Credit card payments are the easiest way to gather your clients money in any shop you own. There are already some other gateways for payments using credit cards such as Authorize.net, however I will concentrate on PayPal Pro features in this article.

PayPal Pro (direct payment) module for PrestaShop let’s you accept payments using Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express cards. The module also takes into account that some users might be from UK where some of these cards use 3D Secure (additional security level for online credit and debit card transactions, for more information about 3D Secure and Paypal visit Cardinal Commerce website) and is also implemented in this module, so you will not have any problems with users worldwide.

In addition, you can test the module using SandBox and make sure that everything is working as expected, before going live.

PayPal Pro module for PrestaShop lets you choose between “Authorize and Capture” or just “Authorize” payments. You will be able to capture them later from the configuration page of the module (for example, when you’re ready to ship). Moreover, the module lets you choose if you want to require address when entering the credit cards information and you can also specify allowed currencies as some of them are not compatible with Discover and American Express cards. You should be able find out available currencies by visiting PayPal website.

Another great feature of this module is the refund functionality integrated straight in module’s configuration page. After entering the order ID you will be able to refund the order partially or entirely, without going to the PayPal website. This saves time as you will be managing everything in one place. Log of all transactions that were invalid or had an error is also available. The log provides information both on 3D secure transactions and PayPal errors. You can easily clear it too in order to save some time and hard disk space if you have many transactions.

Instant download and dedicated support for all of your problems are included.

Purchase the PayPal Pro module for Prestashop at Presto-Changeo.com

While the New Year has passed quite a long time ago, we can still make some predictions about this years ecommerce trends and possibilities. It is no secret that ecommerce is becoming more used and popular worldwide. You will agree that it would be difficult to find people who have not  tried to buy at least one or another product online.

Here’s  a few interesting facts from 2012:

• 80% of B2B companies have invested in ecommerce and a variety of platforms over the last year
• 77% of small and medium-sized businesses are using social media
• 48% of the consumers in one way or another is bound to at least one brand or company in social networks
• 20.7 billion U.S. dollars have been spent using mobile technology (especially strongly influenced by the tablets)

Many online sources suggest that the use of mobile apps in 2013 will inevitably be a priority in ecommerce. It is already apparent in the figures presented earlier. Ecommerce as well as the whole Internet is slowly moving to smart devices. In addition, computer technology giants such as Microsoft say that we will have more users on mobile devices over conventional PCs  in 2014. Here, however, the possibility is not limited specifically to created mobile applications, do not forget HTML5 and CSS3 offered opportunities to create responsive designs which can be used for both PCs and mobiles.

Applications for mobile devices are not the only aspect where shop owners will have to pay attention. Forbes strongly suggests that testing (although the level of one or another is done today too) is simply a necessary and integral part of the success of the business and is required to be done not only by the largest companies owning the largest stores, but also small ones too. Available statistics, processed information, the testing of user interfaces and conversions etc. will be an integral part of the business for all market players, without any exception.

However, testing will not be the only measure according to the Forbes, more and more attention will be paid to the commerce personalization. All of this can be linked to the already mentioned information on the statistics gathering and ability to use their acquired knowledge about customers. Personalization is not the only thing – loyalty programs are essentially a part of ecommerce too. Loyalty programs will gain a whole new face in the coming years.

It is  also suggested that commerce will not be limited only to business-to-customer basis, more attention will be given to business-to-business sales. The majority of companies in one way or another already invest in ecommerce platforms, which promises only more business-to-business expansion. This may also suggest an idea that the market is still in lack of wholesalers who are able to properly exploit the commercial opportunities on the Internet.

Moreover store’s success depends on how quickly the client will receive ordered goods and products. We can see some new interesting trends in this market, for example, Walmart and eBay are already testing same-day delivery in major U.S. cities. Would not it be nice to have the products in your hands at the same day or in couple hours of buying them? I think that’s quite a step into really better ecommerce for daily customers. And while this is happening at the moment it would mean that there should not be restrictions on international shipping anymore.

We should not forget the fact that ecommerce is no longer a youngster. Furthermore, some online stores are already morally and technically outdated and they need to at least redesign in order to meet Web 2.0 demands and trends. And it is worth to keep in mind that the store is not a one-day or month project and requires constant improvements from the beginning.

Moreover,  it is said that more attention should be paid to the content itself when talking about updating websites. There’re some talks that new SEO techniques will be mainly concentrated on high quality content, which basically should also be concentrated on video presentations or videos. One of the 2013 predictions is that customers are tired of reading boring descriptions and video can be the best  way to convey the brand and functionality of products.

To sum up, it is said that commerce continues to grow and becomes even closer to us by expanding more and more to mobile devices; shop owners have to pay more attention to information and statistics, and its proper use, otherwise the possibility of failure will be unavoidable.  Customers will definitely enjoy improvements in delivery and user-friendly designs not only on new eshops, but on those renewed too.

