Plus if you’ve ever thought about running a hotel, holiday home, or destination-based business, then we’ve got a new theme for you with Travel Island designed specifically for those industries.

SEO Deluxe for Jigoshop:

Search Engine Optimisation is a massively important source of traffic to retailers, and even with the rise of social networks, it’s still used heavily for researching and buying products and services. So it’s important to make sure your site is well-optimised and the new SEO Deluxe extension makes it a lot easier for you. Unlike other solutions it’s been specifically designed for Jigoshop, so it has a couple of features which the others don’t.

Adding SEO Deluxe gives you an included layered navigation widget, and much more control over URL structures, Category and Product meta data, and whether you want search engines to ignore specific areas and pages. If you want to save time, you can create templates at a Category level, or dive into each individual product to ensure every part of your site is as optimised for search as possible.

PDF Invoices and Packing Slips:

Increase your repeat customers by impressing them with professional packing slips and invoices, and make your shipping process more efficient with the PDF Invoices and Pack Slips extension for Jigoshop.

The extension lets you quickly and easily print a single invoice or packing slip, or bulk printing for any order status, with options to set page layout, paper size, return information and all your company details (logo, name, address and email address). It can also be localized if you create a translation and use the following text domain: sod_jigoshop_pdf_settings. Check out the PDF Invoices and Packing Slips extension now to add some flair to your packing.

Checkout Fields Manager:

Customise your Jigoshop checkout to include custom fields with a range of input options. You will be able to add, enable and disable, re-order and re-size custom fields. And for each field you can add check boxes, text, text area and date picker fields to make sure the information you get is exactly what you want and need. Check out the new Checkout Field Manager for yourself.

Offline Credit Card Processing:

You can now process credit cards offline with a new extension from VisserLabs which splits customer credit card details into two parts, with one section emailed to the store owner and one part stored in the database. Please note there are security and legal implications to doing this, which are explained in more detail on the Offline Credit Card Processing Extension page.

Travel Island theme for hotels and holidays:

The Travel Island theme is ideal if you’re looking to sell holiday accommodation or services, whether it’s for hotel rooms, renting a house, or taking people out for watersports or day trips. It comes from dtbaker, who also created the Sport Grunge and Mommy Blog themes.

Features of the theme include a responsive design so your site displays correctly on PC, tablet, or mobile phone. And you get a good level of flexibility with an easy-to-use Sidebar and Widget manager which allows you to set your sidebar to display on the left, right, or remain hidden – that control can be applied to individual pages to tailor your site to you demands.

More customisation comes with an image slider, Google Font Selector, a custom photo gallery and importantly a Google Map shortcode is available to let you insert maps quickly and easily into any page to really help people find your business. Find out more about the Travel Island theme for Jigoshop.

As with all your releases, we’ve tested internally, and Version 1.2 has also been available as a Beta Developer Release since April 11 – as a result we’ve received great contributions from a large number of the Jigoshop community, from spotting bugs to fixing them. Everyone has got involved, and we want to keep encouraging feedback and suggestions from everyone, whether you’re new to Jigoshop (and even WordPress) or you’ve been developing WordPress eCommerce for 10+ years. And as promised, one contributor to the beta feedback will shortly be receiving a free official Jigoshop plugin or extension as a thank you for their help.

As with any update to WordPress or any plug-in or extension please back up your install and products before upgrading.

Jigoshop V1.2:

The full release notes for Jigoshop V1.2 are available below, but highlights that you’ll notice straight away include the great new Permalink options to change the way your website addresses display. That’s a key feature if you’re optimizing your shop for search engines, or you have specific preferences on how the URLs are displayed. You can set your own product category/tag slugs, or begin product URLs with the category or shop address as desired.

Anyone with a larger store will appreciate bulk editing on stock levels and prices, and your customers will now be able to take advantage of personalized products. That means buyers can now add their own information to appear on their purchases to customize gifts and purchases with names or specific messages.

Emails for orders can now be customized, and ‘Email Invoice’ can also resend download links for digital products to cut down on customers contacting you if they’re accidentally deleted it. And as always, we’re continuing to improve the way Jigoshop handles tax, whether it’s to improve individual billing options or to handle the various rules and regulations around the world.

