Posts from "October 2012"

Keyword Optimization Tips for Your Exponent Ecommerce Website

The Exponent CMS is the ideal platform for online stores, especially when it comes to ecommerce SEO. Not only does Exponent generate website's to be SEO code-friendly in the back end, but Exponent makes keyword optimization easy in the front-end user interface.

In this video, we share with you some tips on how to go about properly keyword optimizing the product pages of you ecommerce site for better SEO performance. We start with some brief insights on keyword research and selection, then move forward on some of the best practices of optimizing your company's website via the page title, meta description, keyword, and URL.

If you'd like to learn more about the SEO strengths and weaknesses of you ecommerce site, visit ClickCentric SEO for free website assessment. The experts at ClickCentric will perform a hands-on audit and evaluation of your website.

Coping with the v2.0.9 Upgrade

Unlike most previous releases, the release of v2.0.9 has seen it's share of problems.  Though most of these are minor issues, they can seem to be an obstacle if not addressed.  Here's some things to watch out for, and steps to correct these issues:

Git Pull upgrade creates a merge conflict and the site 'crashes':

'Git' is supposed to prevent this, but for some reason when updating (git pull) a 'git' maintained site from 2.0.8 (or the patches) to 2.0.9, you'll receive a notice of a merge conflict and the site will no longer work.  The problem lies in two files (exponent_version.php and framework/modules-1/calendarmodule/class.php).  There are a couple different options to fix this, so you'll find the details in this forum post.  We are working to alleviate this issue!

Menus don't work the same as before the upgrade:

Even though the new navigation controller includes some compatibility to still allow old style navigationmodule modules to work...this apparently isn't true in all circumstances, especially complex menus.  The solution is to update the calls and the templates/views to the new 2.0 navigation module format.  This is a fairly simple change as it entails copying and renaming those custom templates.  You'll find the details in this forum post.

My customized site 'crashes':

This occurs if you are running customized modules (controllers) on your site.  Because PHP v5.4.x enforces greater code standards, we've had to update some of the main code which in turn requires updates to any custom modules (controllers).  This is a fairly simple update as it entails adding the 'static' keyword to the static functions inherited from the parent expController class.  You'll find the details in this forum post.

We'll keep this article up to date as things progress.