Shipworks is a software company that focus on providing software solutions for online sellers by trying to make their life easier.

Shipworks mainly integrates your ecommerce platform and makes sellers life easier when talking about backoffice managements. If your ecommerce service is not that easy to use, then Shipworks would be the solution for managing it.

Shipworks allows you to:

• Get all your orders
• Get all your customer’s information
• It integrates shipping carriers such as DHL, Global Mail, UPS, USPS, so you can easily print shipping labels too.
• and many more which you can get to know by visiting their webpage.

PrestaShop integration

You can easily connect your PrestaShop platform to Shipworks by using a special module which adds necessary functionality for PrestaShop in order to get information from it.

By using this module you will be able to download all the orders from your shop and update their shipping status from Shipworks on your Windows machine. In addition, all your customers information will be sent to Shipworks and you will be able to see some additional statistics or do search.

Contact me if you are interested in this module and would like to either test it out or buy it. Write me an email trough contacts form.

Visit Shipworks page.

PrestaShop ecommerce system is evolving drastically. PrestaShop community has more than 400 000 members and it had 2 million downloads recently. As a consequence even more PrestaShop modules and themes are created and either sold or given for free. I’ve tried to gather as much free PrestaShop themes as I could to give you a quite bunch of them to choose from.

However, I have to say that you should be careful by using free themes and downloading both free modules and free themes from the Internet as they might be sometimes infected by malware and other stuff that could potentially damage your reputation, server and software. That’s why usually it’s better to buy high quality PrestaShop modules from companies such as Presto-Changeo or others. I’ve chosen these themes from good looking and known websites, so you should be OK about that.

There are also many free themes for old versions of PrestaShop. I’ve chosen only themes that are compatible with at least PS1.4 version.

Velvet Sky

Demo | Website

Comments: Soft colors theme that would be best for accessories or jewelery. The theme has some Facebook and Twitter integration at the bottom of the shop, new and featured products, slider, categories on the homepage and categories, specials, new products, top sellers modules on the left sidebar.

Clothes Theme

Demo | Website

Comments: Clothes theme name explains it all, simple, elegant and easy to use. Card, categories and manufacturers modules are available on the sidebar including the featured image the homepage. However, you will need to register in order to download it.

Leo SportShoes

Demo | Website

Comments:

A great theme compatible with PS 1.5 version. You can sold anything you want on this really modern and fresh template which has new and featured products blocks with some advertisements on homepage, categories, specials and manufacturers on the left sidebar on all other pages. You should also not forget the slider on the homepage and functional footer which includes some social buttons, CMS pages, language and currency selection.

Leo TShirt

Demo | Website

Comments:

Another great and modern theme compatible with PS1.4.x versions. It also includes quite the same footer as the theme above. In addition, specials, categories and shipping cart modules on the right sidebar on products and categories pages. You will also find some really interesting slider on the homepage which is quite popular in Web2.0 designs.

If you or you company has some free themes that you want to show to others or add to this list, do not hesitate to write in comments or contact me with all your information.

I took some images from Wikipedia for better understanding:

We put those numbers into buckets based on interval which is get looping from the min value until the end of all numbers which is the max number in the array. In this case you might see that all the negative numbers will be in the first bucket which might be in some case a disadvantage of this particular implementation of this algorithm.

The numbers are at first calculated by the same logic and the main process sends information of how many numbers each bucket will need to parse and get. By doing the same routine again, the main process sends out all the numbers to a particular bucket and buckets are receiving information until it gets all the numbers that should be sent to it.

After putting the numbers into the specific buckets, you just sort them out using any sorting algorithm you want. The native sort() function of C++ is used in this example.

I’ve even create a simple “random” numbers generator which you can use to create some test info. The code is below:

#include
#include
#include

using namespace std;

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
	int size;
	cout << "Kokio dydzio masyva sugeneruot?" << endl; 	cin >> size;
	unsigned int *array = new unsigned int [size];
	unsigned int c;
	srand(time(nullptr));	// preparing random function
	//srand(1); // for the same results

	for(c = 0 ; c < size ; c++)	//
		array1 = rand();
	ofstream fd("testing_info.txt");
	fd << size << endl;
	for(c = 0 ; c < size ; c++)	{
		fd << array1 << endl;
	}
	fd.close();
	return 0;
}

At the main code of the Bucket sort algorithm implementation using C++ Open MPI:

