The guys over at getshopped.org are working on a pretty major revision to their WP e-Commerce plugin. Part of this is migrating “products” into custom post types, including using post thumbnails for the product images. One of the problems that has cropped up in testing was where user’s themes didn’t support post thumbnails. The first fix for was for the plugin to force “theme support” for post thumbnails by calling

add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );

This worked, in that it solved the problem – all of the post-thumbnail function calls worked. However, it left a bug, and one that isn’t a software, or a techie bug – it was the worst kind – a bad user experience. Suddenly “posts” and “pages” would allow you to set featured images when authoring, or editing, but because the theme didn’t really support post thumbnails, those images would never show leaving a confused, bewildered user. So, the solution is to enable the support in general, but disable it for specific post types:

function check_thumbnail_support() {
 if (!current_theme_supports('post-thumbnails')) {
   add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
   add_action('init','remove_posttype_thumbnail_support');
 }
}
add_action('after_setup_theme','check_thumbnail_support',99);

function remove_posttype_thumbnail_support() {
 remove_post_type_support('post','thumbnail');
 remove_post_type_support('page','thumbnail');
}

This does three important things:
1. Check to see if the theme supports thumbnails already – if so, do nothing
2. If not, then turn on post thumbnail support, but also …
3. Remove support from “post” and “page”

The “gotcha” if you’re trying to come up with this yourself is that theme support is for “post-thumbnails”, but post_type_support is for the more generic “thumbnails”. Hope this comes in handy some someone.

WordCamp UK is an informal annual gathering of WordPress publishers, designers and developers based in the United Kingdom.

This year’s event is being held in Manchester (Which is nice and central if you ask me!) and looks like it’ll be a great chance to chat about what’s new and groovy with WordPress, and find out who’s doing what in the UK.

You can find out more at the WordCamp UK site.

This blog now running WordPress 3.0. If you haven’t already, you should probably check it out.

Someone left a comment on my article about Virtuemart Category Discounts the other day – that I though was worthy of a post of its own.

What James pointed out was that instead of amending core files, you can create “class overrides” to amend functionality you want to.

You can read James’ original comment, or skip straight to the article that explains everything!

My future Virtuemart customisations will definitely make use of this – thanks James!

While WP e-Commerce lets you choose how to order your products (E.g. Price, Name, Date Uploaded) through the admin area, it doesn’t let you control whether you’re sorting ascending or descending – e.g. cheapest first, or most expensive first.

Here’s a a quick tip to show how to control the sort order, just add the following snippet to your WordPress theme’s functions.php file:

<?php
    if (!isset($_SESSION['wpsc_product_order'])) {
        $_SESSION['wpsc_product_order'] = "DESC";
 }
 ?>

Just swap DESC for ASC to swap the default order. Happy sorting …

I wrote in a recent post about how to add post images into your sitemap based on WordPress post images. However I look after a couple of sites, and they’re not all WordPress. So I set off on a quest to add images to sitemaps on my Joomla! sites.

The good news is that my sitemap plugin of choice, Xmap, had recently added basic image support to their XML sitemaps. However, while Xmap can generate sitemaps for a wide variety of Joomla! components – the only one to have image support currently is the standard com_content extension. One of my main Joomla! sites though is a store based on Virtuemart, and I wanted to add product images to the sitemap.

The result is a revised version of the com_virtuemart extension for Xmap, and a small change to the Xmap XML output code.

To get things up and running there’s five simple steps:

1. Make sure you’re running version 1.2.7 of Xmap
2. Take backups of all of these files from your existing Joomla! installation:
   • components/com_xmap/xmap.xml.php
   • administrator/components/com_xmap/extensions/com_virtuemart.xml
   • administrator/components/com_xmap/extensions/com_virtuemart.php
3. Download com_virtuemart.xml and com_virtuemart.php from here, and save them into administrator/components/com_xmap/extensions/
4. Download xmap.xml.php from the same place, and save it into components/com_xmap/
5. Configure the com_virtuemart extension under com_xmap settings in your Joomla! administrator area. Make sure you’ve got images turned on, and a license URL specified if you want one.

That’s it – your sitemap should now include images for all of your products.

PS. The default Joomla! robots.txt bans Googlebot from crawling the Virtuemart image folders, you can allow them, by adding:

Allow: /components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/product/

to the bottom of your robots.txt …

I’ve run a Joomla site, and a Campaign Monitor subscriber list for around 18 months. For most of that time I’ve manually exported subscribers from Joomla and imported them to Campaign Monitor. Finally I got fed up, and put together a simple Joomla to Campaign Monitor plugin.

The plugin auto-subscribes new users (Whether they register deliberately, or are created by other plugins – e.g. by purchasing from a Virtuemart store) to your chosen Campaign Monitor list.

To get up and running, follow these 4 simple steps:

• Download the plugin
• Install it
• Set up your Campaign Monitor details in the configuration screen
  
  You can find a great guide for finding these IDs here
• Activate the plugin

Obviously, you’ll want to make sure that you have the user’s permission to contact them as part of the registration policy.

Happy integrating.