Jigoshop V1.2 release notes:

• New: Permalink options:
  Allow `%product_cat%` for permalinks
  Prepend ( Prefix) product URLs with category
  Prepend (Prefix) product URLs with shop base page
  Set your own product category / tag slugs
• New: Personalized products – customers may add their own information to appear on purchased products
• New: WordPress Bulk and Quick editing of both stock levels and prices on the Admin Product List
• New: Options to disable or enable WordPress image cropping on Shop images
• New: Ability to show tax # and business address information on order emails
• New: $0.01 charge on Paypal if configured and total is free
• New: Allow shipping to be taxed on compounding tax classes (all around shipping tax enhancements)
• New: Resend download links by clicking “Email Invoice” on an order
• Tweak: Load CSS & Javascript only when absolutely necessary, for both admin & front-end
• Tweak: Emails for orders can now be completely customized
  Email customizations can be made through a plugin
• Tweak: Allow debugging to be turned on for calculable shipping services through WordPress debug
• Tweak: Allow EU shop to tax other EU countries
• Tweak: Automatically include 0% tax rate for customers outside of tax base
• Tweak: Calculate tax based on billing address when item is not shippable or shipping is disabled
• Tweak: Reduce total image assets size by 28kb
• Fix: Prevent duplicate variations on one product
• Fix: Disables this message when editing orders: “Are you sure you want to leave this page?”
• Fix: Creating new orders will automatically fill in the customer billing & shipping details (on save)
• Fix: Ability to restore orders which are trashed
• Fix: Compound tax display. Tax displays after subtotal all of the time
• Fix: Allow discounts to be applied before or after taxes
• Fix: Multiple tax classes bug (tax class 1 applied to product 1, and tax class 2 applied to product 2)
  If both products were added to the cart, only 1 tax class was applied and the other wasn’t
• Fix: Tax amounts disappearing on orders when changing the status of the order
• Fix: Hiding and showing products on Shop upon stock reduction/increase with ‘hide out of stock products’ setting
• Fix: Multiple tax classes applied to all-of selections on countries
• Fix: Rounding error on taxes with price includes tax option
• Fix: Sale prices on products will no longer be higher than regular price
• Fix: Skrill gateway to allow variable products
• Fix: Variable and grouped products now show both regular and sale price on the Shop

If you do encounter any issues with Jigoshop 1.2 due to the huge range of different hosting providers, themes and plugins in use, please do contact us via our forums. The free forums is home to the Jigoshop community, and for a guaranteed priority response access to Premium Support costs from just $29 for a month of access, including responses from the core Jigoshop developers. And until May 21, you have the chance to purchase all official Jigoshop themes, plugins and lifetime support for just $359 (It goes up to $500 on the May 21, 2012, which still saves you $1000s on purchasing individually).

Thanks V1.2:

As always, Jigoshop Version 1.2 is the result of a lot of hard work by the internal team of Rob, Jeff, Michael, Matt and others, with the invaluable contributions and support of the Jigoshop community, so we just want to thank every single person who has downloaded Jigoshop, submitted a bug, suggested a fix, contributed by buying a plugin, theme 0r support.

We also really appreciate every one of you who has spread Jigoshop word, whether you’ve blogged, tweeted, shared on Facebook or Google+. It all helps us to grow, and motivates us to work even harder to evolve Jigoshop.

The Headway Connect Extension for Jigoshop

It’s been developed in collaboration with Grant and Clay Griffiths, the father-and son team behind Headway. The first version of Headway launched in 2009, developed by Clay at just 15-years-old, and has proven incredibly popular as it allows anyone to drag and drop  Blocks onto the editor to design and edit any page of your website. They’re now onto Headway 3, and in addition to the visual design options, you can also access a live CSS Editor, and they’ve partnered with a number of major theme developers to produce child themes which you can then ‘edit like crazy’.

The Headway Themes Visual Editor

Once you’ve settled on a layout, you can then change the design settings in the same Visual Editor., which lets you select fonts, colours, rounded corners, background images and more to let you style your site or page exactly how you want. As with all official Jigoshop themes, Headway has introduced a Responsive Grid to let your site automatically re-size whether your customers are visiting on their computer, smartphone or tablet. And again, like Jigoshop, it’s available to use for your own sites, or for client sites.

Installation is simple – you’ll need Jigoshop 1.1.1 or greater plus Headway 3.1.1 or greater, and then to install and activate the Headway Connect extension. And this then gives you a Jigoshop Block to use in any Headway theme.

