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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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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A great feature being worked on for a future version of WordPress (hopefully 2.9) was added to the the development version today.

The ‘Trash’ functionality will work in the same way as your Mac or the Recycle bin on Windows – when you delete an item, it will be moved to the Trash from where it can be recovered or permanently deleted.

The functionality is currently being tested out with comments and hopefully if it works well will be roled out to other WordPress assets like post, pages and links.

So no more impulse deleting of something, then wishing you hadn’t… Phew!

One plugin I recommend that everyone should add to their WordPress installation is the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

This plugin will automatically generate an XML sitemap of your posts and pages and ping supporting search engines to notify them that the sitemap has been updated.

But the best thing about this plugin for other plugin developers is it provides hooks so you can ‘borrow’ it’s functionality so that your plugin can add additional pages into the XML sitemap that is generated.

So if you’re a WordPress plugin developer, read on…

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I love the new widgets API in WordPress 2.8

I followed the excellent tutorial at WPengineer.com which gives a great overview about how to create a widget using the new API. Initially, the widget I created by following the guide seemed to ‘crash’ WordPress when I installed it. After a little investigation I tracked this down to the following…

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function widget_myuniquewidget_register() {
   register_sidebar_widget('My Unique Widget','widget_myuniquewidget');
}
<strong>add_action('init', widget_myuniquewidget_register);</strong>

You must initialise the register_sidebar_widget function by hooking into the ‘init’ action. Failure to do so means the function is called too early which will cause problems. For more information read WordPress Widgets API on the WordPress Codex.