Online Stores

When we launched the Ravenshead Press site we evaluated several store plugins and eventually settled for using WP-ecommerce. As a plugin it seemed to integrate well with WordPress and provide a powerful range of options.

It was initially very difficult to set up, especially the Paypal payment gateway. Once we had it running we ran into other difficulties, a change of URL style in WordPress caused the products to break. We finally gave up on it altogether when an upgrade to the latest version caused the server errors on the shopping pages. Behind the scenes it still functioned correctly, but visitors could no longer shop.

Next we looked outside WordPress for options and came across OS Commerce. First trials at installing this went badly as WordPress didn’t allow us to use the catalog URL trying instead to link it to a non-existent page. Temporarily we stopped using WordPress to evaluate the store. First impressions were good, it offered everything we were looking for. The downside was that it was only an online store and didn’t have a wide range of other features such as WordPress’s blogging abilities.

Searching for ways to integrate OS Commerce and WordPress turned up a number of articles none of which fully satisfied. Then we stumbled on WP Store Online http://www.wponlinestore.com/ this plugin for WordPress actually embeds OS Commerce in a WordPress page, all it needs to display it is the inclusion of a tag in a new page and your store is instantly displayed. Even better is the way the store management is carried out. A new section appears in the WordPress dashboard ‘WP Online Store’ clicking on this takes you to an embedded version of the OS Commerce admin area which makes it simple for existing OS Commerce users to interact with.

One problem with this type of solution is that if the plugin isn’t kept updated then eventually it will cease to work with new WordPress updates, meaning you will have to remain on an older version of WordPress. It also means that new OS Commerce updates wouldn’t be applied. This can lead to security flaws. However in this case it appears that at the moment there are pretty regular updates of the plugin.

We will return to this topic later on when we have had a chance to fully evaluate WP Online Store, but at the moment we are extremely pleased.

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