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Jessica Theme v1.9.2 and v2.0.0

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We’re excited to announce two important updates for the Jessica theme – version 1.9.2 and version 2.0.0. These updates bring compatibility improvements and remove legacy code to keep your site running smoothly with WordPress 6.7, Genesis 3.6 and PHP 8.

We believe that frequent updates are generally a bad thing—they’re a hassle for site owners and often indicate poor software management. However, WordPress, Genesis, and PHP (the core language of WordPress) do receive occasional updates, and sometimes, those require theme adjustments for unforeseen changes.

Recently, WordPress introduced a breaking change affecting when text domains for translations are loaded. In response, Genesis updated this in version 3.6 (changelog). This, along with our long-standing plan to remove legacy code for outdated e-commerce plugins, prompted us to update the Jessica theme.

While these updates do not include critical security fixes, we recommend applying them, as some are necessary for PHP 8.4 compatibility.

What’s New in v1.9.2

  • Full compatibility with the latest versions of WooCommerce, Genesis Framework, and WordPress
  • Updated to support current PHP versions (PHP 7.4+ recommended)
  • Various bug fixes and performance improvements

What’s Changed in v2.0.0

  • Removed legacy code for WP eCommerce (WPEC) and iThemes Exchange. These plugins have been unsupported by their maintainers for a long time. Only WooCommerce is supported going forward.
  • Streamlined theme codebase for better performance with PHP 8.
  • I can’t imagine anyone is still using WPEC or iThemes Exchange, but if you are, you’ll want to stick with v1.9.2 and should not expect any further support of those.

Before You Update

IMPORTANT: Always back up your site before installing any updates. This is especially true with these updates as you will need to delete/remove a few existing files.

This includes:

  • Complete site backup (files and database)
  • Export any custom theme settings
  • Note any customizations you’ve made to theme files (especially style.css and functions.php)

If you have code customizations in your current Jessica theme, you will lose those modifications unless you merge them into the new version. Merging those code-based child theme customizations is best done by whomever wrote those customizations in the first place and is not supported by 9seeds. They can do this by comparing a diff of the themes. If your customizations were all done via the WordPress dashboard/customizer without PHP or CSS code being written to files this does not apply to you.

Regardless, we again strongly recommend having a current backup.

Update Instructions

You can download the latest version of Jessica from https://9seeds.com/my-account/downloads/.

Option A: Update via WordPress Admin

  1. Download the latest version of Jessica theme from the link above
  2. Log in to your WordPress admin dashboard
  3. Navigate to Appearance → Themes
  4. Click “Add New” then “Upload Theme”
  5. Select the ZIP file you downloaded and click “Install Now”
  6. Click “Replace current with uploaded” to activate the updated theme

Option B: Update via FTP/SFTP

  1. Download and unzip the latest theme version
  2. Connect to your site via FTP/SFTP
  3. Navigate to /wp-content/themes/
  4. Upload the unzipped theme folder, overwriting the existing jessica folder. Review the theme changelog and be sure removed WPEC/IThemes Exchangefiles have been removed.
  5. Clear any caching plugins or server caches

After Updating

  • Check your site thoroughly to ensure everything is working correctly
  • Test key functionality like product pages, checkout process, and any custom features
  • If you encounter issues, restore from your backup and contact support

Quickly Convert Your Restaurant Into Curbside Delivery With Online Ordering

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All across the country restaurants have been shuttered while we figure out what COVID-19 means to our normal way of life. However, just because you’ve closed the dining room doesn’t mean you have to close your doors completely. Most jurisdictions are allowing for curbside delivery and carry-out options. The question now is: how do you go about making that happen?

There are plenty of services out there to help you with this problem if you are setting up for home delivery: UberEats, DoorDash, GrubHub, Postmates; the list grows every day. While these services have some good benefits, they come with some drawbacks as well.

What Does it Cost?

While most of these services are free to the restaurant, they cost your customers. The fees are all over the map, depending on which one they choose, and it’s impossible to keep track. Sometimes your customers just need, and love, the convenience; but sometimes they just want to pick up some food without tacking on all these extra fees.

