Category: Newsletter

WordPress Security and Cart66 News

This past week has been mostly a week of coding and behind the scenes enhancements paving the way for a new Cart66 features that should land soon – perhaps as soon as next week! For now, I wanted to share some important information about keeping your online store safe and secure.

It’s Not About SSL Certificates

Everybody knows that if you are going to run an online store you have to make sure you provide a safe and secure website for your customers. A common myth is that you can just install an SSL certificate on your site and that’s all it takes.

This crazy story helps clear that up.

Image

Your Hosted Payment Page

Security is one of the most important things if you are running an online store. Cart66 gives you the strongest security possible by providing a PCI compliant hosted payment page that looks EXACTLY like your WordPress site and works with over 100 payment gateways – all built in.

The Cart66 platform, is the most secure ecommerce system for WordPress. In addition to securing the payment form, Cart66 also secures all of your critical e-commerce data, right down to the contents of the shopping cart itself. Cart66 secures:

  • All credit card payments
  • All of your product definitions (prices, options, etc.)
  • All of your customer data
  • All customer order history
  • Saved billing information
  • Subscription payments
  • Shopping cart contents

Watch this video to see how your secure hosted payment page works and why it is important.

Image

Cart66 Cloud Plugin Updates

Tuesday we released Cart66 Cloud 2.0.11 which includes a handful of enhancements and lays the groundwork for some new Cart66 features which may land as soon as next week. We updated some JavaScript libraries and tweaked a few things for a smoother ride on WordPress 4.5. The details are in the change log in the WordPress repo.

Around The Web

WordPress 4.5.1 Released
If you have not already, you should update to WordPress 4.5.1 – the latest maintenance release that fixes 12 bugs recently discovered.

Being A Developer After 40
Coding isn’t just for the 20-somethings. There is a growing group of developers over 40 years old. Here are some simple tips for staying a happy developer.

Structuring WordPress Plugins
It seems everyone has some of their own ideas on how to structure the code in their WordPress plugins. Nevertheless, you can always learn a few things from someone else. Here are Brady Vercher’s thoughts about how to structure WordPress plugins.

If you are in a hurry, here are three great tips:

  • Define the main plugin class in its own file (not the in the main plugin file).
  • Don’t register hooks in constructors.
  • Don’t execute code in the same file where functions or classes are defined.

Sharing and Helping

I’m quite passionate about WordPress, open source, e-commerce, and helping people any way I can. If you blog and are looking for anyone to guest post about WordPress, plugin development, ecommerce, running a business, etc. I’d love to help out any way I can.

If you have any specific questions, let me know about that too. I’ll do my best to get you the answers you need – and you may even find your name mentioned in a video on our YouTube channel – please subscribe 🙂

Stay Connected

Keep in touch on our blog, YouTube Channel, Facebook, and Google+

What’s Next

We’re pretty busy, heads down coding up some new features right now. I hope to be able to share those details with you next week. Until then, happy WordPress-ing 😉

Cart66 News And Updates

Image

It’s been a long time since we’ve sent out an email. I’m sorry for not doing better about staying in touch. I’m going to fix that now, starting with this email. If you are no longer interested in WordPress ecommerce or Cart66, there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email. Otherwise, thanks for staying with us, and we’ve got some exciting news.

Demonstration Videos

Lately we’ve been working on putting together demonstrations of various things you can do with Cart66. We’ve started a new YouTube Channel as well as full written articles including the videos on our blog.

Top Blog Articles

Here are a few of our most popular blog articles:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Around The Web

We are always on the lookout for stuff about WordPress and ecommerce from around the web. Here is a quick list of a few noteworthy articles.

WordPress 4.5 Is Here
Take a look at the latest release of WordPress, version 4.5 “Coleman”. Here are a few highlights from this release:

    • Live responsive previews

 

  • Add a custom logo to your website

 

 

  • Inline URL editing in the page editor

 

 

  • Awesome new formatting shortcuts (our favorite new feature)

 

Thank You Emails
Here’s a great article from Elegant Themes about The Power of “Thank you” emails and how they can make all the difference when growing your ecommerce business. Want to send these emails with Cart66? Here is how you send “Thank you” emails with Cart66.

Be Your Own Managed WordPress Host
In this article Lee Blue explains how you can be your own managed WordPress host by combining WordPress with Digital Ocean for hosting, ServerPilot for server management, BackupBuddy for backups, and Sucuri for security. He also shares his experience with a few other hosting options.

What’s Next

We are continuing to create additional demonstration videos to show how to do all sorts of things with Cart66. So keep an eye out on our blog,  YouTube Channel, and Facebook. We’ve also got a big new feature we’re getting ready to announce. It is one of our most requested enhancements. So stay tuned!

WordPress E-commerce Hosting

Hosting e-commerce sites has always been difficult and expensive due to all of the requirements for PCI compliance. SSL certificates, security scans, allocating dedicated IP addresses, two factor authentication, disabling FTP and creating virtual private networks are just a few things required for PCI compliance. The cost of meeting these requirements is often far too expensive for the average guys who wants to sell some stuff on their WordPress websites.

Read more

WordPress Membership and Subscription Plugin

 

Up until now, running a WordPress membership site has been a rather complex thing because of all the different pieces of software you need to integrate. In general, you need the following components:

  1. Your WordPress website and theme
  2. A WordPress membership management plugin
  3. Some way to control access to certain parts of your website
  4. An SSL certificate, security scans, etc. to make sure your site is secure and PCI compliant
  5. A WordPress shopping cart or e-commerce plugin
  6. A payment gateway to collect credit card payments
  7. Some way to process recurring payments from your customers

Read more