WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it. However, WordPress is more than just blogging software. It can also become a full content management system (cms). Through the addition of plugins you can extend Wordpress to include a shop, customer management, contact forms, forums, the list is endless.

A web content management system has features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to web sites.

Web content management systems are often used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing ecommerce, news sites, blogging, photo galleries, sales guides, and marketing brochures. A content management system may support the following features:

• Import and creation of documents and multimedia material
• Identification of all key users and their content management roles
• The ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different content categories or types.
• Management of shop stock and sales information

If you want to get started with WordPress, contact us and we can arrange to set you up with a site.

Antique Plugin

Plugin Name: Antique Shop
Description: Easily manage and display your Antique Products within your WordPress site.

For developers who are interested we have produced some software for Wordpress. The latest release is wp-products. It is for displaying products with multiple shop owners. However, it can be used for standalone shops as well. Examples of it in use can be found at WEADA (multiple shop use) and Uzella Court Antiques (single use). It doesn’t have any payment integration yet but it is in development. Download WP Products.

We have developed two other products an online shop with paypal integration and also a crm both wordpress plugins. Currently development for these products has been sidelined. Download wp-shop and crm by clicking the links. The software is not complete and you will find some bugs.

Plugin Name: Antique Shop
Description: Easily manage and display your Antique Products within your WordPress site.
Version: 1.0
Author: Glenn Ansley

Tested with WordPress series 2.1.x thru 2.2 May work with versions as old as 1.5

Plugin Description

This plugin is designed to easily manage and display your Products within your WordPress site.

About and Credits:

Antique Shop was created by Glenn Ansley for Cregy Web Development.
It is based on the WP Photo Album plugin created by R.J. Kaplan.
If you need any custom WordPress theme or plugin work, please consider Glenn Ansley.

Plugin Admin Features:

You can find the plugin admin section under Manage then submenu Antique Shop.
Manage and create Product Categories
Move products to and from different product categories
Upload and delete individual products
Adjust thumbnail and full view photos sizes of your products (set default max sizes for each).
See Cornwall Fine Art to see the plugin in action.

Installation and Usage:

1. Download the plugin!
2. Unzip and upload the antique plugin folder to wp-content/plugins/
3. Make sure that the folder wp-content/uploads/ exists and is writable by the server (CHMOD 755)
4. Activate the plugin in WP Admin -> Plugins.
5. Create at least one Product Category in the Product Categories tab
6. In the uploads tab, you can now upload your products

Creating your Products Page

Create a page like you normally would in WordPress. In my example, we’ll give it the page title of “Shopping Cart”. In the Page Content section add the following code:
%%antique%%
Also, make sure under ‘Page Template’ you are using ‘Default Template’ as some WordPress themes have an archives template.
Press the publish button and you’re done. You’ll now have a “Shopping Cart” page.
You can also create a custom page template by dropping the following code into a page:
antique_productcategories()
In order to work properly, this tag needs to be within the WordPress loop. For more information on creating custom page templates, click here.

Adjusting CSS and Template Styling

Antique Shop comes with a default layout and theme. To change the style and layout of the shopping cart, copy them/edit antique_theme.php and theme/antique_style.css to your active theme’s folder, and edit them. Antique Shop uses a system of template tags similar to the WordPress theme system. To view a list of available tags, please read tags.txt

Plugin Support And Feature Request

If you’ve read over this readme carefully and are still having issues, if you’ve discovered a bug, or have a feature request, please contact me via my contact page.

Licence

Antique Products is released under the GNU GPL licence.

Software Development

Developing software is an important aspect of the work we do. Many software packages contain what is sometimes known as ‘bloatware’. Bloatware simply means to take a software package and fill it to overflowing with every possible option available. The problem is the package then becomes unusable or to use it takes a very steep learning curve. So to get around this we develop software.

WP Product

The plugin is a showcase for products. It’s particular use is to allow multiple users to display their products and amend without having to see any other users products.

