It's been a long time, but finally here's a new cpshop, with new functionality. The CafePress site was completely overhauled this week, and I figured it made sense to put off working on some other projects, and give cpshop a little TLC.

The changes are mostly small, but are all based on things posted to the Feature Request board, so hopefully they'll come in handy. The biggest thing is really the update to support the new CP layout, but some new filters and admin fields should also make customization that much more flexible.

changes in cpshop 1.5

• Updated to support CafePress redesign
• added cpfilter_columns to force number of columns
• added cpfilter_rowsperpage to force number of rows per page
• added support for price ranges with multiple cpfilter_cost filters (e.g. cpfilter_cost:10.00~,cpfilter_cost:~20.00)
• added unlimited Wildcard ID fields
• added error page URL (for CafePress server issues)
• added overriding style sheet field
• replaced most embedded styles with classes
• sections are now always sorted first, regardless of filters

how to upgrade

1. Unzip the contents of either cpshop1.5-Unix-update.zip or cpshop1.5-Win-update.zip. Be sure you use the "update" zip file -- and NOT the "full" zip file -- to upgrade!
2. Upload the contents of the zip file to the cpshop directory on your server.
3. Test your store.

Updated to support CafePress redesign

The new CP redesign caused a few smaller issues, like double breadcrumbs, broken additional images, and formatting weirdness. This new version corrects those issues.

If you want to set a special number of columns for a particular store ID, now you can. For example, use cpfilter_columns:4 to set a particular store to 4 columns. Easy, huh?

Pretty much the same as the above, but allows you to force pagination when too many products are showing up on a particular page.

If you want to have price ranges, you can now use multiple cpfilter_cost filters together. For example, if you want to show products between $10 and $20, you could use:

cpfilter_cost:10.00~,cpfilter_cost:~20.00

A number of people have told me how useful the Wildcard ID field is, and how they wish there was more than one. Well, now there are as many as you want. Hopefully that's enough.

If cpshop has trouble connecting to the CafePress servers (if, say, the CP site is down), then you can tell cpshop to bounce the customer to a special error page (which you create). If you leave this field blank, it'll just display the maintenance message (which you can configure in the custom lang file). This should be a vast improvement from the server errors in the past.

Once you start using stylesheets, I know how annoying it is when you're prevented from being able to take advantage of them. So I've made these two changes to make css that much more compatible with cpshop.

In the past, sections have been sorted in with the products. The more I thought about it, it really didn't make sense to do that. So now sections are always sorted first, with products after.

the last word(s)

I've been definitely overwhelmed with projects recently, both personal and work-related, and it's definitely taking its toll. I think I'm starting to realize that it's tiring to always feel like I haven't finished the things I need to finish. So, slowly, I've been trying to finish some of the many projects I've started. That's one of the reasons I felt the need to finally add some requested features to cpshop. It's nice to feel like you've actually accomplished something.

The next big thing for me is to try to finish working on my postcard site. I started rewriting it in .NET last year, and I've yet to finish it. I've clearly got to do that this summer; I'm really sick of feeling like I can't complete anything, and I want to prove to myself that I can. So please, wish me luck, and feel free to email me, and remind me I should be working on postcards. I could use the encouragement.

As always, let me know if you have any problems with this, either via or posting on the message board.

Regards, Marty