Jigoshop and popular theme frameworks:

We want to continue to offer Jigoshop compatibility with the best WordPress theme frameworks, having previously announced official integration with PageLines, and producing our own integration with Genesis. Wherever possible we prefer to work directly with theme providers to ensure seamless integration, so if your favourite theme designer hasn’t been covered yet, why not ask them to get in touch with us?

In case you missed anything, here are the highlights from the past month:

20 new plugins, Pagelines integration and a new theme:

• 6 new plugins, including PayPal Express and NMI Gateways arrived at the start of April.
• 4 more new plugins – Robokassa Payments, a full German translation pack and AJAX layered navigation.
• And we finished up with a whopping 10 more plugins: Moneris, Beanstream, QuickBooks, PayPal Digital Goods, and 6 new image plugins for zooming, enlarging and magnification.
• Plus, there’s the new MayaShop theme for Jigoshop, from the same studio which previously released Sommerce.
• And there’s an official integration with PageLines drag and drop WordPress themes.

Jigoshop Club now gives you more for your money:

Since launching, we’ve been monitoring the Jigoshop Club and discussing how we can give every member more for their money – as a result we re-launched the Club this month to continue to include every official Jigoshop theme and plugins, but it now also includes lifetime support! And if you sign up before May 21st, 2012, you’ll get all of that for just $359. Pay once, and you’ll get themes, extensions and support indefinitely – and you’ll save $141 if you grab it now.

Jigoshop 1.2 Beta Release:

And all of that is in addition to the small matter of Jigoshop 1.2 becoming available as a developer beta release for you to download and test to check out our improvements and new features, and to make sure all your stores (or your clients) are working perfectly when it becomes available as an official update.

Check out and download the release, and take a look at the latest comments, contributions and improvements on the forum thread. Don’t forget, one contributor who files a bug or fix will be thanked with a free official Jigoshop theme or extension of their choice.

May is going to be even better:

It’s going to be a challenge to top that in May, but we’ve got a full list of new plugins and extensions to be uploaded, plus the official roll out of Jigoshop 1.2 and lots more. The best ways to keep up to date are by reading this blog, signing up for the Jigoshop weekly email, and/or following us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

The reasons for the change are relatively simple:

• Pricing will be clearer and easier to understand with a one-time payment rather than recurring membership
• It means we can increase our commitment to supporting Premium Members in the future, whether you’re a Jigoshop Club member, or just buying support on a monthly or annual basis.
• You’ll still be able to download every official Jigoshop plugin listed on the site and each new one as it becomes available. The 37 currently published already have a value of $1330 if purchased separately.
• And you still get access to every official Jigoshop theme, and every new addition we make. That’s currently 7 themes, including the popular minimalist Jigotheme, space-age Corellian, fashionable Stitched and music theme Overload. Bought individually, the themes alone would cost you $464 (Non-sale prices).
• Support currently costs $29 for a month, or $99 for a year, but lifetime support will now be included as part of the single payment to join the Jigoshop Club.

So we’ve come up with a package which offers you great value, and allows us to spend more time focusing on adding even more to the extras available for paid members.

Rather than spending $1330 + $464 + $99 (Total $1893) for a year of themes, plugins and support, we’re going to give you everything, including lifetime support for a total price of $500, saving you a minimum of $1318 before we release even one more extension or theme (And we have lots ready to release very soon!)

 
Jigoshop Club SignUp

Act now and save even more:

The cost of the Jigoshop Club will be set at $500 from May 15, 2012, which is just 3 weeks away.

But if you sign up now, you’ll get $1330 of plugins, $464 of themes, and $99 worth of support every 12 months for a single payment of JUST $359!

We want to reward everyone that’s supported us so far by offering the new Jigoshop Club with lifetime support for exactly the same price you’d have paid for just 12 months of support with our old Club package.

That probably makes it the best value deal in all of WordPress eCommerce. So don’t wait and risk missing out – get your access right now with the Jigoshop Club for just $359 for the next 21 days, because the price won’t be that low again, especially as we continue to add themes and plugins, plus expand our support team.
 
 
Jigoshop Club SignUp

Existing Club Members:

If you’re an existing Jigoshop Club member, there’s no need to worry – at the point your payments reach $359, you’ll be guaranteed the same lifetime access and support as new sign-ups. So you’ll get the same great deal at a bargain price with no risk of forgetting to sign up!

