December 23rd, 2011

Some of our clients do tend to stand out in the web-to-print crowd, www.eprinting.cl is a good example. These guys give a good demonstration of how far one can take our web-to-print service and take advantage of all its features.

Web-to-print localization

Their site is fully localized for the Spanish market in Chile. This is one of the languages that our web-to-print extension for Magento comes pre-translated with. You can translate your store into any language.

ePrinting localized Spanish web-to-print store

Custom web-to-print themes

These guys obviously made the right choice when they decided to go with a Magento based web-to-print store. Magento’s powerful eCommerce storefront comes packed with tons of features and is extensively supported by numerous third-party extensions, such as our own. On top of all, the looks of a Magento store can be completely customized by integrating custom themes.

ePrinting web-to-print product page

December 12th, 2011

We’ve just rolled out an update to fix some bugs found in PDF generation when pages are left as default if not updated. The rumor has it that we botched it up big time. Web-to-print products with printing templates do not always produce the intended output. The PDF files do not always match the previews. It is bad and embarrassing, but we need another 8 – 12 hrs to fix it all properly. It’s out design fault because we didn’t account for one common scenario. It became apparent after the roll-out.

All faulty PDFs can be successfully regenerated when the problem is fixed in less than a day. We are working on it right now.

Shame. It was meant to be a merry post announcing a new cool feature :(

November 30th, 2011

We added a new feature to the web-to-print portals that allows you to get the print-ready files from saved orders faster.

A saved order is an order that has not been completed. The user may come back and complete or delete it. All saved orders, that haven’t had their print-ready output files generated yet, will have a “Generate files” link right there on orders list page.

You just need to click the link and you’ll be sent to the order details page with the output files already generated and links to them available.

Magento web-to-print orders

Magento web-to-print orders added to cart, but not checked out with a payment remain as saved within your ZetaPrints portal. You can locate them via Order Details page in Magento and then use this new link to generate output files.

 

November 21st, 2011

We are having some weird connectivity issues. It is not specific to our web-to-print and dynamic imaging system. Many customer web-to-print sites are dropping connections for no reason as well. It manifests itself in half-loaded images, no CSS being loaded, broken pages and other unusual behavior.

Sorry, nothing we can do about it.Looks like it’s the network.

AWS health dashboard is saying it’s not their fault either.

Let us know if your site is having problems too.

November 21st, 2011

We released version 1.9.2.0beta16 of our Magento web-to-print extension few hours ago.
It has a reasonably stable image editor, additional page info and numerous bug fixes.

Please, give it a try on a test site. The image editor will make your web-to-print site a more flexible proposition to customers as they can now fit their images into the frame the way the want with shift, crop and resize as in this web-to-print demo.

dynamic image editor

 

web to print page size

 

 

 

Waiting for your feedback to support@zetaprints.com.

November 21st, 2011

We made a pretty cool upgrade to the Magento image editor that comes built in our web-to-print extension for Magento. Cropping images just became a lot easier and more intelligent.

Your web-to-print templates contain variable images that come in all shapes and sizes. Users will now be able to adapt any image they’ve uploaded in a way that is relevant to a specific image field shape and size requirements.

The new “Fit-in-field” tool we’ve added is basically a smart crop tool that has its selection area shape locked to a proportional shape according to the image placeholder of the template.

We split the image editor toolbox menu in two sections:

  1. Adapt for this field and
  2. Global changes

The top one introduces this new “Fit-in-field” tool and any image edits using this tool are used for the active image field only. This means that the same image can be cropped differently for different image fields in a single template.

Global changes” section, on the other hand, holds the old and familiar tools which change uploaded images for all fields in all the templates.

Yet another user-friendly feature is the horizontal shortcuts menu that is included in the ”Fit-in-field” tool interface and allows users to quickly fit their uploaded image in the variable image area of the template they’re personalizing.

This new image editor feature is included in the latest beta (1.9.2.0beta15) release of the extension and is activated by default.

November 14th, 2011

We made a significant change how large multipage web-to-print templates are handled at the back end. It was a bit of a weak spot for us. For example a 12-page web-to-print calendar was too slow as the user progressed through the page. Not any more. There is no difference processing page 1 or page 12 or page 20.

PDF generation got a wee bit faster too.

Time to get serious about web-to-print calendars. Let us know if your web-to-print templates are still not fast enough or simply time out. We will try to make them work.

November 9th, 2011

Just added bulk-edit support for web-to-print multipage options so you can change this web-to-print setting for multiple templates in one step.

Also, menu for web-to-print catalogs has changed slightly. Clone catalog and Bulk edit now show in the catalog’s menu.

Read more about multipage options in this web-to-print help post.

web-to-print multipage

November 6th, 2011

Just added a new simple web-to-print feature to control file generation for multipage templates.

The default setting always was to exclude pages users never updated. This works for some, but not other web-to-print templates.

Now you have a choice of:

  • exclude default (not updated) pages
  • include default pages as is in the template
  • require all pages to be updated before checking out

The setting is controlled on template details page.

web-to-print multipage template settings

 

 

October 28th, 2011

Web to print functionality is pretty much unusable at the moment and will be for some more minutes due to an unexpected DB clean up. In other words, we were doing something we shouldn’t be doing at this time of day, screwed up and now trying to clean the mess while your customers are trying to order. Shame.

Sorry about it. :(