A few questions...

[squire]

1.) I noted some older posts asking this first one, but didn't see an answer in the positive. Is there currently an ability to sell and track Gift Certificates in Squirrelcart? If not, do we have an ETA on that?

2.) Does Squirrelcart *require* either cookies or a Session ID to be set? If so, you'll have a lot better product if you simply request instead of requiring one. So is there any fairly simple way we can make that a Request instead of a Requirement?

It's a search engine issue and something I have noted on a site we have which currently runs Squirrelcart. Search engines cannot spider pages which *require* either a cookie or a Session ID to be set. But if you simply request either of those instead they get spidered and included in the search engine index just fine. I don't want to have to create several hundred "static" pages so that they can be spidered with future sites like the last one just to get the search engines to spider a site. I really like the flexibility of Squirrelcart on the design side of things, but this one is a Must Have as far as I'm concerned. Email me if you need more info on what Search Engines can and can't deal with...

3.) As I mentioned above, we already have one Squirrelcart powered site and I really like the design flexibilty it allows us to have. We have two more sites which are going to require a shopping cart due to go Live this month, and who knows how many in the next six months (at least 2 more already slated). I'm thinking the Server licensing option is probably going to be the best for us in the long run, assuming we can get the two issues above resolved. Is there any special discount we would be entitled to for the server version since we're already a customer under a single license?

Thanks and keep up the great work!

Squire

[Jamie]

Hi Squire,

1.) I noted some older posts asking this first one, but didn't see an answer in the positive. Is there currently an ability to sell and track Gift Certificates in Squirrelcart? If not, do we have an ETA on that?

There is no built in ability for this. You can certainly sell anything you can add as a product in the cart, but there is no way to make the gift certificates work online via codes entered by customers. We do not have an ETA for this, but it will not be anytime soon, unfortunately. We are working on v1.2.0, which is very close to release. After that, we will be working on a discount feature.

2.) Does Squirrelcart *require* either cookies or a Session ID to be set? If so, you'll have a lot better product if you simply request instead of requiring one. So is there any fairly simple way we can make that a Request instead of a Requirement?

Squirrelcart uses PHP Session Management. In order for PHP to keep track of your session, it requires that the client communicate the session ID to the server for each page load. There are only 2 ways to do this, by either having the session ID stored in a cookie, or by passing the session ID in the URL. Squirrelcart itself does not impose either upon the client's browser. The method used to communicate the session ID depends on the configuration of PHP on the server that you run Squirrelcart on.

Most SEs do not spider pages that have query statements in their URLs, like:

http://somesite.com/index.php?this=whatever

Squirrelcart does use this method. We will be adding a method to allow your site to get spidered by any engine in the future. v1.2.0 will be out soon, and the SE friendly addition s/be in the release after that.

3.) Is there any special discount we would be entitled to for the server version since we're already a customer under a single license?

Yes. This is not set in stone, or I would post it here. Please send an email to sales@ldev.com and reference this post, and we will let you know via email.

Thanks!
Jamie

[squire]

Thanks for the reply Jamie !

One small correction though in case it makes your life easier down the road...


Most SEs do not spider pages that have query statements in their URLs, like:

http://somesite.com/index.php?this=whatever

Jamie

That statement is actually incorrect. It used to be the case to some degree, but isn't anymore today. Any Search engine worth anything these days can spider dynamically generated pages just fine. The ? doesn't bother them at all (unless you have multiple query strings for some reason).

The thing all search engines have a problem with are Session IDs (because they view the Session ID as a unique URL address and Session IDs in the URL make the number of possibilities endless) and/or sites which *require* cookies, because their spider bots do not accept cookies.

Want proof that SE's can spider dynically generated pages just fine? Take a gander at this report from Google on the SquirrelCart support forums: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&q=www.ldev.com+site%3Awww.ldev.com&btnG=Google+Search

Those are all of the pages here that Google has spidered and indexed, all 5,500+ as of this writing. The vast majority of which are dynamically generated. :yahoo: The other major search engines are very similiar. Some do Dynamic pages better than others, but all of them spider dynamic pages to at least some degree.

Can ya tell I've spent far too much time figuring out the search engines? LOL

Squire

PS I'll shoot ya off an email on the other stuff. Thanks again!

[Jamie]

Hi Squire,

Thanks for the info. I was aware that Google spidered sites with query statements, but didn't realize the others did now. Good information! Last time I was researching that stuff (which was quite a while ago) Google seemed to be the only one. We actually purposely tried to get Google to get into the forums and index them a little while ago. Prior to that, most of the posts in the forums where readable only to licensed customers. We changed that partly to benefit potential customers, and partly to get SEs in here. When Google queries the forum, the spiders show up as unregistered guests...usually 20 or 30 at a time.

-Jamie