Archive for the ‘Company News’ Category

MGS CMS now with Friendly URLs and Auto Sitemap Generation

Friday, May 6th, 2011

It’s been a while since I blogged on the development of our cms, in fact it’s been a while since I blogged about anything on our company site! I’ll blame that on Facebook and Twitter as it’s much quicker to post short sentances there than type paragraphs of text for a blog entry! Anyway enough excuses, here’s what’s new. :)

MGS CMS v1.0.0

So what’s happened since our last blog post. Well in that time there’s been at least two major version updates to our e-commerce content management system with an absolute ton of changes and improvements. I won’t go into every change that’s in the changelog but one of the main new features that has been added is support for friendly urls and automatic sitemap generation. So what do these features mean?

Friendly urls for better seo

Dynamic pages delivered from our cms already performed really well in the search engine results but we’re always trying to squeeze as much seo juice from our websites as possible and so freindly urls was a feature we really wanted to add.

What’s the deal with friendly urls?

Previously dynamic page urls served by our cms would be structured something like http://www.mgswebdesign.com/?cat=123456789 – This might be a blog page for example, but with friendly urls it can be set to http://www.mgswebdesign.com/blog/ – As you can see with a friendly url it’s much easier for a person to read and get an idea of what the page is about, and search engines will also pick up on these keywords in your url which helps improve overall seo for the page.

Automatic Sitemap Generation

The cms can now automatically create an xml sitemap for all the pages in your website but you can also exclude certain pages if you want to. You can submit this sitemap to Google webmaster tools and this can help Google index your pages quicker. And once your sitemap is submitted the cms can be set to auto-ping Google webmaster tools so they can retreive the lastest version of your sitemap.

So that’s it for another blog entry, if you’d like to read more (smaller but more regular!) updates then check out our facebook page and twitter page. Thank you for reading and have a good day! – Tom

Directories & Classifieds Websites CMS

Friday, November 19th, 2010

We’ve been busy over the last few months improving our ecommerce content management system and adding some great new features. Our first and biggest new addition is support for user listings. This new functionality opens up a wide range of possibilites for user based websites such as classifieds websites and directories etc.

Shopping Cart Coupons, Vouchers & Discounts

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

We’ve just added a new feature to our shopping cart software – Coupon Codes! You can now setup coupon codes and offer special discounts to your customers. Usage restrictions can be set for each coupon including a valid date range and minimum spend.

MGS CMS v0.8.1

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Check out the latest changes and improvements to our e-commerce content management system below.

As usual we’ve made lots of changes and improvements but the most notable new features and imporvements include:

  • Parent/Child hierarchy category management
  • Treeview navigation menu with expand/collapse menu categories
  • File caching for lower memory usage and faster page loads
  • Recently viewed products functionality
  • Related products functionality
  • CSV Import (import 1000’s of products in seconds)

Join us on Facebook & Twitter

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

After using Twitter over the past year or so and realising how effective social media can be for businesses we’ve finally gotten around to setting up a company page on Facebook. Use the links below to join us on Facebook and Twitter.

MGS Web Design on Facebook

MGS Web Design on Twitter

MGS CMS v0.7.0

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Hot on the heels of our last release MGS CMS v0.7.0 features new search functionality making it quicker and easier for customers to find the products they’re looking for in your shopping cart catalog.

MGS CMS Updated to v0.6.0

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

Main new features in this release include:

  • New product option to enable/disable file upload when ordering a product
  • Support for user groups – access to categories and products can now be restricted
  • Support for additional/replacement text on product prices

The file upload option gives customers the option to upload a file when ordering a particular product in the shopping cart. Useful if for example you want a customer to upload an image that can be then printed or inscribed etc. on a product.

With user groups you can for example create a reseller user group and then restrict reseller products and categories to be shown only to registered customers in the reseller user group.

More flexibility with the product prices now means if you don’t want to show a price on a product you can now enter text which will be shown instead if the price is zero or if greater than zero the text will be shown after the price.

A multitude of other minor improvements have also been made in this release.

MGS CMS Updated 0.5.0

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

We’ve made more changes to our content management system formally known as our shopping cart system. We’ve decided for this version release (0.5.0) to rename it as a CMS as it’s functionality is expanding beyond that of a shopping cart system. So what’s new this time around? Check out the new features in this release below.

CMS

  • System renamed from shopping cart system to content management system
  • Added new product enquiry form option that allows customers to email enquiries about individual products

E-commerce

  • Added new product option to enable/disable add to cart buttons
  • Added new product note option allowing customers to include notes when ordering a product
  • Shopping cart menu now displays how many items are in cart
  • New improved button images for add to cart, checkout, login etc.
  • Added Qty field beside add to cart buttons

New features in more detail

Now when you add or modify a product you’ll see some extra options.

The first of which allows you to enable or disable the add to cart button for that product. When it’s disabled the product will still be shown to customers on your website but it will not be possible to buy it.

The product note option if enabled will display a text area on that products page so special instructions can be given by the customer when ordering that product.

The product enquiry form if enabled will display an enquiry form on that products page so customers can enquire about that product by email. This can be useful if you’ve disabled the add to cart button but would like to to receive queries on the product.

Other new features are the dispaying of how many items are in your cart on the shopping cart menu, so now customers can see how many items are in their cart at anytime without having to click into the shopping cart page. Quantity fields are now displayed beside add to cart buttons now so customers can easily add more than one product at a time to the their shopping cart.

MGS Cart Updated

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

A new version of our e-commerce shopping cart system has just been released. Most notable new features and improvements in this release are listed below.

  • Improved sorting options for orders, customers, categories and products in admin
  • Added new mailer tool to admin allowing text based emails to be sent to registered customers
  • Added newsletter subscription option to customer myaccount preferences
  • Added multiple image support for products – each product can now have multiple images or no image

We’ll be updating client websites with the new version over the coming weeks.

MGS Web Design Blog Launched

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Welcome to our new website design and development blog where we hope to keep you informed with the latest news and developments here at MGS Web Design. We’ve been busy updating the website and integrating the new blog over the last few days. There are still some cross browser issues in our blog template that we are tidying up so please bear with us while these changes are made.

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