We made some changes to how users are registered in web-to-print portals. It may not appear as a big change on the outside, but we had to make some major changes in the back end to enable it. Still work in progress as we need to add some more convenience features to the process.

Email confirmation is not required

A user can register beforehand, during or after ordering. The user can leave the site, come back and log in without clicking on the confirmation link. The email will be marked as unconfirmed. The user is reminded to confirm it.

We hope it will make life a bit easier in cases where confirmation emails do not reach users or end up in junk mail.

User ownership

If a printer adds a user and the email status is unconfirmed the user can only access corporate catalogs by domain name within the web-to-print portal of the printer that created the user. Once the email is confirmed the user can access such catalogs on any other ZP web-to-print portal. This change may affect printers running several web-to-print portals as different accounts and share users between them.

Bugs

We won’t be surprised if we missed a thing or two with this registration change. Please, let us know ASAP if you spot anything unusual.

We released a beta version of some image management and image editing functions for our web-to-print API.

There is not much at the moment:

• get list of images
• get image details
• upload new
• delete
• crop
• rotate
• edit title

Some other functions are in stealth mode and will be released soon:

• copy to different folder
• move to different folder

We want to add a few filters to the mix, e.g. grayscale,  sepia, watercolor, etc. Need your input on what you think will be popular with your web-to-print customers. Your suggestion on what you think is a good implementation of this functionality are very welcome.

Web-to-print image editing will appear in our Magento web-to-print plugin first and then will be transferred to the core user interface. This is work in progress at the moment.

Our team is back in full strength (almost) and we’ll start rolling out some changes you need to know in advance.

Asynchronous image uploading

Images will be uploaded as soon as they are selected. This will eliminate the problem of the uploads being too large. Users should not notice any difference, only it will be faster.

If you think this will disadvantage your users, please, email us with your concerns. We may be able to leave your store on the old interface for some time.

Skin color changes feature will be removed

We will be removing the color changing feature for web-to-print store skins. You will need to use CSS to make appearance changes. There will be no change in the skin appearance, but if you are planning to change colors soon we suggest you find someone with CSS knowledge now to help you. Any web designer or web programmer should be able to do it.

Sorry, we’ve been quite since moving the new hosting. The core team is still busy bringing order and stability to your hosted web-to-print portal. It’s not as reliable at the moment as it should be. We are planing to complete all the admin, backup and auto-scaling procedures in the next few days. You probably won’t notice from the user end, but we’ll feel much better with all the fail-over protection.

Magento web-to-print update

We released a new version of our web-to-print extension for Magento. It is taking some real shape with most bugs fixed. Not saying it is perfect, but it works.

Custom themes

An important change is how web-to-print integrates into a custom them. We recommend that you upgrade to the latest version and change your theme as well. The sooner you do it the easier it will be to apply further updates.

Configurable and simple web-to-print products

Previous versions could work only with simple products. Now you can link any product to an imported web-to-print template. Simple web-to-print products can be created in bulk from imported web-to-print templates, but they still need to be configured with prices and options.

See our web-to-print for Magento demo for more links and info.

We added a new feature to help you manage designers for your entire web-to-print site in one place.

Web-to-print designer role can be used to manage orders and templates. You can give your graphic designers and production managers access to your web-to-print portal as designers. It will free the master account and reduce the login sharing problems.

Click on DESIGNERS link in the top menu bar for the site. It is the one right under the top banner. Enter the designer’s email and select catalogs to grant access to. Save the changes.

Your current skin may be slightly out of date. Consider switching to our new web-to-print skins for automatic updates.

Hopefully, this little new feature will make your web-to-print chores a bit easier.

We realeased a new feature to add a color picker to any shape, a vector shape in this case.

A color picker could only be used in image fields, which are bitmaps. It was somewhat limiting because transparencies didn’t work there.

With vector shapes you can add a color picker and overlay them with different transparency settings to get gradient fills, random gradient fills, change color scheme of the entiry web-to-print template, etc.

Read more on web-to-print help site and learn how to use variable gradients.

