There are many occasions when you may want to create multiple WordPress Loops – instructions on how to do this can be found on the WordPress Codex.

If you need to keep the original query, it is suggested you create you second loop by creating a new query object.

<?php $my_query = new WP_Query('category_name=special_cat&posts_per_page=10'); ?>
<?php while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
   <!-- Do special_cat stuff... -->
<?php endwhile; ?>

This works fine, but if you use more template tags after this loop, they display the content from the last post in the $my_query loop. So, if you want to reference the original loop how should you go about it?

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I was just about to update an old plugin I created to create an XML site map for products in WP e-Commerce…

…then I stumbled across the WP e-Commerce XML Sitemap plugin by Lee Willis.

The plugin worked well with WP e-Commerce 3.7.5 (the latest version) apart from a few minor issues. I got in touch with Lee and suggested a few tweaks/fixes – he has just released an updated version:

• Unpublished products are now not added to sitemap.
• Is now compatible with WordPress installations with custom table prefix.

You can download the latest version here…

The latest version of Instinct’s WordPress e-commerce plugin uses the WordPress body_class filter to add classes to the HTML body tag.

WP e-Commerce 3.7.5 adds the following styles to the body tag:

• wpsc
• wpsc-home
• wpsc-single-product
• wpsc-single-product-id
• wpsc-category
• wpsc-category-id
• wpsc-group-id
• wpsc-shopping-cart
• wpsc-transaction-details
• wpsc-user-account

These extra classes will give you more flexibility when designing themes for WP e-Commerce.

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Upgraded to OS X Snow Leopard, Yeah…
Mac OS X SOAP Client not working, boo…

Mac OS X SOAP Client is a great little app which can be used to access and query XML Web Services. I was very disappointed that after upgrading to Snow Leopard the XML result preview tab kept crashing the application.

Fortunately the application is now an open source project available on Google Code and it was only a short matter of time before someone came up with a fix – thank you Howard.

I’ve been using the WP e-Commerce plugin for WordPress a lot recently and delving behind the scenes to make it do want I want it to. In the process I have submitted a couple of style changes to the core to style it to be more like WordPress out-of-the-box.

One thing I think should be changed to bring the product edit screen in-line with the WordPress post/page editing layouts is the separation of the Categories and Tags boxes.

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