Who’s Customers are These?

Another problem is that, by using these services you are giving away one of your primary assets to these third parties: your customer data.
These are your customers, not GrubHub’s. When you want to contact your customers, you should be able to without talking to some other entity to do so. If you’re having a slow day or need to do a salad special before all the arugula goes bad, you should be able to reach out to your customer list with a quick promotion. “Half off the Arugula Steak salad while supplies last!”

Make Your Website Work for You

It is time to make your website do some heavy lifting for you. It can do more than just display an image of your menu and list your hours. Instead, you’re going to put your menu online in an easily editable format with beautiful pictures. If you run a special, it takes just a few minutes to edit your online menu and have it be just as available to your customers online as it would be if they had walked in and seen that fresh sheet right there in the restaurant. You’re also going to be able to take orders directly from the site, no human intervention required. Customers can place an online order, including payment and including tip, all up front. Finally, you’re going to be able to contact your customers as a group just as easily as sending an email.

This is a lot of heavy duty functionality, but thanks to the power of WordPress and its ease of use, you will be able to do this all yourself. From here on out I am assuming that you are already using WordPress, and I will be talking about how to achieve these goals with it and the plugins you can install on a WordPress site. This isn’t the only way to solve the problem of taking online orders for your restaurant; but in my experience, it’s just the easiest and most robust solution.

Install WooCommerce

I have written about WooCommerce before and everything I have said before still stands. There is simply not a more flexible, robust way to have your customers put multiple items into a cart and pay for them online. If you are using WooCommerce for a restaurant, there are only a couple things I would call out specifically.

WooCommerce is going to refer to everything as a “product;” but in terms of your restaurant, you can replace that word with dish.

Every product has a “category;” but for your restaurant the category is going to be the course or menu section. You will put in a dish and assign it a category, like Specials, Appetizers, Soups & Salads, Entrees, Desserts, or Beverages. However you organize your food on the menu, you are going to want to organize it the same way on the site. In addition, you can assign multiple categories to a single product. So if you have different menus for lunch and dinner, you can assign the dish both “entree” and “dinner” and it will easily group with all the rest of the dinner entrees. You would add the Beverages category to all options you serve.

Last, each product is going to have something called “product tags”. For a restaurant, I would suggest using these tags to make it easier for your customers to search for items. Good examples of product tags are beef, poultry, vegan, and gluten-free. Tags are for short descriptive words, not long sentences.

Now that you know what all those terms mean, you’re ready to set up your menu. For each dish you have in the restaurant you would create a new product, assign it a category (or more if necessary), give it some tags, upload a photo, and assign it a price.

Repeat until all your dishes are created.

Get Paid

Now you need to set up your payment processor. You can set up as many as you want, but in general the fewer options your give your customers, the better. Give them a way to pay with a credit card and, if you want, you could allow them to pay when they come and pick the food up. WooCommerce refers to that second option as an “offline payment method” and by default it will say “Pay by Check”. If you are going to offer this option you are going to want to change that option to “Pay at Pick-up” or something else that sounds good to you.

For the credit card orders, there are any number of options to choose from. There’s even a possibility that WooCommerce can hook into what you are already using for payments. If you don’t want to try and hook into your payment system, then you can’t go wrong with Stripe. It’s very easy to set up, it has reasonable fees, and it just works. I have used every imaginable payment processor out there and the “it just works” feature is worth more than you might imagine.

Tipping

The one thing that is a little different when it comes to online orders vs. the regular restaurant experience, is that in non-restaurant related business there is rarely an opportunity to add a gratuity. You could just leave this entire step out if you wanted to simplify the process, but there is a very affordable plugin that will help you keep the option to add gratuity to an order.

WooCommerce Donation Or Tip On Cart And Checkout is a very affordable plugin that will seamlessly allow a tip to be added while your customers are checking out and paying for their dinner orders.

Getting the Orders

Email
Finally, after the customer has placed their order and paid for it, you need to be notified that the order has been placed. With no additional work, you can keep track of email order notifications with a phone or tablet monitored by a manager or front of house person. To make sure you’re seeing those email notifications, you’ll want to set up you email box so that emails from the ordering system come in as a VIP email.

