New Release: xCMS - Blogs, Information, News, Articles and more!
 

xCMS for X-Cart is a fully integrated, full featured content management system that allows you to post blogs, information, news, articles and more to x-cart.
Questions? Call us! 1.604.477.7049

FULLY INTEGRATED WITH CDSEO!
We've updated our SEO optimization module, CDSEO Pro for X-Cart, to provide xCMS with all the SEO optimization tools of CDSEO including xml sitemap integration, search engine friendly urls, custom page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords and link titles.

Category Features

• Unlimited categories and unlimited subcategories.
• Top-level categories are displayed in menu dialog boxes in your side navigation.
• Default top-level categories include blogs, information, news, and articles which can be enabled/disabled/edited/deleted easily to customize your content needs.
• Synopsis for categories allow ideal SEO keyword optimization for the pages.
• Thumbnail images for categories can be easily added through the admin panel.

Entry Features

• Integration with x-cart's WYSIWYG editor makes formatting entries simple.
• Entries can be posted with an expiry date to display content that will automatically expire; ideal for mentioning sales and specials, etc.
• Post date for entries can be specified so you can post entries to the past, or to the future. When posting to the future, entries won't appear until their post-date so you can post many entries at once for future post dates and search engines will believe your site is being constantly updated.
• Records the number of times an entry has been viewed which can optionally be shown on entry pages.
• Entries can be sorted by Recent, Most Commented, Most Viewed.
• Article listings are paginated allowing you to configure the number to display per-page.
• Synopsis for entries allow ideal SEO keyword optimization for the pages.
• Thumbnail images for entries can be easily added through the admin panel.

Comment System

• Captcha and optional url prevention in comments aid in the prevention of spam.
• Comments aren't posted live until given admin approval.
• Admin receives email notification of pending comments.
• Comments can be disabled globally or for specific entries.
• Comments are paginated allowing admin to configure the number to display per-page.
• Comments can be batch updated to modify/approve/delete.

Additional Features

• RSS feed allow users to subscribe to your content feeds.

Re: New Release: xCMS - Blogs, Information, News, Articles and more!
 

I just bought it, so hopefully it will work out. The idea behind it sounds great.

Re: New Release: xCMS - Blogs, Information, News, Articles and more!
 

I just bought it too. I'm hoping this mod will increase our google rankings once we begin adding lots of articles, blog content, etc. to the site. It is a nice looking mod. I've only been using it for a little while but here's my feedback so far.

Pros:
- support is excellent (really - very fast and helpful)!
- interface is user friendly
- very flexible in terms of setting up your own categories and subcategories and arranging them in order, etc.
- flexible in terms of what you would like to display on the home page
- ability to add pictures
- ability to link "related item(s)" from the store to a particular blog or article (this is a bidirectional link which also shows on the product page - very cool!)
- wysiwyg editor for blog/article entries
- integrates nicely with CDSEO Pro (it creates seo friendly urls for your blog entries automatically, etc.)
- offers rss feed option

Cons:
- there's no option to have thumbnail images for articles, which means I've spent a lot of time re-sizing images in photoshop to get things looking "clean" and symmetrical - it seems to me this would be easy to add because x-cart already has the ability to do this, but I'm no programmer so I'm not sure.
- when you add a "related product" it doesn't display the product images thumbnail size the way they appear in the product listings, it shows them full size for some reason. This means if you use x-cart's automatic resizing for your product thumbnails (which I do, see the above mentioned dislike of resizing stuff in photoshop) all the previews of your "related items" will have large images.
- no option to have tags for entries the way you do in Blogger
- no option to order blog entries or articles - they are sorted by date. This is a bit of a pain because if you edit something it resaves it as the first (or most current) entry. There is the option to order the categories the way you like so it would be nice to add it for the entries as well.
- no option to subscribe to blogs by means other than rss (email, "following", etc., although maybe these things are particular to Blogger? (sorry, I'm not that blog savvy!)

Re: New Release: xCMS - Blogs, Information, News, Articles and more!
 

Thanks for the wonderful feedback. The image system does use the same image system that x-cart does so the image issues you are experiencing seems odd. The user can sort the entries by date/views/comments. We'll definitely consider your feedback for new options/features as we will continually improve the product based on feedback.

Re: New Release: xCMS - Blogs, Information, News, Articles and more!
 

Here's an example of the image issues. The image on top has been manually reduced to appear thumbnail size otherwise it would be large as well (it does not automatically get reduced to a thumbnail. Maybe giving the user the option of having it thumbnail size or large when uploading would be better). Also the image for the "related item" on the right hand size appears full size which is too large:
http://www.lebabyshop.com/news/whats-new/whats-grrrrrrowling-around-at-le-baby-shop.html

Ideally it should appear thumbnail size like it does here:
http://www.lebabyshop.com/ride-on-toys.html

Re: New Release: xCMS - Blogs, Information, News, Articles and more!
 

Any thoughts on fixing the image issues?

Re: New Release: xCMS - Blogs, Information, News, Articles and more!
 

Love this product! So easy to use and quickly installed by Jon. We love to see our customers commenting on our news, blog and video library. Easy to set-up categories, add/edit entries, review comments and it integrates perfectly with CDSEO.

Great product and excellent support - Well Done!!

Re: New Release: xCMS - Blogs, Information, News, Articles and more!
 

I have installed it but it seems to be missing a file xcms_admin_category_add.php. You cannot delete a thumbnail image. Plus when you change a blog icon all blog icons seem to change.

Re: New Release: xCMS - Blogs, Information, News, Articles and more!
 

Sounds like there may be some install issues, please open a support ticket with us and provide FTP and we'll help get you fixed up.

Re: New Release: xCMS - Blogs, Information, News, Articles and more!
 

ive raised a ticket for the missing file.