Inspiring Use of "Latest Products"

[Guest laptoptrading]

Well, I'm back- looking for inspirational uses of the "Latest Products" box, I'm set-up with 9 products listed on the front page at all times, listed from top, to bottom latest > oldest.

Default stuff, right?

Has anyone done anything particularly clever with this code? I mean, I'd like to list 3 of the 'latest items' from Each catagory, 3 rows. This is possible?

If not, I'm just interested to see some nice front-pages, I've done some Googling around, but hmm. Well, here's our site: Under Serrious Construction!. Any pointers would be... nice. :errm:

[Robsta]

Not a bad looking site. I have the same problem with the front page as you. Sometimes, the latest products list just doesn't work as you want it to. Ho hum.

[Guest]

I have a mod that will streamline the look of the Latest Products box.

Chech it out here.

It's shown on a 2 column format, but will work for 3 columns too. I also have this mod installed on some of my skins, so have a look around my store.

Jen

[Guest sunshine]

Hi Jen,

Does that '&' symbol in your Product Listings cause your code to be invalid? If not, how were you able to fix that? Thanks :w00t:

[Robsta]

In which file does the 'Latest Product' code reside? Was having a look and couldn't see it...

[Guest]

Sunshine,

TBH, I really don't know what & symbol you are referring to. Uuuuh, but I haven't had anything to fix anything with the latest products code.

Robsta,

The Latest Products code is in /yourskin/styleTemplates/content/index.tpl

Happy to help!

Jen

[Guest]

OOOOh, Sunshine, do you mean the names of my products that have & symbols in them? I haven't had any issues that I needed to fix. I altered index.tpl allot to get the Latest products to show how I wanted it to, so it's possible I fixed it on accident. Not sure . . .

Jen

[markscarts]

Hmm, I guess I might have seen a post or two somewhere wher the ampersand "&" was being converted to ISO number equivalent or name, but the usual problem when it arises is the use of apostrophe in titles . . . due to the way "htmlspecialchars" is used in the code

There has been alot of discussion about this, and I don't know if a fix was added to 3.0.6 but I think maybe so?

Latest Products . . . in addition to Jen's formatting of Latest Prods display, there is a setting in the add products/edit products that allows you to specify whether prods are included in Latest Prods,; therefore, if you wish to choose three prods from each category, no problem. The actual number of Latest Prods displayed can be set under general settings in ACP.

Also, I have written a tutorial that gives some basics about manipulating Latest Prods that can be had for free on this page. If you know where to go in your stylesheets and in styleTemplates/content/index.tpl you can customize Latest Products to your heart's content :w00t:

[Guest sunshine]

Hi Grassmeyer,

Thank you. You probably took care of it in your one of your tweaking modes. I don't think I'll use them anyway but I was curious.

Hi MarksCarts,

If I remember, it either failed or errored in my css/xml validation.

[markscarts]

If I remember, it either failed or errored in my css/xml validation

Not sure what you mean, are you still writing about the ampersand? ( & )?

The problem with special characters has to do with php. there is an $htmlspecialchars that tells php how to handle special characters, and Sir William wrote a bunch of info in a thread about the problem with CC3 - keeping the CSS and XML validated was causing a problem with the way php was handling special characters, I think.

On another php driven program I used the past couple of years, apostrophes were a big problem, and I've see post here about it. I had some apostrophes and ampersands in category title and caused problems uploading a csv file a couple months ago in 3.0.2 - I had to do away with the special charaters to make it work.

Also, some users on different servers may have a problem while others don't. Prolly php version or server parsing issues . . . but all of that is still a little over my head, I'm afraid :w00t:

[Guest]

Hey Markscarts,

I have a question for you. . . . how do you fix the bullets in Explorer? I hate IE, my skins look perfect in every other browser but IE makes the custom bullets unaligned with the titles.

I'm placing the bullets like this in style.css

 li.bullet {

	list-style-image: url(../styleImages/backgrounds/bullet.gif);

}

I tried resizing my bullet images, I tried adding a verticle align property, too. I can't figure out how to get them perfectly aligned.

Any ideas?

Jen

[markscarts]

Hi Jen, it's a frustrating PITA for me too.

I've searched for a way to control placement of list-style-image and haven't found one, so I've had to control it with editing the actual images (more invisible space at the top) and/or controlloing margins or padding on the text class that appears in the list.

I don't really despise IE, although MS is probably the worst of the browsers when it comes to competition and pettiness. Netscape was very much responsible as well, in the beginning of the browser wars, for putting us where we are today with the frustrating differences between Mozilla, IE and other engines. If not for the W3C things would be alot worse :whistle: