Extending WP-e-Commerce WordCamp UK

Editor's Notes

• #2: Hello Thank You Tony Scott and all the organizers and volunteers for putting together an amazing event! Who Am I? Name/From NZ 1 1/2 yrs Plugin Development Learnt Lots, Learning more Work for Instinct and the GetShopped Crew Technical Support Person Maintain Plugin, release new versions Create additional Modules and Plugins to extend WPEC
• #3: WPEC is around 6-5 years old, downloaded over 500.000 times, FREE PLUGIN that transforms your blog into an online store,
• #4: Control 1. (A means of managing your products )add/edit products & product categories
• #5: Control 2. handles shipping methods (external/internal) UPS, FEDEX, USPS, flat rate, weight rate
• #6: 3. handles tax - currently working on a new tax system with full user control
• #7: Coupons, Promotions Specific Price or Percentage off price
• #8: 4. Pays You! handles gateways - paypal, google checkout, sagepay, chronopay, DPS +++ So thats the Control is gives you, It also provides some theming options...>next slide
• #9: Standard Theming for the front end of your site, Display (mini-themes) WPEC comes with basic styling of the front end, display 1. product-list A list of your products or category
• #10: 2. single-product Specific Page to show case a particular product
• #11: 3. checkout page A page used for calculating shipping and tax costs, and capturing billing and shipping details and sends request through to payment gateway
• #12: 4. transaction results and User Profiles Soon to be in a template of it’s own
• #13: Cart Widget,
• #14: How many people use wp-e-commerce personal or clients? How may of you are theme developers? How many of you are WordPress Developers or PHP Developers? What I mean Extending WP e-Commerce? What is the right way?
• #17: If you can’t do something using a hook or filter, then you should talk to us, maybe there is something we can do to help. We could: 1. Add a filter / action 2. Recommend a different approach
• #18: Upgrade scripts was the answer to extending WP e-Commerce for GetShopped for the past few years, however after conversations with WP developers, we have been advised that it does not follow WP best practices,, Ability to use Upgrades is still available, but if you are starting a new project I would recommend
• #19: Plugins, Follows along WP best practices, Only thing about Plugins is with the current WP-e-Commerce setup it is difficult to control when your Plugin will run, be it before or after WP e-Commerce, some say Plugins run alphabetically,, but we found this to be unreliable. We are working together with a few developers, and are getting advice from buddyPress core developers (who I believe have structured their Plugin in the best way in regards to extensibility)
• #20: If all you are planning on doing is customizing the esthetics then don’t worry about the Upgrade scripts and the Plugins,, make a WPEC custom theme. So there you have it. there is a few ways you can extend WP e-Commerce right now. The most exciting of all is Plugins. We are embracing Plugins in a big way,, My only tiff, with Extending through Plugins, is the fact it messes up the Plugins page,,, Unless the developer uses a naming convention that makes the Plugin noticeably an extension of WP e-Commerce then it becomes very difficult to tell whats what,, In my opinion it would be really cool if it worked in the same strain as Child Themes. but that’s just nit picking.
• #21: Pros: Developers are already familiar with Plugins Keeps WP e-Commerce Plugin free from modifications, allowing you to Upgrade worry free Keeps to WordPress best practices, Cons: Currently some filters, and actions are not included in the correct sequence, therefore some hooks and filters are not as reliable when used through a Plugin so should be done as an Upgrade instead. This is a known issue, we plan on rectifying in the 3.8 release. One such hook would be the `wpsc_gateway_modules` filter, as it is run on the main Plugin file,, :(
• #22: Pros: Developers are already familiar with Plugins Keeps WP e-Commerce Plugin free from modifications, allowing you to Upgrade worry free Keeps to WordPress best practices, Cons: Currently some filters, and actions are not included in the correct sequence, therefore some hooks and filters are not as reliable when used through a Plugin so should be done as an Upgrade instead. This is a known issue, we plan on rectifying in the 3.8 release. One such hook would be the `wpsc_gateway_modules` filter, as it is run on the main Plugin file,, :(
• #23: Pros: Developers are already familiar with Plugins Keeps WP e-Commerce Plugin free from modifications, allowing you to Upgrade worry free Keeps to WordPress best practices, Cons: Currently some filters, and actions are not included in the correct sequence, therefore some hooks and filters are not as reliable when used through a Plugin so should be done as an Upgrade instead. This is a known issue, we plan on rectifying in the 3.8 release. One such hook would be the `wpsc_gateway_modules` filter, as it is run on the main Plugin file,, :(
• #24: Open up Coda and Google Chrome
• #25: Pros: Files get included at the same time as the WP e-Commerce plugin No activation, works immediately Keeps WP e-Commerce Plugin free from modifications, allowing you to Upgrade worry free Keeps Plugin Page clean (with a whole lot of Plugins the Plugin Page can sometimes look a little over the top..) Cons: 1. Permissions can be a pain, Some hosts have PHP running on a different group than your average FTP User, which means Users sometimes have to talk to their hosting provider about changing the groups / owners permissions for the uploads/wpsc/* folder tree. I've seen this happen a fair amount, and it is a right pain. 2. Confusing for Users, more and more Users switching to WP e-Commerce are entirely clueless when it comes to servers, PHP, and file management. So having them FTP? and Copy Files? becomes frustrating for them,, 3. WordPress says NO, Many WordPress developers have approached us and told us that this way of adding additional functionality is not quite best practice, and we should embrace Plugins.
• #26: Pros: Files get included at the same time as the WP e-Commerce plugin No activation, works immediately Keeps WP e-Commerce Plugin free from modifications, allowing you to Upgrade worry free Keeps Plugin Page clean (with a whole lot of Plugins the Plugin Page can sometimes look a little over the top..) Cons: 1. Permissions can be a pain, Some hosts have PHP running on a different group than your average FTP User, which means Users sometimes have to talk to their hosting provider about changing the groups / owners permissions for the uploads/wpsc/* folder tree. I've seen this happen a fair amount, and it is a right pain. 2. Confusing for Users, more and more Users switching to WP e-Commerce are entirely clueless when it comes to servers, PHP, and file management. So having them FTP? and Copy Files? becomes frustrating for them,, 3. WordPress says NO, Many WordPress developers have approached us and told us that this way of adding additional functionality is not quite best practice, and we should embrace Plugins.
• #27: Pros: Files get included at the same time as the WP e-Commerce plugin No activation, works immediately Keeps WP e-Commerce Plugin free from modifications, allowing you to Upgrade worry free Keeps Plugin Page clean (with a whole lot of Plugins the Plugin Page can sometimes look a little over the top..) Cons: 1. Permissions can be a pain, Some hosts have PHP running on a different group than your average FTP User, which means Users sometimes have to talk to their hosting provider about changing the groups / owners permissions for the uploads/wpsc/* folder tree. I've seen this happen a fair amount, and it is a right pain. 2. Confusing for Users, more and more Users switching to WP e-Commerce are entirely clueless when it comes to servers, PHP, and file management. So having them FTP? and Copy Files? becomes frustrating for them,, 3. WordPress says NO, Many WordPress developers have approached us and told us that this way of adding additional functionality is not quite best practice, and we should embrace Plugins.
• #29: same problem as Upgrades, Permissions are a pain. Confusing for Average User
• #33: Who am I? Jeffry Ghazally screamingcodemonkey.com Web Developer that has been using WordPress for about 2 years I work for getshopped.org Main Support Technician and Main Code Co-ordinator