Category: How To

Blog posts showing you how to do or achieve something

Now store and rotate up to 5 global slot messages

Now store up to five global slot messages and rotate them according to the priority you want!

What are slot messages?

Remember, a slot message is where a randomly chosen product grid slot / cell has its contents replaced with an optionally linked image.

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What are global slot messages?

A global slot message is one displayed in all eligible product grids across your site in real time. You set them up in the NiftyGridZPro page of your Admin panel settings.

setting up global slot messages
admin settings page: setting up global slot messages

Eligible product grids are those:

  • with 4 or more products in them
  • ones without their own slot message in their shortcode
  • ones without slot messaging switched off in their shortcode

How does rotation work?

In real time…

It’s all about choosing which of the slot messages to display – and doing it in real time.

You see, whenever someone visits a post / page of yours with a NiftyGridZPro shortcode, then NiftyGridZPro gets kicked into action to do its stuff.

Part of that stuff is checking if Global Slot Messaging is switched on and, if it is – and this grid is elligible for them – then it randomly chooses a message and displays it in a randomly chosen position (slot) in the grid.

How a slot message is chosen (rotated)

Think of a lottery draw. Each of the 5 possible global slot messages has its own weighting, a number you give from 1 to 9. That’s the number of its tickets that get thrown into the hat.

Once all tickets are in the hat, one is drawn at random.

Say you have two global slot messages set up. You give both a weighting of 1. Both get one ticket in the hat, so there’s a 50/50 chance of each being drawn.

Say instead, you give a weighting of 1 to the first and 2 to the second. The first gets one ticket in the hat and the second gets two tickets. There’s now a 33% chance the first gets chosen and a 66% chance it’s the second that sees the light of day.

Simple! Now go up there ^^ and page through the grid to see the rotation of the global slot message. You’ll get a new randomly chosen one (rotation) every time a new page of the grid is shown.

At the time of writing, we’ve got got 4 messages set up, 3 are for Halloween, each with a weighting of 1, and the other one is the announcement about the release of V3 of NiftyGridZPro. That’s 8 tickets in the hat.

That last one we’ve weighted at 5 so it’s got a 5/8 chance of being shown each time. The others (flappy bats, frankenwalker and happy halloween) each have a 1/8 chance of being shown.

Setting up and using Global Slot Messaging

You can also think of it as message / promotion injection.

Here’s a 7 min 30 sec YouTube video taking you through the steps and showing the results. It covers:

  • Swtiching global slot messaging on and off
  • Setting up your own global slot message
  • How to prevent a particular post’s/page’s from showing global slot messages
  • How to set up a specific slot message using your post’s/page’s grid shortcode

Here it is:

If we’ve currently got global messaging switched on, you’ll see the current one in the grid below 🙂

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Important points to remember

  • Global slot messages are real-time
  • Only eligible grids will display your global slot message
  • Product grids with fewer than four products in them aren’t eligible
  • Product grids with a slot message defined in their shortcodes aren’t eligible
  • Product grids that include use_message_slot=0 in their shortcode options aren’t eligible
  • The position a slot message displays in a grid is chosen randomly each time

Turn that on its head and you should get that every product grid that makes no mention of slot messages in its shortcode will automatically display the global one (as long it has four or more products in its grid).

Great feature – how can I use it?

The bare facts are that you get to define the web address of an image you want to display and the web address it gets linked to.

Armed with those two facts, here’s some obvious examples

  • Feature a different designer or brand store from time to time
  • Announce major Zazzle promotions and link either to Zazzle’s suggested landing page or to their coupon page
  • Feature your own specific product when you launch a new design
  • Provide an affiliate image/link for, say Amazon, or wherever else you might affiliate
  • Promote other pages of your own site
  • Make a short campaign in the run up to special holidays (hello “Halloween”!)
  • You could even sell that “ad space” to who you choose

We’d love to hear about ways you’d use it, so if you don’t mind sharing, drop off a comment 🙂

How to: Halloween Party Invitations for Kids

So, Halloween is almost upon us! Now is the time to think about all those kids’ parties being organized right now!

So the question answered for this post is “how do I make a product grid containing just invitations for kids’ halloween parties?”

It’s so easy to do with NiftyGridZPro just use the shortcode builder over on our sister site.

Here’s the grid I created with it and you’ll see that they’re all invitations for halloween parties for kids. Perfect, just what we want. Keep reading to see how I set it up.

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Search for:
How many to get (max 120):


…and here’s the shortcode for the grid

[niftygridzpro title_font_size="14px" title_alignment="center" cell_max_width="260px" cell_border_color="#aaaaaa" cell_background_color="#ffffff" cell_font_color="#333333" cell_vlink_color="#666666" description_font_size="12px" description_alignment="center" description_length="0" include_product_names_in_titles=1 include_by_line=1 include_tags_line=0 include_price_line=0 allow_interaction=1 product_grid_nav_font_size="20px" show_visitor_search_form=1 show_grid_navigation=1 fallback_filename="default-fallback-grid.html" grid_sort_method="pulledorder" grid_sort_direction="highlow" associate_id="238582202591969585" search_term="halloween kids" sort_type="popularity" sort_direction="desc" page_size="4" page_number="1" department_id="252145500430512226" product_background_color="ffffff" tracking_code="ngrdzwp_hlwn"]

I had to use the Zazzle Department finder, linked to under the More options->Advanced options in Step 1

screenshot showing the shortcode builder being used
Giving a search term and getting the department number for invites

I chose the display options I wanted and set a few other bits and bobs, copied the code it gave me and pasted it into my post. Done deal! 🙂

That was easy, wasn’t it? See the exact setup I used for it by following this link to the shortcode builder

Making a product grid from a store category

Here’s the grid made using the shortcode: [niftygridzpro category_id="196345274397862357"] as shown in the video at the bottom:

 

Creating a product grid for a specific department

NiftyGridZPro allows you to restrict a product grid to products from a specific department. For example, to restrict it to just business cards, you use the shortcode option: department_id="252055618931521092"

Here’s the shortcode used for the grid below:

[niftygridzpro store_or_collection="hightonridley" department_id="252055618931521092" page_size=2]

So the next question is, how do you find out what the department id is for the products you want?

Finding the department id

The answer is that Zazzle provides a utility for it. Follow this link and at the very top of the window you’ll see:

Screenshot showing the location of Zazzle's Department Id finder
Locating Zazzle’s Department Id finder

(I’ve scrolled up a tad so you can see the context)

Just click “select” and keep navigating until you get to the type of product you want:

screenshot of Zazzle's department id tool
Zazzle’s tool for finding a department id

When you click “Done”, you’ll be given the department id – just copy it ready for pasting into your shortcode:

You can stop navigating before you get to a specific type of product and that way you’ll get all product types within the department.

That’s all there is to it.