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 an access control extension for Magento.

Magento Community edition (the free one) has no access control. It’s a feature of their Enterprise edition, which costs money. We created a simple extension that allows access control at a basic level, but it should do the job for small portals. Please, give it a try.

Web-to-print extension update

We also released a stable update for our web-to-print extension for Magento. It went through a dozen of betas and has many bugs fixed, plus many new features. It’s really shaping up now. Image uploading and basic editing features are in the works. We planned to release them couple of weeks ago, but the festive season got on the way.

You need to update the XML in data import and product creation profiles for the latest upgrade to work correctly. See the latest help for web-to-print extension.

Problems with emails

We are having problems with many emails not being delivered. It is a complex issue with some of it beyond our control. We are trying to find altenatives, but it may take another 24 hrs.

Would you like notifications about new web-to-print orders to arrive as text messages to your cellphone via Twitter? Flick us an email and we’ll set you up.

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.