leewillis.co.uk

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.

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’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.

I’ve been asked a few times about how to split up countries into regions and charge shipping differently to the different areas in WP E-Commerce. This was something that was almost, but not quite possible with one of my existing plugins.

Now it’s just a little bit easier.

What You’ll Need

• WP E-Commerce (3.7.6 or later)
• My Weight / Destination plugin
• Database access to your WP e-Commerce database

In this example we’re going to show how to achieve the following:

• Set of Weight rates for New Zealand (North Island)
• Set of Weight rates for New Zealand (North Island)
• Set of Weight rates for the rest of Asia/Pacific
• Set of Weight rates for Europe

The Plan

To acheive our end goal we’re going to:

1. Create 2 regions attached to the country “New Zealand”
2. Remove New Zealand from the Asia and Pacific continent (So people ordering to NZ see those prices, not the general “Asia and Pacific” pricing
3. Set up per-country/region rates for New Zealand
4. Set up per-continent rates for Asia and Pacific, and Europe

Getting Started

The first job is to find out the “country ID” for New Zealand. Using your favourite database you’ll want to look in the wp_wpsc_currency_list table for the entry for New Zealand, and make a note of the value of the “id” field – in our case 156.

While we’re here, we’ll also move New Zealand out of it’s current continent. This basically just involves updating the same record, and setting the continent field to something unique, e.g.

Next – you’ll need to create whatever regions you want in the wp_wpsc_region_tax table, using the ID you’ve just found as the “country_id” field, e.g.

Configuring your pricing

That’s all with the scary database stuff, now on to the easy stuff. First of all you’ll need to activate both of the shipping modules:

First up we’ll configure the continent-based pricing. Click on “Edit” next to the weight-continent pricing. Up will pop the configuration pane, with a drop-down of the standard continents – and also our “newzealand” continent – which we’re not going to use since New Zealand is going to be priced by region.

Let’s pick Europe, and configure some weight rates.

In this case we’ve just configured one weight band – which means that anything shipped to Europe will be charged at the same rate – £80 in this case.

We can do the same for Asia and Pacific, except maybe setting up multiple layers using the “Add Layer” link.

At this stage shipping will work for Europe, Asia and Pacific, but not for New Zealand (Since we took it out of Asia and Pacific).

Click on “Edit” next to the Weight / Country and Region pricing. Up will pop the configuration pane, with a drop-down of the countries, including regions where configured – for example, we can see our North Island, and South Island regions here:

Selecting a region gives us the chance to configure weight rates, e.g.

Repeat for other regions, and you’re set. Happy Shipping!

Note: All weights should be set up in lbs, no matter what weight unit you used to set the weight for your products. WP e-Commerce will convert between them for you.

WordPress 2.9 e-Commerce, has been published – the definitive guide to setting up an e-commerce site on your WordPress blog using the WP e-Commerce plugin, of which I’m a bit of a fan.

This book provides an easy to understand, step-by-step approach to installing, configuring, and using WP e-Commerce to run your online store. We will construct an example store in the book with enough information and flexibility to adapt the store to your specific needs.

This book is for you, if you are interested in using WordPress as the basis for a store that can sell physical items, downloads, or services. It is ideal for a sole proprietor or small business owner with only basic, in-house technical skills. Some prior knowledge of WordPress will help, but is not required. No knowledge of PHP is expected, but it will be helpful.

You can buy it from Amazon here.

Disclaimer: I’ve linked to Amazon using affiliate links, to help fund this blog.