Blog posts of '2013' 'May'

So you have been giving discounts on your nopCommerce stores. Other than raising the interests of your customers and generating more sales (in terms of quantity, not necessarilly in terms of total sales amount), you are not getting any other benefits.

But you could have done it anyway! How about giving discount in exchange of social mentions of your store? In this way, not only are you getting social referrals, you are also improving your stores' Search Engine Optimization (yes, social mention is accounted for SEO these days)!

Enter Pmints Discount - Social Discount Plugin. Pmints Discount is an nopCommerce discount plugin that allows you to give discounts to your customers after they've shared your website on their social networks. The actual sharing mechanism is provided by Pmints. Currently supported social networks include Facebook and Twitter.

Pmints Discount essentially integrates nopCommerce's "discount requirement" mechanism with Pmints. In other words, the plugin works along nicely with nopCommerce's "discounts" feature, and you can add "shared on Pmints" rule to any discount on your nopCommerce stores! In this way, the discount will only be available after your customers have shared your website on their social networks.

But how can you get the most of the Pmints Discount plugin? Read on to learn more!

There has been numerous questions posted on nopCommerce forums and StackOverflow about how to make nopCommerce plugins' Views text-editeable as CSHTML files. This is because the most widely known method of displaying Views in nopCommerce is to mark the .CSHTML files as Embedded Resource, which essentially makes the Views behave like binary files (such as DLLs), which in turn makes the Views uneditable in text editors. In fact, you can't even find the CSHTML files on the compiled plugins folder!

For example, the figure below is how a compiled nopCommerce plugin looks like. You notice that there's no .CSHTML that you can edit. Why is this a bad thing? Because if you are developing an nopCommerce plugin for your clients, that means there is no easy way they can edit how the plugin renders on their shop.

How can we go about solving this limitation? Read on to learn!