WordPress Twentyten Ecommerce Theme With Google Checkout
At one point, I was using Wp ecommerce to turn WordPress into a shopping cart. Unfortunately, I found that it lacked in three major areas.
- SEO – the themes for the most part are not search engine friendly (you could not manually edit title tags etc)
- It continually conflicted with other major plugins
- It only worked inside of one page therefore limiting the use of WordPress post and page options
It has been a while since I used Wp ecommerce (which I do think is a good plugin for certain applications), but I decided to build a theme that would work inside of WordPress posts and not require developers to learn a whole new template system.
Twentyten ecommerce features overview
I used the twentyten ecommerce theme that comes prepackaged with WordPress 3.0+. It already has some cool features built in such as the ability to change the header from inside of the admin menu. I also used features that are already built inside of WordPress such as post meta and featured images in order to keep from slowing WordPress down.
The product page displays a larger image, the price and Google checkout button. All of these values are pulled from the post meta data.
You can also add products with multiple options and prices. The Google Checkout button is built on the fly with up to five options.
Future development ideas
- Automatic excerpts for home page
- Admin panel to control site options
- This version forces the entire site to become an ecommerce store. In future releases, I plan to give site owners the ability to make the store a specific category
- Any suggestions?
Requirements
- WordPress 3.0+
- Google Checkout account
Installation
- Download and unzip the theme
- Open footer.php in your favorite editor
- On line 97, change mid=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx to your Google checkout id number. The id number can be found at the top right of your Google checkout account. You will notice that the account number is a part of the URL in the src attribute below.
[php]<script id="googlecart-script" src="https://checkout.google.com/seller/gsc/v2_2/cart.js?mid=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" type="text/javascript"></script>[/php] - Upload and activate the theme
How to add a product
- Add a new post
- Write your product description and title
- On the right hand side, click “set featured image”
- Add your product attributes in the post meta. The first time you will have to add the actual attributes. However, WordPress will save them for the next time you want to use them.
- Publish and you are done.
Product attributes in post meta
- price
- option1
- option2
- option3
- option4
- option5
- option1price
- option2price
- option3price
- option4price
- option5price
The only attribute you have to include is the price. Without it, the theme will break. Check out this screenshot to see where to add the attributes:
Download
Version 1.0
Hi there,
Can you if this works with PayPal?
@MJ,
Paypal’s shopping cart works differently because it encrypts its forms, making them hard to generate on the fly. I am going to investigate this soon and see if I can find a way to incorporate paypal without using their API or SSL.
Hi,
Just to respond to the following:
These are great…
* Automatic excerpts for home page
* Admin panel to control site options
About this….
* This version forces the entire site to become an ecommerce store. In future releases, I plan to give site owners the ability to make the store a specific category
* Any suggestions?
I think your theme should also have a feature as a it is right now…(entire site become ecommerce store) for people who wants to install this as another folder in their domain host and manage it separately from their blog (the use of categories is then not useful here).
Example: http://www.yourwebsite.com/store (this is a separate wordpress installation and your theme is then used here).
@MJ, I see what you are saying. WordPress MU would come in handy for that type of install. For now, I am going to leave it the way you describe.
Hey thanks for the wonderful insight on the new twentyten theme. I love blogging. So i hope this is going to be great use for bloggers like me.This new theme anytime looks better than the wordpress previous theme based on kubrick. Its user friendly and white, which is my favorite color.
I would like to give this pluggin a try on a few of my sites. Can you please show me a few more sites that this pluggin has been used on.
I actually have not looked for any other sites that are using the theme so I don’t know of any. I have only tested it on multilinephones.org. This is the alpha version, so if you use it I would appreciate any feedback you have.
This is awesome! I hope you keep working on this. It’s much needed! Thank you.
@Leo, thanks
Hi,
I installed the theme and it is not working too well. When I set a Featured Image, that image replaces the header on the post/product page. I cannot make the price appear either.
I checked and re-checked all the steps and I followed the directions properly.
Any solutions?
@Vera,
There is a problem with the featured image. I am going to fix that in a future release. For now, don’t add an image that is the width of the site and it will not happen.
Do you have a site link I can check out?
Make sure that “price” is lowercase and not “Price”.
Hi, Jason,
I was able to resolve the header issue and actually work with the price a bit by deactivating the theme then reactivating it. That made the price and checkout features appear. However, there is a $ with no actual price amount which seems to be added to the product title.
More detailed information was sent to you by email as I would prefer to keep the url private until the site looks a bit better. Thanks – it is a great idea!
This works great for my client. My only complaint is that the thumbnails need to appear in the category previews.
Thats a good call.