WP Shop

Shortly to be released wpshop is a plugin to the Wordpress CMS. This shop contains many attractive features and a demo will be available to view. There are a wide variety of options to be set including a variety of currencies and taxes. The shop also has a marketing manager.

WP CRM

Now released
WP crm is a plugin to the Wordpress CMS. CRM stands for Customer Resource Manager and in its simplest form is an application that allows you to manage your customers through letters, emails and dating times of contact. It will have a very handy contact form, which when completed by a customer will store the details directly in your database for immediate management use.

Organise

Organise - order, stock, customer and accounts database is a Mac only product which I use extensively to manage my business. Take a look it is brilliant.

Serving the needs of Lostwithiel

Cregy is a web design company serving the needs of Lostwithiel. We are also keen to give back to the community. Hence the reason behind the WP Shop. We will also be developing the concept on further with the creation of crm software for Wordpress. This will give web designers and small businesses a real chance to develop an online business.

Slow Down

And if you get the chance, slow down and watch some paint dry, some snails race and just chill. If you’ve got a wife, daughter or son, go and tell them you love them.

I recently received an email asking for some Wordpress advice on making posts show up in columns just like on 9antivirus.com and thought I’d share one way of doing this.

I’ve set up a demo blog showing how it looks after the code is implemented.

There are two theme files to be edited: index.php and style.css. I have just edited the default Kubrick theme, so adjust this to suit your own theme.

The basic idea is to add a “switch” so Wordpress knows if you’re looking at a post which will appear in the first or second column.

View How to organize posts into two side-by-side columns in Wordpress

Wordpress Reports - Google Analytics and Feeburner

This is a brilliant plugin. Quite simple really - it tracks your Google Analytics and Feedburner reports without you having to login. They are contained within your Wordpress install. Makes the whole thing so easy to view. Thanks Jo.

From his site:

WordPress by default doesn’t come with any sort of web site reporting tools (and it really shouldn’t). So if you want to know how many people visited your site, which pages they viewed, or where they came from, you’ll need to either rely on your raw web logs or use an online tracking service provided by a third party. There are many different third party web tracking services out there, but the two free and popular third party solutions that I highly recommend are Google Analytics (for web traffic) and Feedburner (for syndicated traffic).

For all those interested it is nearly here. I have been playing with the admin backend and it works great. Not long to go.

I have always wanted a list of tags that could be used in a template. Well here they are. If you know of any more please send them in this direction. Thanks


[?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?]
[?php the_date('','[h2]‘,’[/h2]‘); ?”
[div class="post" id="post-[?php the_ID(); ?]“]
[h3 class="storytitle"]
[a href="[?php the_permalink() ?]” rel=”bookmark”][?php the_title(); ?][/a][/h3]
[div class="meta"]
[?php _e("Filed under:"); ?] [?php the_category(',') ?] —
[?php the_author() ?] @ [?php the_time() ?] [?php edit_post_link(__('Edit This')); ?]
[/div]
[div class="storycontent"]
[?php the_content(__('(more...)')); ?]
[/div]
[div class="feedback"]
[?php wp_link_pages(); ?]
[?php comments_popup_link(__('Comments (0)'), __('Comments (1)'), __('Comments (%)')); ?]
[/div]
[/div] [!--closing .post --]
[?php comments_template(); // Get wp-comments.php template ?]
[?php endwhile; else: ?]
[p]
[?php _e('Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.'); ?]
[/p]
[?php endif; ?]
[?php posts_nav_link(' — ', __('« Previous Page'), __('Next Page »')); ?]

Hi

Just to let you all know. I am still trying to employ a developer that will finish the development of the shop and then start on the next stage. It seems that the coding needs a lot of sorting out and maybe some trimming.