Texting
A slightly better way to handle notifications is to have the email go directly to a phone with texting capabilities using your mobile providers email to SMS gateway address. Each mobile company has an email address you can send an email to that will take a standard email and send it directly to your phone. T-Mobile’s, for example, is tmomail.net; so if you were using T-Mobile on the phone you receive orders on, you would set the orders emails in WooCommerce to go to [email protected]. Just replace xxxxxxxxxx with your phone number and any email that goes to that address will get texted right to your orders phone.

Many more methods…
I could double the length of this post just talking about getting orders out of the system and into the hands of your chefs. For example, using Zapier and a Gmail account, you could have emails automatically routed to a cloud based printer. Another excellent choice, using Zapier, is to have it call your restaurant phone line with a simple message like “Order is in the system”. There are as many different ways to solve this as there are different types of restaurants, so once you get to the point in which you want an improved notification experience, you may want to contact a developer to help you out.

Moving from Brick and Mortar Sales to Online Orders

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If you’re one of the thousands of non-essential retail stores closed right now, you may be looking for what it is going to take to move your sales online. It’s probably an idea you’ve been kicking around for a while but the complexity of how to make it all work has stopped you from going down that path. Regardless of what happened before, this is the time to make the jump to online sales.

Choosing an ecommerce platform

The first thing to solve when moving to functioning as an online retailer is to decide which shopping cart system to use. The number of choices you can make at this point is daunting. I am not going to get into a large pros and cons of the various service in this article. I am simply going to start with some assumptions and give you a good recommendation as a starting point.

You want to…

  1. Get up and running as fast as possible.
  2. Sell items from your store on your store’s website.
  3. Maintain a path for maximum flexibility as you grow your online business.

With those criteria established there’s only one real choice that meets them all, and that is WooCommerce. WooCommerce works for every business whim imaginable. Go to the extensiogns page of their site and you can see over 350 different ways to extend WooCommerce to fit your particular need. There are shipping services, mailers, payment integrations, and customer service extensions. In addition to all those external integrations there are all the extensions that change how WooCommerce actually works. You can turn a WooCommerce install into something to handle bookings, sell subscription services, safely sell downloadable products, and automatically calculate US state taxes or VAT. If you can imagine it, WooCommerce with its library of extensions can probably make it happen.

Over 4 million sites run WooCommerce. This number is important to you because with that many people running the software, they’re always working on adding new features that their customers want. In addition, it means that they are always working to keep that installed base secure with patches and updates to keep your store safe. Finally, that enormous installed base of WooCommerce sites means that when you want to do something fancy there are a lot of WooCommerce developers around to support your ideas.

Another major benefit is that WooCommerce is very simple to get configured and ready for sales. If you can upload a picture of a product and give it a price, you can run a WooCommerce based store.

Finally, WooCommerce has a great pricing model. It’s free! Some of the extensions and more advanced features have costs associated with them but if you are just getting a store up and running it’s nice to know you won’t have to have a huge outlay in capital for licensing and software just to get started.

Getting started with WooCommerce

Install WooCommerce
It is easier to see than to describe so take a look at the simple WooCommerce setup video below to see what it takes to get up and running very quickly.

Now What?
Once your store is up and running you can now take a step back and look at your next steps. It’s possible you could just stop here. If your store looks the way you want it to and you don’t mind some paperwork to handle shipping and inventory management, you could just stop here. Make sure your Google listing has your store website listed and you’re set.

If, however, you want to automate inventory management, make shipping easier or make your store look a little fancier, here are some additional steps to consider.

Install a WooCommerce Compatible Theme
While WooCommerce makes every effort to be compatible with any theme you are using on your site, the sheer amount of themes out there makes this a very complicated task. The way they make the base plugin the most compatible is by making it display products as simply as possible. If you want your site to stand out a little you will probably want to install a WooCommerce specific theme.

Installing a WooCommerce theme means that you can have a lot of basic look and feel changes right in your admin area and you won’t have to write code or talk to a developer to get your site to look more like the way you want it to.