Moneris Payment gateway:

Moneris processes more than 3 billion credit and debit card transactions for over 350,000 merchant locations across North America, and now they can be handling your payments with the Moneris Payment Gateway Plugin for Jigoshop. You’ll need a Merchant Services Account, but you’ll then be able to accept a wide range of credit card and payment options with all of the payment services you’d expect from a provider that has been around for decades. The Moneris Payment Gateway plugin for Jigoshop was developed by Patsatech (Also developer of Shipping Details, NMI Payments, DPS PaymentExpress and the AlertPay Gateway)  and costs $15.

Beanstream Payment Gateway

In addition to the Moneris Payment Gateway above, Patsatech have also now released a Beanstream Gateway to give you the choice of another popular provider serving Canada and North America. They cover the most popular credit cards, several private label cards, and with a U.S business presence, you also get access to 150 additional currencies to target more than 200 countries around the world with native currency solutions. You’ll need to have an SSL Certificate for your website (Simple to arrange with your website host), and a merchant account. The Beanstream gateway costs $15.

Quickbook (Intuit) Payment Gateway:

Continuing the Patsatech theme, here’s another payment gateway, this time for Quickbooks. This offers a lower level of integration than our existing Quickbooks plugin, which automatically syncs your orders, inventory on-hand and pricing, by just offering the Quickbooks payment service. You’ll need cURL to be enabled on your Hosting Account and also make sure your site is SSL enabled. The Quickbooks Payment Gateway costs $15.

PayPal Digital Goods Gateway

PayPal payment gateway specifically for digital products with a streamlined process to keep customers on your site, combining JavaScript with the Express Checkout API. That means clicks and waiting are kept at a minimum for items such as ebooks, music files and digital images. This gateway triggers a lightbox which overlays your website for payments to be made. Developed by wadev, the PayPal Digital Goods Gateway costs $12

6 MagicToolbox Image Plugins for Jigoshop:

If you want to let customers do more with the images on your site, you’ll be pleased to know we now have a huge range of options for image plugins as MagicToolbox have released six plugins specifically for Jigoshop. That’ll allow anyone to zoom, magnify and enlarge the product images in your store and reassure themselves they have to buy your products right now.

The list of new image plugins for Jigoshop is:

• MagicZoom for Jigoshop:  Zoom right into your images
• MagicZoom Plus for Jigoshop: Zoom and enlarge your images
• MagicTouch for Jigoshop: Zoom into huge images fast
• MagicThumb for Jigoshop: Enlarge your images
• Magic Magnify for Jigoshop: Magnify elegantly into your images.
• Magic MagnifyPlus for Jigoshop: Magnify and enlarge your images.

Mayashop theme for Jigoshop

Mayashop is the latest design from Sara Presenti who previously released the popular Sommerce theme, and it’s another stylish and flexible theme for your Jigoshop install.

Options include the choice of a boxed or full-width layout, and unlimited background colours, plus 50 custom backgrounds or the option to upload your own. Eight sliders come built into Mayashop to let you promote products and special offers, whilst Megamenu navigation aids customers in finding everything you have to offer. And with a responsive design, your customers will see your site displayed properly on their computer, tablet or mobile. Mayashop costs $45.

As it was our first time at the event, we decided to try and cover all bases by splitting the presentation between the business side of developing an open source plugin, and the top tips for working with Jigoshop as a developer or designer. It seemed to go pretty well and the slides are embedded below – to our eternal shame a video of the presentation is also available online here.

The event itself was a fantastic night – many thanks to the organiser, Keith Devon, and everyone who gave us such a nice reception. We also need to compliment Keith on his choice of pub for us to visit after the final talk, which saw a lot more conversation about Jigoshop and WordPress eCommerce (Yes, really). We also met up with Lee Rickler, the man behind the Clear Creations website featured on our Showcase, and a number of very interesting and talented people we hope will have been tempted to give us a try.

If you’re in London or the surrounding area, it’s well worth checking out the WordPress London meetup – probably the best place to follow for updates is the Twitter account @wpldn. We’re certainly hoping to go along again to chat and learn rather than standing at the front!

Robokassa Payment Gateway:

First is the Robokassa Payment Gateway for Jigoshop which is a free plugin to allow you to use the Russian payment provider. As with most payment gateways, it means that the service provider deals with credit car details and data regulations, leaving you to focus on sales. And as a Russian company, Robokassa gives you access to some specific payment providers, including Webmoney.ru and Yandex.Money. Click here for more details.

