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  • Magento 2 Extension Is Now Available

    Finally, we have a hefty update for our Magento users.

    Extension for Magento 2 has been released, incorporating some of the best features we have implemented in WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3.6, including analytics, multi-row 3D product views, better responsiveness, API integration, and more.

    Download

    For those of you who are familiar with our Magento extensions, there has been always two integration modes you could use: Standard and Ad-hoc.

    In Magento 1.x, the Standard integration overrides the default implementation of the product media block, disabling any previous customizations to this block. This downside was addressed in Ad-hoc, which embeds a 360 product view or a popup thumbnail to a selected html element on a product page, making it quite flexible and as a result quite popular as well.

    So our new Magento 2 extension is essentially the Ad-hoc mode... We will be releasing an extra module for Magento 2 similar to the Standard integration mode (i.e with a product image gallery) sometime later this year.

    PS: since we have learned first hand that a transition to Magento 2 is not a walk in the park (and a lot of companies are still waiting), we have also released a refresh of our original Magento extension for Magento 1.x. This refresh includes v3.6 scripts and minor fixes so you can now enjoy the full power of 2 years worth of the core viewer development (see product history).

    A new dedicated page for all our recent Magento releases with detailed installation instructions and release history is now available on our website in the following link:

    http://www.webrotate360.com/products/cms-and-e-commerce-plugins/plugin-for-magento.aspx

  • Another Free Template to Launch Your WebRotate Inside a Lightbox

    It's true, SpotEditor still lacks a lightbox (popup) template and we will get to this soon... For now, if you need a quick "out of the box" solution to launch your 360 or 3D product views inside a lightbox popup (and you don't rely on WebRotate's CMS plugins that have it already integrated), use this template. It's simple!

    Download

    Here's how to get it up and running:

    • Create a new project in SpotEditor or use an existing one.
    • Publish it as usual.
    • Navigate to the "published" folder of your SpotEditor project.
    • Copy the contents of the template zip to the published folder except for 360_assets and imagerotator folders which you already have.
    • Open page.html and update the config parameter in the hyperlink to point to your published xml, i.e ...?config=360_assets/YourProject/YourProject.xml
    • Change popup dimensions as needed by updating height and width parameters accordingly.
    • If you need to change the viewer skin, open viewloader_basic.html and change basic.css to one of these: thin.css, empty.css, retina.css, round.css.
    • Open page.html in your browser and click "Test thumbnail" to see it in action. Simple!

    PS: if you use Chrome or Opera, remember about this security issue when testing the template locally.

    The template is based on the prettyPhoto library that has served us well over the years although we customized it slightly for a more responsive behavior on small mobile screens, etc. Also note that you can use it as a gallery of 360 or 3D product views which you can test by uncommenting the inactive section in page.html in the attached zip.

    Just ping us here if you have any issues.

  • Just in: WebRotate 360 Product Viewer for WordPress v3.1

    If you haven't noticed, we just quietly released a new version of our popular WordPress plugin.

    The announcement was postponed a bit as we were worried it could bring a lot of unexpected customer support during the holidays in case something was overlooked during the release. Now that the holidays are over and we saw a few successful upgrades and new installations, we can finally announce this exciting new release. Why is it exciting?

    First off, we have never really released or advertised v3.0 of the plugin. It has been a constant beta for almost a year. And while it packed the new WooCommerce integration and some of the original features of our core 3D product viewer, we never felt it was complete enough to call it a release..

    So now with the battle-hardened 3d product viewing function, our brand new SVG skins and the long list of other major core improvements released in the past 12 months (as part of v3.6 core), it is finally a good time to get the new plugin out of the door. Some of the notable plugin enhancements include:

    • API integration in wr360embed and wr360expand shortcodes.
    • wr360expand shortcode now allows full browser window mode instead of our usual full-screen.
    • Minimum viewer height property in shortcodes and global settings.
    • Viewer background color in shortcodes and global settings.
    • Full-screen support inside the popup shortcodes.
    • Custom path for your hotpot indicators (if you have them customized).
    • And a long long list of the core improvements and fixes.

    We also consolidated our WordPress downloads and installation instructions as well as the plugin history on a new page that is solely dedicated to the WordPress plugin. We encourage all our users to review the Installation notes that have the most comprehensive up-to-date details on the shortcode config and other related notes.

    Take it away!

  • Free Template With Custom Progress And Spinning Rollovers

    Ever since we launched our new website featuring the revised 3D product view of a Reebok shoe with a custom progress indicator and spinning rollovers, we have been receiving questions on how these customizations were accomplished. Today we would like to share some details as well as the working example!

    Click on this image to see it in action:

    SpotEditor project that was used to create this template is available here.

    The actual template file with the customizations is located under the published folder in the linked archieve and it's called SiteCustomizationsDemo.html such that it's not overwritten should you re-publish the project. Note that the project requires WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3.6 RC (free version can be downloaded here).

    Let's start with the spinning progress indicator which is based on SVG Circle Progress by Jon Christensen.

    The core of the customization is a new viewer initialization parameter in WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3.6 RC called progressCallback. Now you can pass this callback upon the initialization so you can be notified on loading progress. This includes the loading of the 360 product images as well as the hotspot rollover images (if they are configured under Image Content on the Hotspot form in SpotEditor). When you supply the callback, we automatically turn off the built-in progress indicator, and it becomes your responsibility to present the progress information to your visitors.

    So if you are using jQuery, here's how this callback can be setup:

    jQuery('#wr360PlayerId').rotator({
        configFileURL: '360_assets/SiteCustomizations/SiteCustomizations.xml',
        ....
        progressCallback: function(isFullScreen, percentLoaded, isZoomLoading)  {
                // your custom progress logic
        }
    });

    percentLoaded is a numeric parameter, representing the current state of the loader in percent.

    isZoomLoading is a boolean parameter which is only passed to the callback on zoom-in when your 3d product view is configured to use high-resolution images for image zooming. High-res zooming triggers the same progressCallback twice to give you a chance to show (and then hide) some sort of a progress status while the high-res image is being loaded. This means that isZoomLoading is first set to true followed by false in the second call when the high-res image is finally loaded.

    With this in mind, we simply center the SVG circle (as per the codepen example) by absolutely positioning it inside our viewer container via div.customprogress. We then update the offset of the animated stroke in incrementProgress upon every call to progressCallback and according to the value of percentLoaded.

    Next up is the spinning hotspot rollover...

    We started by creating a hotspot in SpotEditor with the Text Content tab set to the following html markup (on the Hotspot form):

    <div class="spinningSpot"><span>Text Hotspot</span></div>

    "Use custom styles" was also checked on the same tab to give us full control over the hotspot presentation. The rest was done in CSS by styling div.spinningSpot and the embedded span element accordingly.

    You can see the CSS styling inline in SiteCustomizationsDemo.html located under the published folder of the supplied SpotEditor project. In short, we have the parent container div.spinningSpot with two absolutely positioned elements: 1) div.spinningSpot:before for the spinning background and 2) div.spinningSpot span for the text. The demo SVG image that we used as a spinning background is also located in the linked zip archieve next to SiteCustomizationsDemo.html.

    To test this template with your own (published) 360 views, copy SiteCustomizationsDemo.html to your published folder and update configFileURL on line 165 to link to your xml config file which you can find under 360_assets/your-project-name. Remember that you would need to publish your project using the latest SpotEditor v3.6 RC (build 1367) to test these customizations with your own 360 or 3D product images.

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