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.

How things are…

The WordPress post/page edit screen looks like this:

Currently, editing Categories and Tags in WP e-Commerce looks like this:

How I think things should be…

A few times I have run into problems with the current WP e-Commerce categories and tag box in that if I have long category names, they wrap very badly on smaller screens where there isn’t much space – the tags filed squashes everything over to the left.

I propose that the categories and tags box be separated into a similar layout to the way WordPress does things. This would add UI consistency throughout the admin and the boxes would be expandable allowing you to easily minimise the tags box if you only use it infrequently.

So you would end up with something like this:

It is essentially a mirror version of the panels in the main WordPress admin but with some of the extra functionality removed.

In WP e-Commerce it is possible to have multiple types of category grouping such as Categories and Brands. In this scenario I would suggest that the scrolling categories area in the Categories box (illustrated above) is duplicated so that there are two scrolling areas – one for categories and one for brands.

So, what do you think?

That’s just my opinion so please vote and leave your comments below and who knows, if enough of you like my idea then it might find it’s way into a future release of WP e-Commerce.

I’ve made my first contribution to the WP e-Commerce plugin – my first contribution to an open source project…

It’s a great e-commerce plugin for WordPress but there were a few visual things niggling me that I thought should be sorted out – mainly the way that the widget for showing categories was not styled the same way as the WordPress default widgets.

Fixing the issue was just a case of making a couple of tweaks to the HTML; changing some square brackets to normal brackets and removing some bold styling.

Nothing revolutionary there, but it should now look a whole lot better with your default WordPress theme without making any modifications…

The current version in development WP e-Commerce 3.7 is looking great, with an overhaul of the user interface to bring it into line with WordPress 2.7, a complete reorganisation of the code making it easier for us developers, and a new template engine which works along the same lines at the WordPress Loop so that theme authors can now get in on the act without having to delve too far into the plugin’s code.