MurraySoft Blog

We’ve been developing a website that devours the web!  XOOMSites is a search engine that scours the web looking for information on websites.

XOOMSites pulls relevant information from a webpage and inserts into a MySQL database.  From that database, we can spin this data in numerous ways, from related sites to who hosts a site.

Today we started showing a new feature.  On each page there is a section titled “Other Sites Hosted on this IP”.   While other domain-name services are charging $20 a month for this information, XOOMSites offers it for free!  Enjoy!

XOOMSites is currently indexing over 300,000 new websites every month.  If you’re site isn’t on the list, go to the Add URL to XOOMSites page and add your site!

Also check out XOOMblogs.com for Free Wordpress Hosting.

MurraySoft runs X-Cart as our main site engine (along with Wordpress and Mediawiki).  We are always getting emails with questions about upgrading, changing, modding or templating X-Cart.

We’ve decided to create a section in our Wiki just for X-Cart.  Over time we will be documenting all of X-Carts functions and code, as well documenting some of the more popular mods (including our list of mods).  The wiki is also an open wiki which means YOU, our user community can help us by adding your comments and mods as well!   Enjoy, and keep watching as we add more information each and every day!

The Wiki is located here: X-Cart Wiki

One question I see often is “How do I change the title of the X-Cart landing page (home.php) but let X-Cart control the rest of the page titles normally.  It’s simple, and in my honest opinion (which is worth less than… nevermind) should be included in the standard build of x-cart.  Nevertheless, here is how you do it:

In customer/home.tpl, replace this:

<title>{strip}
{capture name=title}
{if $config.SEO.page_title_format eq “A”}
{section name=position loop=$location}
{if not %position.first%}&nbsp;::&nbsp;{/if}
{$location[position].0|strip_tags|escape}
{/section}
{else}
{section name=position loop=$location step=-1}
{if not %position.first%}&nbsp;::&nbsp;{/if}
{$location[position].0|strip_tags|escape}
{/section}
{/if}
{/capture}
{if $config.SEO.page_title_limit <= 0}
{$smarty.capture.title}
{else}
{$smarty.capture.title|replace:”&nbsp;”:” “|truncate:$config.SEO.page_title_limit|replace:” “:”&nbsp;”}
{/if}
{/strip}</title>

and replace it with this:

<title>
{if $main eq “catalog” and $current_category.category eq “”}
Insert your keyword-rich title here
{else}
{strip}
{capture name=title}
{if $config.SEO.page_title_format eq “A”}
{section name=position loop=$location}
{if not %position.first%}&nbsp;::&nbsp;{/if}
{$location[position].0|strip_tags|escape}
{/section}
{else}
{section name=position loop=$location step=-1}
{if not %position.first%}&nbsp;::&nbsp;{/if}
{$location[position].0|strip_tags|escape}
{/section}
{/if}
{/capture}
{if $config.SEO.page_title_limit <= 0}
{$smarty.capture.title}
{else}
{$smarty.capture.title|replace:”&nbsp;”:” “|truncate:$config.SEO.page_title_limit|replace:” “:”&nbsp;”}
{/if}
{/strip}{/if}</title>

In the second set of code, replace the Insert Your Title Here… with the tile you’d like on the main page.  It’s that simple!

UPDATE:  In X-Cart 4.2 this has changed.

in file skin1/customer/service_head.tpl

<title>{$html_page_title|escape}</title>

to

<title>
{if $main eq "catalog" && $current_category.category eq ""}
Place you homepage title here
{else}
{$html_page_title|escape}
{/if}
</title>

Google Sitemaps for X-Cart 4.x by MurraySoft

One of the most frustrating issues with X-Cart is that is does not support something as simple as Google Sitemaps out of the box.

Google Sitemaps, along with Bing, Yahoo! and other search engines which now support the XML Sitemap standard use these XML files as a directory of your website.  This helps the search engine to find pages and information it might not otherwise find by spidering your site.  In fact, many SEO experts are now claiming that Sitemaps are now a requirement for decent SERPs placements on major search engines.

MurraySoft has filled this hole by creating a simple drop in PHP module for X-Cart.  Simply drop the sitemap.php file into your root X-Cart directory and and point Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc to http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.php.  That’s all there is to it!  No configuration, setting up permissions, etc.  Sitemaps for X-Cart 4.x reads your X-Cart configuration file (config.php) to get access to your database and create the sitemaps with zero user input or configuration.

Get it here: Google Sitemaps for X-Cart 4.x

One question surrounding X-Cart that get’s brought up often regarding news management is “When my users sign up, I want the box to be ticked automatically to sign up for emails.  I put checked=”checked” in the code, but now it’s always checked even if they are not subscribed.  How do I fix this?”

It’s actually quite simple, and all it takes is a little logic.  Here’s what you do:

You should alter the “<xart_dir>/skin1/modules/News_Management/register_newslists.tpl” template.

Find this code:
<input type=”checkbox” name=”subscription[{$listid}]” {if $subscription[$listid] ne “”}checked=”checked”{/if} />

And replace it with this:
<input type=”checkbox” name=”subscription[{$listid}]” {if $subscription[$listid] ne “” or $login eq “”}checked=”checked”{/if} />

That’s all there is to it!