• Anonymous checkout in Sitefinity eCommerce

    by Venkata Koppaka | Sep 04, 2011

    Often on your eCommerce website,you might want to allow users to anonymously checkout that is allowing them to place an order even though they are not a customer of your website. There are number of reasons on why you allow anonymous checkout which you can read more about here.

    This post will show you how you would enable anonymous checkout of Sitefinity eCommerce 4.2.

    The Checkout widget controls the checkout process in Sitefinity eCommerce, so when you drag and drop Checkout widget on to your page, hit edit for bringing up the control designer property screen


    Hit advanced button on the control designer to bring up advanced properties. In the list of properties of checkout widget there is a property called CheckoutRequiresLogin, by default this value is set to true which means, every user that will checkout using your website will need to register with your website. But if you change the setting to false, the eCommerce system will allow users to checkout even though they are not a registered user of the system.

    Below is a screenshot of where the property is on Checkout Designer properties.

    Hope this helps

    Cheers

    Venkata

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  • Get started with eCommerce module using Sitefinity 4.2

    by Venkata Koppaka | Aug 11, 2011

    The Sitefinity’s 4.2 Release, brings a new module to the picture ECommerce.

    This post walks you through how to setup a store and all the steps that are required in the process.

    First let’s talk about the feature set of the eCommerce module -

    Features

    The initial release of eCommerce lets you –

    Backend Features


    1.       Manage Products
    2.       Manage Product Types
    3.       Manage Departments
    4.       Manage Customers 
    5.       Manage Orders
    6.       Manage Shipping Methods
    7.       Manage Discounts and Sale Prices
    8.       Manage Payment Methods
    9.       Manage Taxes

    10.   Reports

     

    Frontend Features


    1.       Showing Product List with Sale / VAT Price
    2.       Product Detail page with configurable routing
    3.       Shopping Cart page
    4.       Checkout page with Anonymous login
    5.       My Orders page which lets the users see the orders they placed

    6.       Invoice page which shows the invoice of the purchased order

    To get started with the eCommerce module, a merchant will need
    1.       Pages (that shows various eCommerce controls)
    2.       Basic, Shipping and SMTP settings
    3.       Payment Method

    Let us talk about each of them in detail –

    Pages required by eCommerce

    Any basic store will need the following pages to be created in Sitefinity pages section –


    1.       Product List Page: The page that lists the available products in the store.
    2.       Shopping Cart Page: The page that shows the shopping cart control and lets the users checkout.
    3.       Checkout Page: The page that accepts user’s credit card information and performs checkout.
    4.       Confirmation Page: The page that the user will get redirected to after placing an order.

    Settings required by eCommerce

    The following settings are required by the eCommerce module to work correctly –


    1.       Basic eCommerce Settings (under Sitefinity/Administration/Settings/Advanced/Ecommerce)

    a.       Default Currency

    b.      Shipping From Country

    c.       Shipping From Zip

    d.      Merchant Email


    2.       Shipping Settings (under Sitefinity/Administration/Settings/Advanced/Shipping)

    a.       Shipping Carrier Provider


    3.       SMTP Settings (under Sitefinity/Administration/Settings/Advanced/System/SMTP (Email Settings))

    a.       Settings for sending out email

    Payment Method

    Every Ecommerce system requires payments methods to be setup to process payments. The Ecommerce module will support two different Payment Processors by default


    1.       Authorize .net

    a.       Authorize .net by default needs URL, Login Id and transaction key.


    2.       PayPal PayFlowPro

    a.       Thee PayPal PayFlow Pro by default needs URL, Username, Password, Vendor and Partner information. You can signup for a PayPal PayFlowPro account here

    Widgets

     


    1.       Product List: This widget shows a list of products that are available in the store.
    2.       Buy Now: Useful when the merchant wants to show a single product buy now option
    3.       Shopping cart Summary:  This widget shows the summary of the users shopping cart (Number of items in the cart and subtotal information)
    4.       Shopping cart: This widget shows the shopping cart of the uses and lets the user checkout or continue shopping.
    5.       Checkout: This widget shows the Checkout (Order related) form and lets the user to place the Order.
    6.       Order list: This widget shows list of orders place for the online store.
    7.       Order invoice: This widget shows the invoice of a particular Order

    I will be posting more in detail regarding each widget and how to use the other parts of the Sitefinity Ecommerce system soon.

    Stay tuned!

    Cheers

    Venkata

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  • I don't always test my code....

    by Venkata Koppaka | Jul 17, 2011
    Saw this funny image and thought I would share.


    Cheers

    Venkata

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  • Republishing Pages in Sitefinity 4.X

    by Venkata Koppaka | Jun 20, 2011

    If you would like to Republish pages in Sitefinity 4.X for any reason this post will help you write a custom page to do this task.

    Up until 4.1 this Republish page is a very important page to have as when you make changes to the template, the content pages did not get the latest changes from the template. You had to open up each and every content page and then hit Publish on that page. This is a cumbersome task especially if you have a lot of content pages.

    To ease up this procedure here is a quick asp.net page to Republish all pages(and clear the cache) -

    Create a page called RepublishPages.aspx on the root of the Sitefinity website. In the code behind of that page copy & paste the following code -

     

    1 using System; 
    2 using System.Linq; 
    3 using Telerik.Sitefinity; 
    4 using Telerik.Sitefinity.GenericContent.Model; 
    5 using Telerik.Sitefinity.Modules.Pages; 
    6 using Telerik.Sitefinity.Pages.Model; 
    7  
    8 namespace SitefinityWebApp 
    9 { 
    10     public partial class RePublishPages : System.Web.UI.Page 
    11     { 
    12         protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) 
    13         { 
    14             var pageNodes = App.WorkWith() 
    15                                          .Pages() 
    16                                          .LocatedIn(Telerik.Sitefinity.Fluent.Pages.PageLocation.Frontend) 
    17                                          .Get() 
    18                                          .Where(pN => pN.Page.Status == ContentLifecycleStatus.Live) 
    19                                          .ToList(); 
    20             foreach (PageNode p in pageNodes) 
    21             { 
    22                 var myId = p.Page.Id; 
    23                 var manager = PageManager.GetManager(); 
    24                 var myDraft = manager.EditPage(myId, true);                 
    25                 manager.PublishPageDraft(myDraft, true); 
    26                 manager.SaveChanges(); 
    27             } 
    28         } 
    29     } 
    30 } 

    And whenever you want to Republish pages just browse to this page and all the pages would be published with the latest changes.

     NOTE: Majority of the code is from this discussion - Not answered Adding content to template does not show on pages but changed a little according to my comment here .

    If you would like to download the Republish Page on the whole (aspx and codebehind)  Click Here

    Hope this helps

    Cheers

    Venkata


    Go comment!

  • Telerik MVC Music Store : MVC Music Store with Telerik OpenAccess ORM

    by Venkata Koppaka | Jun 14, 2011
    I would like to introduce you all to Telerik MVC Music Store. The sample is completely based off MVC Music Store, with Telerik OpenAccess ORM as database accessing mechanism.

    I would love if you download and give the project a try.

    Cheers 
    Venkata

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