A great time was had by all at Dan's stag weekend last weekend. Many thanks to Dan Tregidgo for the organisation, to Dan Jenks for being such a great stag/sport and to Fell End Farm in the Lake District for the top accommodation!

Invosoft have designed and developed a new blog for the leading UK log wholesaler and distributor Logs Direct.

Logs direct are leading supplier of hardwood, software, kiln dried firewood and other carbon nuetral fuels. They have their own state of the art processing and distribution facility.

The blog will allow Logs Direct customers to keep up with company news and promotions, as well as providing a valuable resource for the renewable fuel industry. With regular updates, articles and tips and tricks on how to get the most out of using firewood of various types (softwood, hardwood and kiln-dried), wood pellets, smokeless fuels and other wood fuels.

The new blog is called "Burning Logs":

 http://www.burning-logs.co.uk/ 

The site is based on wordpress which makes it incredible easy to update and add rich media content including videos and pictures. Keep checking back for regular informative articles on the Logs Direct and the industry in general.

Also, checkout their direct to consumer online store at www.logsdirect.co.uk.

Don’t be too put off by the system requirements on the Magentocommerce website, Magento is surprisingly easy to install and run on Windows and IIS 7.

We are currently developing a new ecommerce platform for an online t-shirt business specialising in music t-shirts.  In the past, we have used dashcommerce with great success, for example on Logs Direct. Unfortunately, dashcommerce has ceased to be living open source project.  Also, we develop primarily using mvc.net these days so I wanted to find an ecommerce solution based around mvc.net 3. 

The best mvc.net solution I could find was Orchard.  This is a really great platform but it doesn’t have a mature shop or ecommerce component, which is unfortunate, and perhaps somewhat strange, as I believe the codebase is founded upon Rob Connery’s MVC.NET ecommerce Kona project.

So, despite numerous reservations about Magento (the platform has a reputation for being slow, overly-complex, unwieldy, unsupported on Windows, good at marketing itself but lacklustre at delivering what it promises), I decided to have a bash at installing it on Windows Server 2008 running IIS 7.5 just to see what would happen/how hard it was.  It was surprisingly easy.

These are the steps I followed:

• Prerequisites: We already have a Windows 2008 IIS 7.5 server setup running a number of PHP platforms (SugarCRM and CakePHP based web applications) so I think this helped a bit.  I didn’t have to install any extra components but these are the relevant ones I believe you need to install using the web platform installer:
  1. PHP 5.2.17
  2. IIS: CGI
  3. Windows Cache Extension 1.1 for PHP 5.2
  4. URL Rewrite 2.0
• Install MYSQL: Once you have IIS setup, you also need a working mysql instance http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/
• Upload Magento Install: Create a new website in IIS and copy/FTP the Magento 1.5.10 install files into the website directory.
• Setting up the URL re-write rules:  This step is the key to a smooth Magento install.  Create a new web.config file in the base install directory and then copy the following URL rewrite rules in:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
   <configuration> 
    <system.webServer>
    <rewrite>
    <rules> 
     <rule name="Imported Rule 1" stopProcessing="true"> 
      <match url=".*" ignoreCase="false"/>        <conditions> <add input="{URL}" pattern="^/(media|skin|js)/" ignoreCase="false" negate="true" /> 
      <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" /> 
      <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" /> 
    </conditions> <action type="Rewrite" url="index.php" /> 
    </rule> 
   </rules> 
   </rewrite> 
  </system.webServer> 
</configuration>

• Permissions: I also encountered some permission problems which were a little tricky to diagnose as magento hides errors by default.  You simply receive a generic “There has been an error processing your request” message.  To print errors to screen, I followed the guide here - http://www.designersandbox.com/magento/fix-for-magento-1-4-install-does-not-work/.  

Invosoft were asked to design and develop a new website for to South Lake District Holiday Home Park, Ings Mill Park.

The new website is based on Invosoft’s advanced content management system and features a bespoke facility to showcase their regularly updated Holiday Home and Static Caravan stock for sale.

Click here to visit Ings Mill Park.

Invosoft client Logs Direct have recently undergone a number of improvements to their e-commerce system to compliment the company’s new and improved product range.  Logs Direct, based near Lancaster are already UK market leaders for seasoned firewood logs and kiln dried logs. They hope to expand their range with a number of chimineas,  summer offerings and wood coal. Their e-commerce system has been improved, to enhance usability, cope with demand for new forthcoming product ranges, and their ever increasing customer base. 

Further improvements to improve the usability of the website and to upgrade the payments system are to follow shortly.

Invosoft has been commissioned by a leading Cumbrian property maintenance firm, based near Carnforth, Cumbria to create a website following its well publicised merger with a local landscape gardening firm. Together, Select Property Maintenance and A & A Garden Services (going under the banner of Select Property Maintenance) will provide their customers with over 15 years of expertise from an expanding range of craftsmen, all experts in their fields.

The merger is set to create up to 15 new jobs also, and the company is set to deliver a high level of maintenance services to the hospitality, retail and commercial industries as well as private residences.

David Greensmith, director of Select Property Maintenance, said “existing customers of A&A with whom we are merging will now benefit from a wide range of additional services including painting and decorating as well as gas and electrical services.”

The website will have detailed listings of the wide range of services Select Property Maintenance now have on offer, which include ground works and construction, interior decorating, kitchen and bathroom installation, an emergency call out service and a carefully designed package of Service Level Agreement tariffs.

The easily navigable website is fully editable via Invosoft’s advanced .NET content management system (CMS). Full Search Engine Optimisation should give this brand new website a great start.