#include "mpi.h"
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
#include <iomanip>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <ctime>
#include <algorithm>
#include <assert.h>

using namespace std;

int main( int argc, char* argv[] )
{
	double starttime, endtime;
	int proceso_id;
	char processor_name[MPI_MAX_PROCESSOR_NAME];
	int namelen;
	int numprocsused;
	// Intiating parallel part
	MPI_Status stat;
	MPI::Init();
		/
		MPI_Comm_size(MPI_COMM_WORLD, &numprocsused);
		proceso_id = MPI::COMM_WORLD.Get_rank();
		MPI_Get_processor_name(processor_name, &namelen);
		unsigned int receivedElement;
		if(proceso_id == 0) {
			// if it is main process

			// --- We are getting info from text file
			int SIZE;
			unsigned int value;
			ifstream fd("testing_ingo.txt");
			fd >> SIZE; // the first number on the first line is the number of numbers in file
			unsigned int *array = new unsigned int [SIZE];
			for(int c = 0 ; c < SIZE ; c++)	{
				fd >> value;
				array1 = value;
			}
			// --- DEBUG: in order to check if information was read properly
			//for(int c = 0; c < SIZE; c++) {
			//	printf("   %d   ", array1);
			//	if((c+1)%5 == 0 )
			//		printf("\n",SIZE);
			//}

			// starting time calculation of the sort
			starttime = MPI_Wtime();

			// min and max values are got
			unsigned int min = array[0];
			unsigned int max = array[0];
			for(int i=0; i < SIZE; i++) {
				if(array[i] < min) { min = array[i]; }
				if(array[i] > max) { max = array[i]; }
			}

			// calculating how many numbers each bucket/process will get numbers
			int *elementQtyArray = new int[numprocsused]; /
			// default values
			for(int d=1; d < numprocsused; d++) {
				elementQtyArray[d] = 0;
			}
			for(int d=0; d < SIZE; d++) {
				int increaseOf = max/(numprocsused-1);
				int iteration = 1;
				bool pridetas = false;
				for(unsigned int j = increaseOf; j <= max; j = j + increaseOf) {
					if(array[d] <= j) {
						elementQtyArray[iteration]++;
						pridetas = true;
						break;
					}
					iteration++;
				}
				if (!pridetas) {
					elementQtyArray[iteration-1]++;
				}
			}

			// Sending how many each process/bucket will get numbers
			for(int i=1; i<numprocsused; i++) {
				MPI_Send(&elementQtyArray[i], 1, MPI_INT, i, -2, MPI_COMM_WORLD);
			}

			// doing the same, this time sending the numbers
			for(int d=0; d < SIZE; d++) {
				int increaseOf = max/(numprocsused-1);
				int iteration = 1;
				bool issiunte = false;
				for (unsigned int j = increaseOf; j <= max; j = j + increaseOf) {
					if(array[d] <= j) {
						MPI_Send(&array[d], 1, MPI_UNSIGNED, iteration, -4, MPI_COMM_WORLD);
						issiunte = true;
						break;
					}
					iteration++;
				}
				if (!issiunte) {
					MPI_Send(&array[d], 1, MPI_UNSIGNED, iteration-1, -4, MPI_COMM_WORLD);
				}
			}

			// Getting back results and adding them to one array
			int lastIndex = 0; int indexi = 0;
			for(int i=1; i < numprocsused; i++) {
				unsigned int * recvArray = new unsigned int [elementQtyArray[i]];
				MPI_Recv(&recvArray[0], elementQtyArray[i], MPI_UNSIGNED, i, 1000, MPI_COMM_WORLD, &stat);
				if(lastIndex == 0) {
					lastIndex = elementQtyArray[i];
				}
				for(int j=0; j<elementQtyArray[i]; j++) {
					array[indexi] = recvArray[j];
					indexi++;
				}
			}

			// stoping the time
			endtime   = MPI_Wtime();

			// showing results in file
			ofstream fr("results.txt");
			for(int c = 0 ; c < SIZE ; c++)	{
				fr << array1 << endl;
			}
			fr.close();

			// sorting results
			printf("it took %f seconds \n", endtime-starttime);
			printf("Numbers: %d \n", SIZE);
			printf("Processes:  %d \n", numprocsused);
//----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
		} else {
			// if child process
			int elementQtyUsed; // kiek elementu si gija gauja is tevinio proceso
			// --- getting the number of numbers in the bucket
			MPI_Recv(&elementQtyUsed, 1, MPI_INT, 0, -2, MPI_COMM_WORLD, &stat);

			unsigned int *localArray = new unsigned int [elementQtyUsed]; // initiating a local bucket

			// --- getting numbers from the main process
			for(int li = 0; li < elementQtyUsed; li++) {
				MPI_Recv(&receivedElement, 1, MPI_UNSIGNED, 0, -4, MPI_COMM_WORLD, &stat);
				localArray[li] =  receivedElement;
			}

			// --- sorting the bucket
			sort(localArray, localArray+elementQtyUsed);

			// --- sending back sorted array
			MPI_Send(localArray, elementQtyUsed, MPI_UNSIGNED, 0, 1000, MPI_COMM_WORLD);
		}

	MPI::Finalize();

	return 0;
}

Do not forget that you need to have OpenMPI configured and installed in your machine in order to have this code work. There’re some tutorials on the Internet how you can add it to Visual Studio.

