Sometime this month we’ll be rolling out a big update to the “More Products” section (aka merchandise) of NextProof galleries. Remember that any product marked as “merchandise” and added to a gallery will be available for purchase in the “More Pruducts” tab.

In this upcoming release, you’ll be able to add an image and a description to any merchandise item. The “More Products” tab will have an improved layout and include the images and descriptions.

You can see an example here on our staging server (be warned: the final layout may change slightly).

The descriptions will even support basic HTML tags and embedding videos/slideshows. So, for example, you could sell a DVD slideshow and even offer a preview.

A related feature coming as well: when you customer places an order, you’ll be able to view their favorite images in the order details screen. This will allow customers to use their favorite images as part of an album purchase.

How to prepare

In preparation for these updates, we recommend getting images together and writing copy for your merchandise.

Just a quick note. Because of the firewall configuration at our new servers, you must use passive mode when uploading images via FTP.

As far as I know, every FTP client supports passive mode transfers.

I currently use Transmit for Mac when uploading. Passive mode option is located in Preferences->Network.

Ok, a few updates for you. First off, we’ve got a new theme in the system. Butterscotch has some nice muted tans and browns–perfect for your Autumn galleries. It’s available in the control panel now and we should have a sample gallery up later today.

Prettier Emails

We’ve been working to improve the emails that go out to both you and your customers (order notifications, invoices, etc.). We just updated the order notifications that go to you–they now look like this:

More pretty emails are on the way (they take a quite a bit of testing to ensure formatting on popular email clients).

Tax Rate Update

Thanks to Fresno photographer Mark Janzen who notified us that some govenments like to collect taxes in the ten thousandths of a percent. We’ve updated the NextProof system to reflect this–you can now set tax rates like 7.0625%.

Help

You may have noticed there’s now a Help link in the NextProof control panel. Click it for quicker access to our help pages and to submit a support ticket.

More Resources and Stability

Since moving to our new host (EngineYard), we’ve been working hard to make the entire NextProof system faster and more reliable. We’ve recently made changes that should improve the speed of FTP imports and orders sent to ProDPI.

Thanks and keep the feedback coming.

Since the move to our new server, some users experienced issues with the featured images slideshows (both in the gallery and embedded).

We think we’ve resolved these issues–slideshows should be a bit more stable now.

Remember, it’s very easy to embed a slideshow in your blog. It’s a great way to get people over to your galleries and place orders. Just follow the steps in this help document.

FTP uploading has been restored. Again, sorry for the inconvenience–it was a small configuration issue resulting from our server move.

We’re currently experiencing some FTP issues this afternoon. FTPed images are not being recognized by the system when adding images.

We expect to have this issue resolved very shortly. The web uploaded is working properly.

Our apologies for the inconvenience.

We’re moving NextProof to a bigger/faster server this evening. Maintenance will begin at 9pm Pacific Time–at this time NextProof will be unavailable for approximately 2 hours. During this downtime, visitors to your NextProof gallery will be presented with a maintenance page (not just a 404 error or blank screen).

We recommend not uploading any images after 7pm Pacific Time tonight.

Thanks again for your continued support.

If anyone is curious, NextProof will now be hosted by the good folks at Engine Yard.

So, we’re getting ready to create some new videos for NextProof. Not tutorials, but customer testimonials and spotlights.

We’re looking for a photographer or two who is using NextProof to boost their sales and business. Of course the focus is NextProof, but we also want to know how you shoot, what your workflow is like, and how you market your business.

So, if you’ve got a good story and don’t mind being on the other end of the camera, send your pitch to Mike (mike[at]bigfolio[dot]com). If we pick you, our trusty video guy will fly out and film you in your natural habitat. We might even throw in a new website or other prize to sweeten the deal.

This will happen over the next few months. Even if you haven’t used NextProof, you’ve got a chance. Create an account and get started.

We love WordPress here at BIG Folio. If you use WordPress for your blog, here’s some good news. We’ve developed a simple plugin for WordPress. The plugin displays your most recent NextProof event links right on your blog’s sidebar.

How to Use the NextProof Sidebar Plugin

1. Download and unzip the plugin .zip file below
2. Upload the nextproof-sidebar folder to your WordPress plugins folder (in wp-content/plugins/)
3. Access your WordPress admin
4. Navigate to the Plugins page and activate the NextProof Sidebar plugin
5. Navigate to the Design tab and select the Widgets page
6. Drag the NextProof Sidebar widget to your Current Widgets
7. Click the edit link and enter your NextProof URL (including the http://) and a heading
8. Click Save Changes

That’s it. Your event links will dynamically show up on your sidebar.

Download NextProof Plugin for WordPress

Requires WordPress version 2.3 or higher

UPDATE: We pushed back our migration date due to some configuration issues with the new server. The update is now planned for this Tuesday at 9pm. Do not start any uploads after 8pm.