My recommendation is that you cannot go wrong by choosing a Storefront based theme. Storefront is the official WooCommerce theme and has the maximum amount of compatibility with WooCommerce. They have almost 20 different variations on this theme and one of them would almost certainly get you where you want to go with a minimum of fuss. Another good choice (if I do say so myself) is the Jessica theme. Jessica is a Genesis based theme that looks great right out of the box with very little configuration. Finally, you also may want something a little more custom in which case it might be time to talk to a developer and see about something built to your exact specifications.

Calculating Shipping costs with WooCommerce

Install a Shipping Plugin
Once you start doing any level of shipping whatsoever you are going to want assistance in getting your products out the door and into the hands of your customers. Fulfilling orders by hand and printing labels will make the most stable among us tear their hair out in frustration very quickly. Getting ShipStation is an affordable way to remove these headaches from the get-go.

The ShipStation plugin has an added benefit of being able to automatically calculate shipping prices, in real-time, as your customers are checking out.
In addition to handling your shipping needs, ShipStation also helps with inventory management as an impressive bonus. With ShipStation hooked up to WooCommerce it gives you a single interface to manage your inventory while handling shipping. No more hassle of trying to match orders to labels. It’s all in one place.

Other honorable mentions in this category are Shippo and ShipBob. Both of these also have very tight WooCommerce integrations. They may have extended features or pricing that might work better for your business.

Hooking up a POS system to WooCommerce

The final item isn’t for everyone but to close the loop on inventory and sales and is to install a Point of Sale (POS) system that integrates with WooCommerce. Once your store is open for business again you are not strictly online you are going to want to make sure all the sales data is going into one place. Once again, WooCommerce comes to the rescue with its incredible versatility. This section is going to be a little different than what I have mentioned before because the system you use is going to be very dependent on what POS you are already using. If you are starting from scratch you could do a lot worse than simply starting with Square. Square has long been a favorite for non-traditional POS systems. You can even use your own phones and tablets in a pinch and on the go. As an added bonus the WooCommerce integration is through a free plugin.

Another service like Square is Lightspeed. This is a full featured service with integrated hardware and software, much like Square. Unlike Square, the plugin to integrate with WooCommerce costs $150/yr so keep that in mind. If you already have Lightspeed, however, installing that plugin and WooCommerce is a very quick way to get your online sales hooked up.

Lightspeed and Square can deter some people because of their inherent ongoing costs for both the service and the hardware. The major benefit of either is that your headaches are much reduced by getting an integrated system. The screens, credit card swipe, receipt printing, and cash drawers are all hooked up and connected and you don’t have to worry about any of it. The downside to all this convenience is cost. A full kit for Square starts at $600 and you have to add a tablet on top of that. Lightspeed doesn’t publish their hardware prices which makes me suspicious that they are probably more expensive than that.

If you’re looking to get up and running by simply using hardware you already have, FooSales might be what you’re looking for. The plugin is $15/mo and there’s no sales people to talk to, no hardware to install right off the bat. You can simply sign up and be selling, in person, directly out of your WooCommerce inventory in minutes. You will have more set-up to do in terms of printing receipts and hooking up card readers but if you like that sort of control, take a look at their hardware page and see how you can connect it all yourself. This can be a nice solution for a lot of businesses because sometimes getting something workable, quickly, today, is more important than getting it perfect, later. This also gives you the ability to add the pieces and parts as you go without having to do the entire outlay all at once.

What’s next with WooCommerce

I’ve tried to give a very straightforward rundown of how WooCommerce can help you get your business online with as few headaches as possible. I’ve also tried to cover some more advanced topics that you will almost certainly want to implement if you want to keep the management of your online and physical store inventory and sales in sync, get your site looking just the way you want it to, and to keep your shipping headaches minimized.

WooCommerce can do it all and puts that power into your hands.