The current issues with the coding:

1. Works with 2.1.2
2. Safe urls
3. Pages not being displayed on the front end
4. Remove links and all items pertaining to shipping tokens, vouchers, reviews and ratings, tools, help.
5. Make Paypal work as a payment gateway
6. In the product list, remove sort date, apply special rules, fields.
7. Get the description fields to work correctly. Short description should be a simple teaser. Long description should provide more space.
8. Shipping should have two fields applied to it. Inland for all local delivers, overseas shipping for all long deliveries. How these apply can be varied from country to country. i.e. In England, inland would apply, whilst overseas might be the eu only!
9. Customer details need to be recorded along with items they have bought.
10. Orders need to be split into outstanding, paid not sent, sent, etc.

Suffice to say much work needs to be done. I need a developer who can do it. Is there anyone you can recommend. I am speaking to one or two at the moment but it would be an idea to see who else might like to be involved.

Many thanks for your patience.

Rich

This is the first part of creating a software for small businesses.

The WP Shop originally created at the start of this year has seen a full rewrite and should be available for a re-release on 18th October. The shop plugin will be a full ecommerce product with a link to Paypal. However, development will take place to include other payment providers.

The shop features:
Runs in Wordpress 2.0.x (possibly working on it running in 1.5)
Paypal payment Gateway (with development for others planned)
Three ways to present stock
Add options (e.g. Black cap, white cap, green cap)
Link relevant products together
Create as many images as required

Future work:
Prepare plug-in for other payment gateways.
Namespace and incompatibility tests with other than the default plugins of Wordpress 2.0.4 (akismet, dbbackup and hello dolly)
Include shop urls in url-rewrite procedure.
Preparing a wordpress release of the shop as a package.
Extend the plugin to store customer details.
Extend the plugin to include the facility to send mailouts.
Extend the plugin to encompass stock control.
Extend the plugin to encompass customer/supplier billing and contact details etc.

Ok the developer has also written some instructions!

Activate plugin
configure payment
click gateway, activate paypal payment modul
click “configure”
email: shop owner email, probably the same as the blog owner
operating mode: If you haven’t set up paypal yet, test first in the internal sandbox. To use a paypal sandbox, you’ll have to set up a paypal sandbox account (which has nothing to do with your real account). Once you’re ready, use the “normal” mode
in order to get a PDT(payment data transfer) token you have to
register at paypal.com
upgrade your account to premier or business account (note the differences in charges; decide on the turnover you expect)
click on “profile”
click on “website payment preferences”
your first option is auto return. Turn it on, and add the link to your return page (find it on the paypal configuration page, or in your blog frontend, it’s titled “thank you for your purchase”)
your second option is pdt. Switch to “on”
submit the page
your pdt token will be displayed as a long string of letters and numbers.
Copy this token, and paste it into the configuration
To set up the IPN link
Copy the IPN link from the configuration page
On the paypal “profile” page, click on “Instant Payment Notification Preferences”
Click edit
Tick the checkbox
Paste the link
Submit
Logout paypal, if you want
Submit paypal configuration page on your site
Add categories
Click on categories
Click on “create new category”
The form field on the left will now be editable
For categories in the first level, just enter the name and a brief description, leave the parent select box as it is. You’ll have to do this for your first category
Click save
Add more categories, if you like. If they are subcategories, select the parent (the main category) from the dropdown list
Add products
Click on products
Select “create new”
Add all the information (this needs some more explaining…)
If you want to add a picture
Take your ftp client to the folder where you installed wordpress. You should see folders such as wp-content or wp-includes
Create a folder called wp-images (all lowercase)
Go in there, and create a folder called wpshop (no hyphen, all lowercase)
Make this folder writeable for everyone (chmod 777)
Configure your shop
Go to settings
The minimum you have to do is to open your shop
Select “options”
Change “shop open” to yes
Enter a shop title
Enter a shop email address
Select your country and currency of trade
Select a currency format
Select a date format
Alter more options, if you like
Press “save”
Set general Settings
Set “show prices” to yes
Set “show buy button” to yes
Alter more options, if you like
There are more options which you can alter by selecing them from the dropdown box
You’re ready to go!