You can find some more info about this algorithm on Wikipedia.

A short video about what to expect from the newest PrestaShop 1.5 version. Mike Kranzler, PrestaShop’s Community Manager, answers some of most commonly-asked questions about PrestaShop version 1.5.

The book called “Pragmatic Programmer, The: From Journeyman to Master” about software engineering and best practices was first published in 1999. This book was written by two experienced programmers and writers Andrew Hunt and David Thomas who are both known for their big income in respectively agile techniques and Ruby programming language.  The Pragmatic Programmer tries to gather all the necessary characteristics of a programmer that creates high quality, easy to reuse and bug free software solutions.

First of all, the authors describe the pragmatic programmer’s characteristics and what qualities that programmer should have, for example, they suggest that a pragmatic programmer must accept his or hers responsibilities and do not make trifling excuses for mistakes he or she have done. They suggest that a good programmer should not allow making minor mistakes because of the psychological phenomenon which is called the broken window theory.

In addition, a pragmatic programmer should invest regularly in his knowledge and portfolio by experimenting with unpopular and sometimes risky technologies or new languages. Authors suggest that a good programmer should learn new programming language each year. Also there are some tips on how to avoid repeating the same code blocks and maintain a clear and unambiguous code. Everything should be separated to abstract different modules that interact with each other. The book also stresses that there are no endpoints and final decisions for the projects and maintenance starts with the first steps of the project. Authors advise not to hurry and plan everything in detail even if you have a strict and hard to meet deadlines. Thinking more at first will save lots of time at the end and will help you to prevent from making major bugs and bad decisions on the go.

Thirdly, the importance of quality tools is considered one of the most important things especially when optimizing the job. Authors give an analogy with tree cutters and other craftsman by stressing the importance of tools. In addition, a pragmatic programmer should not be afraid of command line and choose IDE wisely. Version Control Systems should be used even on small projects because they help to save and archive all changes made in the code. When talking about optimizing  tasks, there is a suggestion to learn a text editing language such as Perl which will definitely help in replacing some parts of code and creating code generators or working with the text itself. A simple text format is said to be the best way to save data for later use.

Moreover, this book might help you to understand that no one is writing perfect code and you need to think of mistakes as problems that you need to solve. Being nervous or angry will not help in this case.  The book introduces some tips in order to help avoid these problems, for example, exceptions, MVC architecture, modules, metadata capabilities, parallel programming and testing techniques, blackboards are discussed in the book.  Authors do not suggest to create fastest algorithms too because they are usually very complicated and not readable.

Finally, there are great advices on what to do and how to handle when working with pragmatic projects. The authors also make an analogy for people to think that programming and software engineering is like having a garden which you need to look after constantly and you should not think about it as construction site which has the end. Pragmatic programmers should not let bad habits overcome the quality of code and projects because they will destroy your garden as pervasive disease.

I have found that Snippely saves its database in catalog on Windows 7: C:\Users\{Your user name}\AppData\Roaming and you can make the copy of this file for some later use. I have tried to reinstall fresh copy of the program and the backup worked just fine.

Just do not forget to create those backups constantly!

After some research I have found that you need to press alt + space after you select the icon from the taskbar and then choose maximize from the pop up menu. That’s all – you can now use your snippets program as usually.

I hope this helps someone having the same issue.

Module features:

• Send emails to your PrestaShop customers
• Send newsletter email on their birthday
• You can use variables for your emails to make it more personal: %FIRSTNAME% – %LASTNAME% – %MAIL%
• Works good with your server because there is an ability to add delay on sending emails
• You get a detailed information about the process when it is finished
• You can check all checkboxes and the script will automatically filter duplicate emails.

Here is a screenshot:

Download: Newsletter Tab Module for PrestaShop 1.4.4 v1.1

UPDATE v1.1: 2011-06-22:

• Added automatic translastions to the admin tab class
• Added ability to choose parent tab for your Newsletter tab
• fixed some mistakes

UPDATE v1.1: 2011-06-29

• Mistakes regarding configuration and parent tab selecting form for 1.4.3 were fixed.

UPDATE v1.1: 2011-08-15

• Deleted some unnecessary functions for better and easier installation.
• Tested and works fine with versions 1.4.3 and 1.4.4.

Download: Newsletter Tab Module for PrestaShop 1.4.4 v1.1

Leave feedback and comments if you want more functionality or have problems.