I hope you’ve found this post helpful in clearing up some of the mystery about how to get WooCommerce up and running. As always, if you have any questions about this or anything else we’ve written about, please feel free to contact us.

email

A new and improved support experience

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Forums used to be a big deal

Long ago most themes were supported via forums. Theme frameworks like StudioPress and Thesis used to have extremely active forums of which we were a part. Like so many of our freelance and agency customers we learned a lot from those forum communities, and running our forums has always been part of how we’ve given back to that very same community of learning and sharing that permeates the broader WordPress Community.  

The way people request and digest information online is different these days, and it is much more transactional than lesson-based. In short, folks just want answers to their questions, not lessons. 

As a result of the shift in the way information is being consumed, we will be discontinuing forum-based support and shifting resources to provide the best possible experience for email-only support.

Self-service documentation  

As we’ve evaluated our end-to-end support experience, we’ve found opportunities to make or self-service theme and plugin documentation a bit better as well. As a result, we’ll be focusing on updating documentation to better address the theme setup process and make your life easier in the process. 

We’re also taking this opportunity to move self-service support documentation to a more modern system which will make getting answers to your questions faster and easier. And of course, if you’re not able to find the information you’re looking for, the ‘create support ticket’ button will be nearby to get in touch via email!

Forum sunset plan

The forum content will stick around for the foreseeable future as the information contained in the forums is still an amazing resource to those that want to mine them. They will be branded “community support forums” going forward which means that we will continue to monitor them to make sure the lights stay on, but they’ll no longer be our “official support channel”. Oh, and one last note on privacy — forum posts will forever retain the same privacy restrictions they have now. The public can see that the forums exist and read the post titles, but the body content of forum posts will only be available to logged in users. We don’t want your old forum posts about a client’s website indexed by search engines any more than you do!

As always, please get in touch if you have questions!

Lazy Loading Goes Native in Chrome

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Good web developers build great experiences for users. Incredible web developers build super quick, elegant experiences for users. Speed is extremely important in modern web development because a growing number of consumers use mobile phones to access the internet – that’s why a while ago Google announced mobile-first indexing of web pages (basing your search position partially on how performant your website is on a mobile phone).

Pro Tip: While creating a mobile-friendly website is an important principle of modern web design, it’s important to note that the mobile version of the site must be performant. We’ve seen many cases where sites lose search rank because mobile-first indexing reveals how poorly a site performs on a mobile device. Don’t assume that because desktop page load time is fast, that the mobile version of your website is fast too. 

While there have been a lot of improvements in browser standards over the years, a feature called “lazy loading” has always been a performance hack baked into site-side code that utilizes one of the many lazy load compatible CDNs, caching plugins, or libraries. Unfortunately, these solutions often require a paid subscription or JavaScript payload to be transferred client-side as a prerequisite for the performance enhancements that come with lazy loading images. Sounds complicated because it is. That is, until now (if you’re using Chrome). Starting with Chrome v76, the browser gets a new superpower – native lazy loading.

While the Chrome dev blog has a simple article on how to implement lazy loading, here are the top 3 things you should consider before getting started.

It’s only good for images for now

While Chrome developers have eluded to the fact that they might be adding other elements to  lazy load browser capabilities in the future, for right now the feature only works on images (image tags). That means that if you want to lazy load videos, CSS, or other types of content, you’ll need to use a traditional lazy load library.

You’ll still need a fallback for unsupported browsers

While native lazy loading is now supported by Google Chrome, there are plenty of other browsers that don’t yet support this standard. In-fact, the market share for Chrome worldwide is only 63.99%. That means that a little less than half of your users will experience diminished performance unless you opt to implement a lazy load library or plugin.

Effectiveness of implementation has had mixed reviews

In web development, installing a library or plugin is rarely the entirety of what needs to be done to implement a new feature. In the case of implementing native lazy loading in WordPress, there are a couple factors to consider including how your images are loaded (are they loaded with CSS as backgrounds to layers or as images within image tags) and conflicting plugins (a plugin that isn’t aware of Chrome’s new superpowers might continue to load libraries in order to lazy load the old way).

Overall it’s awesome to see lazy loading capabilities becoming standard within browsers (especially browsers sponsored by the same companies that use performance as a ranking criteria). In the future, we look forward to other browsers adopting the lazy load standard along with the inclusion of new elements.