Tech Tips

How to add taxes and discounts to a payment order

Taxes and discounts are popular items in payment orders. These are the price modifiers that applied to a total purchase amount regardless of items in order. And if you want to know how to configure it on your site, powered by AppThemes, this article is for you.

First, the basics. The AppThemes has own payment module included in all their themes - AppThemes Payments. The framework for processing orders and payment gateways. So, instructions below will work for all software that uses AppThemes Payments module, including all AppThemes themes.

1. Use the built-in "Tax" setting to add a tax item in all orders.

This option can be enabled in General Payments settings by adding a non-zero "Rate" value.

And the order summary will look the following:

The Regional Taxes item added in the order summary table.

Works pretty fine, but it has some drawbacks:

You can't change wording "Regional Tax" to something else. Only via translat…

Create a dedicated custom field for embedding media in the Vantage theme

In most cases, site owners do not mind users placing embedded video in the listing description section. And it works in Vantage without hassle. But sometimes they want to have a dedicated area for embedded media. What is possible, but requires some explanations.

The Vantage theme allows embedding videos in the listing description, but other fields do not recognize embedding and display the plain link to the video.However, there is a workaround that allows to display embedded videos in a dedicated area.

Create a dedicated field for embedding media

Open Vantage → Forms → Listings and add new "File Upload" field. Add the name. Set "File Limit" to 0 (what means no file upload allowed) and "Embed Limit" to 1 or more (depending on how many embeds allowed for this field). Save and remember the field meta name: in example we've got "app_youtube".

Edit listing and embed an example YouTube video to…

Easy way to add custom PHP code on your WordPress site

A short instruction on how to Use Code Snippets plugin to add custom PHP code snippets on your WordPress site without files modifications.

We highly not recommend modifying WordPress themes and plugins!

A next software update will wipe out all the modifications from the code, so you will be forced to restore them each time.

The most obvious way is to create a child theme or custom plugin for all your code mods and snippets. But it requires you have some knowledge in coding. And if you are not skilled enough or don't want to hire a specialist for a 1-minute job, so try following.

There is an easy way to add some code on your site though the admin dashboard - using the Code Snippets plugin.

It allows you to create separated PHP code blocks (snippets) like you create new posts. You can disable or enable each snippet whenever it needs.

So, whenever you need to create a new custom PHP code snippet, you can do the follo…

Compare files and folders

A short tech tip on how to compare files and folders using diff and merge software such as Meld. The basic Meld usage and features.

Sometimes, you want to compare files in two directories find the difference.

For example, when you update software on your site, would be good to know which files updated and how the changes may affect your installation. Or maybe you've (or your developer) changed some files on your site and forget where the changes were made.

Obviously, you won't check each file line by line. You certainly need a tool, which can find all differences and give you visual report.

One of such tools is the Meld. It's free, open source and available for Linux, Windows and OS X users.

Meld helps you compare files and directories in two- and even three-way overview. You also can manage files under version control, such as Git or Subversion.

Example

Example below shows how looks comparison of the ClassiPress versions …