Archive for the 'tricks & notes' Category

With the introduction of HST in several Canadian provinces, some of our clients have asked us how this will impact their e-commerce stores. As the majority of our clients are using osCommerce, we have decided to write a short how to in order to help them prepare for the switch.

From the osCommerce admin, the first thing that needs to be done is to create some new tax zones. Since we are from BC, we will write this how to from the viewpoint of a BC based company (but don’t worry, if you live in another province, we will explain at the bottom of the post).

We created the following tax zones:

BC HST Zone

• British Columbia

Canada GST Zone

• Alberta
• Manitoba
• Northwest Territories
• Nunavut
• Prince Edward Island
• Quebec
• Saskatchewan
• Yukon Territory

NB / NF / ON HST Zone

• New Brunswick
• Newfoundland
• Ontario

NS HST Zone

• Nova Scotia

Once we created the Zones, we then created a tax class so that it could be added to our products. We called the tax class Taxable Goods.

Under the tax rates section, we then set the tax rates for each of our zones and associated them with the tax class.

1 – Taxable Goods – BC HST Zone – 12%
2 – Taxable Goods – NB / NF / ON HST Zone – 13 %
3 – Taxable Goods – Canada GST Zone – 5%
4 – Taxable Goods – NS HST Zone – 15%

If your company is NOT in BC, and requires you to charge PST in your province:

Create a new tax zone: Province PST Zone
Associate your province to the new zone.

eg.
Manitoba PST Zone

• Manitoba

In the tax rates section, set a new tax rate for your zone at the amount that PST is set at.

eg.
5 – Taxable Goods – Manitoba PST Zone – 7%

We hope this post was helpful to those of you with e-com stores. Remember, HST goes into effect July 1st, 2010 in BC!

Please contact us if you have questions or need assistance configuring your osCommerce website.

We get a lot of calls from clients about the Rich Text Editor we use in our Custom CMS admin area. We’ve stripped down the TinyMCE buttons and options to what we think are the most important, and still there are lots! It can be hard to know what is what.. So here is a visual glossary and explanation of the TinyMCE buttons and plugins, and what they all do! Enjoy:

Here is a link to the Moxiecode site Wiki, with a full list of possible buttons and plugins:

http://wiki.moxiecode.com/index.php/TinyMCE:Control_reference

Click the arrows next to the volume control to watch in full screen!

This video tutorial walks through the process of creating a new email newsletter campaign, selecting the template, and editing the newsetter template using the simple newsletter CMS. Once you’ve entered your content, this tutorial takes you through the basic steps to send out.

I can’t take credit for this, but am doing my best to spread the wealth. The basic idea behind CSS reset is it attempts to create a level playing field across all modern browsers by neutralizing browser-specific styles. In essence, it creates a base CSS foundation that attempts to make all modern browsers render sites identically.

One of the biggest trouble-makers for web design is Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), because it very often renders websites much different from how the designers intended. As a web designer, I am occassionally forced to use ugly hacks to fix IE6-specific layout issues, which is less than desirable. Once I started using CSS Resets, however, many of those IE6 layout issues dissappeared. I now start every project with CSS Resets and it has saved a ton of frustration and headache in the design process.

I’ve tested a couple different CSS Resets, and I have found the one created by Eric Meyer to be superior to the rest. Check it out, you’ll be glad you did:

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/

Hey, we created this for a client wondering how to upload and insert an image into their newsletter template.. Thought we’d post it for anyone who could use it. Enjoy. Oh, the width suggestion was related to a specific template, and is the only thing I would disregard.

phplists_insert_upload_image_604media_pdf

peace&love

so this is a pretty basic tip, but when I figured this one out I was pretty stoked. It makes life pretty easy, especially when you are on the internet as much as me.

hello, thanks for visiting!

we are insanely busy and trying our best to get our new web presence up, but it is hard to find time in the day for our own site! We are too busy working with our clients building beautiful custom sites…

we will be posting new releases here, behind-the-scenes tips and tricks, as well as let you know what we’re up to when we aren’t in front of our MacBooks Pros. .

we hope to share new ideas with fellow developers, and learn from the interaction, so please feel free to post comments on our posts. whether we can help, or you have a different / better approach to a coding issue, we’d love to hear it.

take care, and thanks to all of our wonderful clients who continue to support 604media.