German Full Translation Language Pack:

As standard, Jigoshop comes with a wide range of language translations in the core download, and that selection will only continue to expand. So if you’re looking to get a choice between formal and informal German, for example, you’ll appreciate the German Full Translation Language Pack. Click here for more details.

Jigoshop Norway Custom Emails:

Developed in response to a support request from a Norwegian Jigoshop user, this plugin aims to solve some of the taxation hassles faced by shop owners. The Custom Emails plugin creates separate tax calculations for the differing tax rates for different products, as well as the amount payable at each rate. Click here for more details.

Jigoshop AJAX Layered Navigation:

If you’ve got lots of variable products or a lot of inventory with a high number of attributes, then you might find the new AJAX layered navigation offers some useful advantages for you and your customers. Not only does the layered navigation use ajax calls to reload content on the page, but the extension also provides a number of additional user-interface elements for the layered navigation, such as color swatches, size selectors and checkboxes. Click here for more details.

The full Jigoshop Version 1.2 changelog is:

• New permalink options:
  Allow `%product_cat%` for permalinks
  Prepend product urls with category
  Prepend product urls with shop base page
  Set your own product category / tag slugs
• Resend download links by clicking “Email Invoice” on an order
• Provide personalized products – customers may add their own information to appear on purchased products
• Provide WordPress Bulk and Quick editing of both stock levels and prices on the Admin Product List
• Provide options to disable or enable WordPress image cropping on Shop images
• Fixes compound tax display. Tax displays after subtotal all of the time
• Allow discounts to be applied before or after taxes
• Emails for orders can now be completely customized
• Email customizations can be made through a plugin
• Fix for multiple tax classes applied to all-of selections on countries
• Adds the ability to show tax # and business address information on order emails
• Allow $0.01 charge on paypal if configured and total is free
• Cleaned up some minor code issues
• Fixes multiple tax classes bug (tax class 1 applied to product 1, and tax class 2 applied to product 2)
  if both products were added to the cart, only 1 tax class was applied and the other wasn’t
• Allow shipping to be taxed on compounding tax classes (all around shipping tax enhancements)
• Fix for the tax amounts disappearing on orders when changing the status of the order
• Fix rounding error on taxes with price includes tax option
• Fix Skrill gateway to allow variable products
• Allow EU shop to tax other EU countries
• Allow debugging to be turned on for calculable shipping services through wordpress debug
• Automatically include 0% tax rate for customers outside of tax base
• Calculate tax based on billing address when item is not shippable or shipping is disabled
• Variable and grouped products now show both regular and sale price on the Shop
• Completed orders are now final, only refunds can be issued

As you can imagine, an enormous amount of work has gone into this release by the team, led by Rob, Jeff, Michael and Matt. But now we need your help to find any kinks left to iron out.

Jigoshop V1.2 Beta Download Details

Please do download the developer release for testing, and please do report back any issues via the Jigoshop repository on Github, here. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with Github, as reporting issues is simple once you’ve registered an account. We’re also working with all developers and designers of themes and plugins which are built to work with Jigoshop to minimise any disruption when Jigoshop 1.2 is officially released, and your help not only helps your own store, but those of around 70,000 Jigoshop downloads to date.

And as a thank you, when the Beta period ends, we’ll pick out one contributor of an issue or fix at random to receive a free official Jigoshop plugin or theme of their choice.

ClothSpot: clothspot.co.uk

Jigoshop is actually the offspring of our parent company, Jigowatt, who have specialised in open source eCommerce for a number of years. For larger solutions, Magento is available, but for everything else, there’s Jigoshop, and sharing a team means Jigowatt can produce custom online stores based on our own product.

Obviously it would be a little disingenuous to analyse our own design changes, and more importantly, I sit within projectile range of the designers involved, so we’ll just show you the site and the client’s own comment on the work.

The team aren’t just software and design specialists – they also know about the business end of eCommerce and the Jigoshop application is a creative and elegant business solution as a result. The launch process was painless – from my personalised training session to the swift and ever-patient responses to questions as my products went online and ClothSpot made it’s first sales. Invariably good-humoured, never patronising and well-managed – the team at Jigowatt have helped turn ClothSpot from a vision into real life.

To find out more about our parents at Jigowatt, visit their site for Magento and WordPress Web Design, or head straight to the Contact Form (Please note this is for custom design enquiries and not for Jigoshop support).