Favicon

Don’t like the cute yellow ZetaPrints logo on every page of your web-to-print portal? No more!

Go to BRANDING / Page layout and enter a URL of your own favicon.ico.

Sorry, you need some server to put it on first, but at least you have this option now.

More in web-to-print help.

Order cancellations

You may have this problem if you are selling consumer web-to-print products – a web-to-print order was placed and paid for, then canceled, re-ordered and paid again. What a mess!

Now you can go to BRANDING / Page layout and specify a URL of your cancellation and refund policy. If a user tried to cancel a paid order the system will not cancel the order, but will redirect the user to this page instead. You can go and cancel the order any time.

You need to create this policy page on your WWW website. There is also a more advanced option to handle refunds automatically, if you want. Read this web-to-print help post for more info.

Cluster reboot

We will need to re-boot the entire cluster in a few hours. A few minutes of downtime are possible.

How to get more traffic

We’ve just released a WordPress plugin for an image generator.

The plugin can connect to your catalogs and users will be able to email your designs as e-cards.

It is not possible to email directly from Flash. The server-side part of the plugin handles all the configuration and emailing.

There are a couple of minor glitches, still, but overall it is usable.

This service is free. You are not paying anything. There is a link on every design page in Flash to jump to the ordering page.

Make a few simple templates your audience may want to use and let them have a bit of fun before they are ready to order.  Ideally, you need to approach other blogs and ask them to embed this to get more traffic to your site.

Magento

We’ve been flat out working on Magento web-to-print integration. It is now in a stable beta stage. You can grab it directly from Magento website. Contact admin@zetaprints.com if you run into any glitches. We are giving full installation assistance at this stage. This is an open source project, so you can always get your own developers to turn it into a web-to-print store you want.

Upcoming features

Three main streams of work:

• Improve Text.1, Text.2 web-to-print ext field linking and Text~ fields with per-char formatting
• Add custom blocks of text to let you write your own emails and insert some user or order details.
• Improve search, including searching by size and download file type.

A re-designed PayPal Pro plugin for WordPress is coming out soon too. It should reduce number of declined transactions as PayPal may get fussy with it’s hosted payments page.

From now on, administering orders in your web-to-print system can be done by designers.

Previously it could only be done by the master account. We expanded the role of designer to cover what production does.

A designer can see orders only for web-to-print catalogs he was granted access to.

Designers can browse, search web-to-print orders, view order details, change order status.

They cannot wave or manage payments. This is a grey area at the moment. We have conflicting requirements. Please, email admin@zetaprints.com if you want them to manage payments as well.

Designers cannot empty deleted folder or view user details beyond what is showing in the order details. Nor can they manage users.

Access for print production

We are making a change to let web-to-print designers access orders, including changing web-to-print order status.

A designer with access to a web-to-print catalog on your web-to-print site will be able to see and manage orders for that catalog. It will be kind of a shared designer/production role.

Please, check your catalogs and remove designers if you do not want them to see your orders. You may want to create some test catalogs for them specifically and then copy them into production, if you don’t want them to see orders, but still want to work with templates.

This change will come into effect in the next few days.

Bug fixes

We had a problem with repeating images for some time, but it’s no more. You can design web-to-print templates and re-use the same image (for effects?) as many times on the same page as you need. Just watch the file size.

A whole bunch of other bugs was fixed. If you know of any bugs we missed, please, let us know.

New web-to-print features

We added a few new neat tricks you can do with text fields. Check out this overview post.

Web-to-print widget

We are updating out Flash widget. Some new features there and we removed ZETAPRINTS from the screen as it was a little bit too much self-promo. It has a neutral welcome screen now, if any.

You can see the widget and embedding code if you enable it for a catalog or enable sharing for a template. The widget can show as an embeddable plugin on a page or take the full screen. Give it a try. Make a few viral designs, spread the word and see if it brings you more traffic.

One of the key factors in YouTube success was embedding. Their rivals did not allow that. You know which strategy won in the end.