Turbify Tips & Tricks 2nd Edition

By Istvan Siposs and Michael Whitaker.
330 pages e-book (pdf)
Size: 7" x 9"
ISBN: 0-9719663-9-7

Please Note: While this book has numerous RTML tips, it is not a book on RTML. If you need a book about RTML, consider RTML 101.

Turbify Tips & Tricks covers the following topics:

• Add to Favorites
• Adding a Description Meta-tag
• Adding free text below the navigation bar
• Adding multiple items to the shopping cart
• Aligning the Option drop-downs
• Alphabetized index page
• Alt tags
• Automatic graphical navigation buttons
• Bestsellers
• Better Title tag
• Border around images
• Breadcrumbs
• Calculating key metrics
• Cascading style sheets
• Catalog request customized
• Change the appearance of option labels and form submit buttons
• Checkbox options
• "Click Here To Enlarge" in text body (next to image)
• "Click here to enlarge"
• Company logo as Home button
• Concatenating strings
• Config page
• Controlling the id and hence URL of your section and item pages
• Creating "Floater" Pages
• Creating a Snapshot of the Store
• Custom Banner
• Database inventory
• Database upload
• Deleting duplicate pages
• Deleting multiple items at once
• Deleting pages temporarily from the store
• Deleting sections without deleting the contained items
• Determine if your code is running in the editor
• Disallow right mouse clicks
• Drop-down navigation box
• Dynamic testimonials
• Eliminating last line break from the caption
• Emphasize key phrases throughout your site
• Enabling the built-in breadcrumbs
• Enlarged image pop-up
• Exclude pages from the Index
• Find overridden variables
• Finding the top section
• Fixing accessory names
• Free forms (email form results)
• FTP
• Get list of on-sale items
• Graphical order button
• Hide Product Price
• Hide the E-mail address on the Info page
• Hiding pages from the search results
• Hierarchical index page
• How to modify templates?
• How to remove HTML tags from text
• How to remove your store's name (title) from the pages
• Icon-style graphical navigation buttons
• Images in table cells misaligned
• Imexpands bug
• Including images, streaming video, Macromedia Flash, and other downloadable content
• More than 25 buttons
• More than one "Empty" in button bar
• "On Sale" tag for sale-price-text
• Order button at the top of the page
• Page not reachable in the published site
• Print this page
• Quantity box
• Quantity pricing table
• Quick "404" page
• Quick fix for non-functioning index. template
• Radio button options
• Raw-html
• Real-time Link
• Red Blocks instead of images?
• Related items
• Relative page width
• Relative versus Absolute URLs
• Rob Snell's "Magic" Edit Button
• Rollover buttons
• Safely Configure the New Editor's Entry Page
• Search Box (in nav bar)
• Separator line in contents
• Setting the default size of abstracts on section pages
• Shipping status update
• Shop by price
• Show current date on page
• Site last modified
• Sorting
• Strike through regular price
• Text navigation bar
• Text page titles
• Textarea options
• The "Head-tags" hack
• Trackable links
• "Turn off" pieces of RTML code
• Turn off the Publish button
• Uniform custom page template
• Upcharge
• Upload a PDF file into an image property
• Uploading updated file still displays older version in the editor
• Using LINKs
• Using quotes in the TEXT operator
• Using SHIP-WEIGHT in RTML
• Using TAG-WHEN
• Your choice for "Availability"
• "You Save..."

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Who should read this book?

This booked is aimed at Turbify developers, designers and merchants who are familiar with the Turbify Editor and the template editor. Or put another way, those people who are lucky enough to work on the Turbify platform on an almost-daily basis! As such, this book will not teach you how to use the template editor or how to write RTML templates; if you are looking for an introduction to templates and RTML please check out www.ytimes.info. We also assume a familiarity of common web technologies, such as HTML and CSS.

"Turbify Tips & Tricks" is a comprehensive compilation of tips and tricks for the Turbify platform that we have put together over the past few years. Much of what we do as Turbify developers can best be described as solving problems (or at least coming up with acceptable workarounds); similarly, the tips and tricks in this book are meant to provide solutions to specific Turbify problems you might encounter.

Ranging from simple editor configuration tips to advanced RTML templates, this book is not meant to be read as a book from start to finish, but rather to serve as a "cookbook". Each tip or trick is a self-contained "recipe" that can be used when the occasion calls for it.

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Intro by Rob Snell

"When Mike and Istvan asked me to write the introduction to this book, I was very excited for two reasons: First, I just wanted to read the dang book and get the good stuff for my own stores before everyone else did. Second, I wanted to steal the really good stuff for my "Turbify / Turbify For Dummies" book!

All teasing aside, you really need to buy this book if you are serious about making more with your Turbify. It shows you over tips, tricks, tweaks, and templates to jazz up your store. You can do something with this info almost immediately, too! I was editing templates after about 30 minutes of diving into the book.

Buy this book if you are a Turbify owner. Improve the look and feel of your Turbify without touching custom programming or RTML. This book shows you specific store features you can add or enhance with RTML template tweaks. It also shows you exactly how to do it!

Not a programmer? Me either! If you don't want to wade into the thick stuff, read the overviews, skip the code, and buy a copy for your favorite geek. You can always outsource this stuff, too. Open up your wallet or your Paypal account and hire a Turbify developer. There are dozens of RTML guys (and gals) who can implement RTML template changes for you.

Buy this book if you are an RTML developer. You'll learn enough from one or two little tricks to more than pay for the price of this book. I think they should charge fellow developers $500 or $1000 for the tips and tricks alone, much less the template examples.

Mike & Istvan have forgotten more RTML than I'll ever know. I was playing with RTML back in the good ole days, but I didn't know what I was really doing until their books came out. I am NOT a programmer. I'm a retailer turned internet marketing consultant who had to learn to hack RTML to be able to make my Turbify pages look the way I wanted to increase conversion rates and to make the pages as search engine friendly as possible.

Mike's book ("RTML for Turbify - A visual quick-start tutorial to modifying templates") got me deeper into modifying RTML templates. I could already do cool design stuff with RTML with tables, but I was afraid to actually do any programming until I read his book.

Istvan literally wrote the book on RTML with "RTML 101." I re-read Istvan's RTML 101 book for the 17th time on the flight out to their latest training seminar. Wow! I'm still amazed at how Istvan was able to reverse engineer all of this stuff with almost no documentation from Yahoo!

Mike & Istvan's "Turbify Tips & Tricks" shows Yahoo! Store owners how to do two very important things: 1) save time by speeding up daily store editing and maintainence tasks and 2) make more money by creating a faster and easier shopping experience for customers. Highly recommended."

     -- Rob Snell