When I set up Worm Sign T-Shirts I knew I wanted to use Wordpress as the CMS. Personal projects are a great way of developing and practicing your skills, and it’s not really fair on clients to use them and their websites as guinea pigs, for you to learn new tricks. After having a look into some plugins that would allow me to use Wordpress as an e-commerce website – I knew I wanted to see if Wordpress could do more than just blog.

I initially looked at using the very popular WP Commerce plugin, but it took quite a long time to set up and the learning curve was just a little longer than I what I wanted – I needed something simpler, that I could jump into a use straight away. So I turned to eShop.

It’s real strength is in it’s simplicity – the plugin is very quick to set up and adding products to your site is very easy. The main part of the set up was taken up adding PayPal details and calculating the shipping prices for our T-Shirts, this can be done by country, by weight or by the shopping cart total. There are also options for discount codes and downloads, so eShop will work if you are selling digital music or ebooks.

Products are added either to blog posts or pages, I only wanted to have products on pages and so for each new T-Shirt I’ll create a page with it’s images and text, and then fill in the custom eShop panel to add the “add to basket” functionality, prices and options – which in our case are sizes. This is one of the only downsides of eShop, it only has one set of options when PayPal can accommodate two, it would be great to have a second set of options for different T-Shirt colours. We’ve got around this by having multiple pages for the different colours of T-Shirt from a single design.

This is all the necessary set up needed to get the plugin working, from here it’s all cosmetic tweaks to get the shopping cart and check out pages fitting in with the rest of the website. This has taken a pretty long time to get right, the majority of the styling can be done via a style sheet, but I’ve gone a little further and I’ve edited many of the php files that come with the plugin. I’ve added and removed text, I’ve also cleaned up the check out pages and taken out many of the fields that weren’t needed on our check out process. Now that I’ve edited all these php files, I’m a little stuck becuase any upgrade of the plugin would overwrite all my bespoke changes – so I’m stuck on version 3.5.4 – missing some of eShop’s recent feature additions.

We use PayPal to take payments as this is the only payment gateway that eShop works with, and that is fine – I’ve used PayPal on many of my client’s websites, so I’m familiar with how it works, and so are many website users.Many still have incorrect assumptions about PayPal, for example – visitors may think they need a PayPal account to make a purchase, or that they have to register their details with PayPal – not true. I’ve tried to address this in Worm Sign’s copy, hoping that it will appease any worries a potential customer will have when making a purchase, a simple paragraph in the footer explaining that payments are made securely and that all popular credit and debit cards are accepted. This information is duplicated on our check out pages, and is expanded further in our Frequently Asked Questions page.

The default search on Wordpress wasn’t going to be suitable for the product search I wanted to implement on Worm Sign T-Shirts. On the default theme, standard search will give you a results page that contains the pages and posts that were found as a clickable title and excerpt – a text only sample of the the pages content. This wasn’t going to good enough for a T-Shirt store.

Using 2 plugins I was able to define the pages and posts I wanted to be included in the search, as well as pages and posts that I didn’t want to be included, and to include an image from the product page as the main focus of the search results.

Search Unleashed gives you options for what content is searched. Rather than stating what could be searched, I selected what was to be excluded from the search results; all posts from the blog, as well as Home, FAQ’s and Contact page – this just left the T-Shirt pages, giving me a product search. Although one that would just give me the text from the pages and no images, not quite there yet.

Get The Image scans a page or post with the Wordpress loop and extracts an image – the plugin has a number of options for styling, as well as options for what image to grab from the post; one that is automatically extracted, or one decided by a custom field. Here’s the code that sits inside the loop;

<div id=wsthumbnail”>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>">
<?php get_the_image( array( ‘image_scan’ => true ) ); ?></a><br>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
</div>

The options for Get The Image plugin sit in an array, you can add as many or as few as you want. I’ve just simply added an image scan to pull the first image it finds from the page, the image is already the correct size for the results page and will be styled within it’s containing div layer.

I’ve been working with Wordpress more and more recently and have just launched one site built in this versatile content management system (wormsigntshirts.co.uk) with another on the way very soon.

When installing Wordpress I download and install a set of plugins that help extend Wordpresses capabilities and give me features that aren’t ‘out of the box’. Here’s my list of 9 essential plugins for Wordpress – the ones I use each and every time.

All In One SEO Pack
Add tags and descriptions to posts and pages to help with search engine optimisation.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack

Contact Form 7
A simple contact form, add any elements you want and give them a class so you can style them in a style sheet.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7

Really Simple CAPTCHA
Can be used in conjunction with the above contact form to add a little spam guard security,
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/really-simple-captcha

Feedstats
Statistics for your blog and RSS feed.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedstats-de

WP-DB-Backup
Make backups of your database tables and content, then email them to yourself – just encase the worse case scenario should happen to your blog or website.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup

Google XML Sitemaps
Another helpful SEO plugin that will automatically crawl your and compile a XML sitemap that can be tracked and submitted to Google, Ask, Yahoo and MSN.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator

Google Analytics for Wordpress
Track visitors on your website with this powerful analytics package – this Wordpress plugin makes installing the code within your website very simple.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
Downloads and installs the latest version of Wordpress, very clever and very simple – it will also make backups along the way so there’s no chance of you loosing your content.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade

Sociable
Allow your visitors to submit your pages and blog posts to one of hundreds of social bookmark sharing websites – you can select the ones that you want on your website.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable

If you have any essential plugins that you use – suggest them in the comments box.