in the wp_wpsc_currency_list table for the entry for New Zealand, and make a note of the value of the “id” field – in our case 156.

While we’re here, we’ll also move New Zealand out of it’s current continent. This basically just involves updating the same record, and setting the continent field to something unique, e.g.

Next – you’ll need to create whatever regions you want in the wp_wpsc_region_tax table, using the ID you’ve just found as the “country_id” field, e.g.

Configuring your pricing

That’s all with the scary database stuff, now on to the easy stuff. First of all you’ll need to activate both of the shipping modules:

First up we’ll configure the continent-based pricing. Click on “Edit” next to the weight-continent pricing. Up will pop the configuration pane, with a drop-down of the standard continents – and also our “newzealand” continent – which we’re not going to use since New Zealand is going to be priced by region.

Let’s pick Europe, and configure some weight rates.

In this case we’ve just configured one weight band – which means that anything shipped to Europe will be charged at the same rate – £80 in this case.

We can do the same for Asia and Pacific, except maybe setting up multiple layers using the “Add Layer” link.

At this stage shipping will work for Europe, Asia and Pacific, but not for New Zealand (Since we took it out of Asia and Pacific).

Click on “Edit” next to the Weight / Country and Region pricing. Up will pop the configuration pane, with a drop-down of the countries, including regions where configured – for example, we can see our North Island, and South Island regions here:

Selecting a region gives us the chance to configure weight rates, e.g.

Repeat for other regions, and you’re set. Happy Shipping!

Note: All weights should be set up in lbs, no matter what weight unit you used to set the weight for your products. WP e-Commerce will convert between them for you.

I recently re-worked a site for a client. He was moving over from Joomla to WordPress, so I started from scratch with his theme design. They liked the new theme I came up with – however I’d put the menu and other navigation (Links to recent articles, etc) in a right hand sidebar, and they weren’t too sure about that.

“Doesn’t everyone have the menu on the left?”

Now I’m no usability expert, and while I figured they were probably right I thought we’d run a little experiment. I trawled around a bit, and I found a nice little post by David Dellanave. While I was OK implementing David’s solution I though it was probably a little complicated for some of my other clients, especially when it came to running 3 Google analytics accounts – so I did some digging.

The result is the SES Split Testing plugin.

To use the plugin you’ll need to be using Google Analytics tracking on your WordPress blog already (If you’re not, then I’d recommend the “Google Analytics for WordPress” plugin), then :

• Create two (or more) versions of your theme
• Select them in the plugin settings
• Define custom segments in Google Analytics
• Sit back and watch the results roll in

Create theme variations

In most cases, you’ll want to test two versions of 1 theme with some slight changes. Let’s assume your theme is in the folder wp-content/themes/mytheme. Take a copy of your theme and put it in fresh folder, e.g. wp-content/themes/mytheme_2. Open up the style.css file in the second folder, and change the Theme Name, e.g.

/*
Theme Name: MyTheme
*/

to

/*
Theme Name: MyTheme (v2)
*/

Set up plugin settings

Now you can drop the plugin into your plugin directory, activate it in the WordPress backend, and then go to the settings page (Settings->SES Theme Split Test). The plugin will list all of your available themes, and you can choose which ones you want to be part of the test.

Once you’ve saved the settings, the split testing will kick in. Visitors will be randomly assigned one of the chosen themes, and they’ll receive that theme any time they visit in the next 30 days. Not only that, but their visit will be tagged with a special variable that you can pick up on in Google Analytics.

Set up Custom Analytics Segments

Google Analytics lets you define custom segments (Ways of grouping customers). In this example we want to group customers according to which theme they were shown and then we can measure our chosen metric (Purchase / sign-up / page views – whatever) for the two groups and compare them. To get started, you probably want to wait 24 hours so that Google starts to receive the tagging data.

Log into your analytics account, and click on the “All Visits” dropdown (Top-right, just above the date selector), and then choose “Create a new advanced segment”. Then, you want to expand the “Visitors” dropdown under “Dimensions”

Scroll down until you find “User Defined Value” and drag it onto the right hand box that says “dimension or metric”. If Analytics has got your tagging data (See – I told you to leave it 24 hours!) then you’ll get to choose from the values being passed, e.g.

Create a segment for each of your themes, and give them a meaningful name, then you’ll be able to select them as custom segments in your reports.

Now it’s just time to wait, see what happens, then decide. Once you’ve got a winner then just set that as your blog’s standard theme in the normal way, and either deactivate the plugin, or unselect the themes in the settings and users will see the blog default.