The latest version of WP e-Commerce (3.8.x) for WordPress is a significant move on both in terms of stability and extensibility.

This is partly down to an extensive re-build on the codebase to take advantage of some of WordPress’ latest features; custom post type and taxonomies. This has the added benefit of making it much easier for plugin developers to create add-on plugin to enhance WP e-Commerce functionality.

The key objectives now seem to be to keep WP e-Commerce ‘lean and mean’ to provide a solid platform on which to develop WordPress-based e-commerce sites, and provide additional functionality through plugins.

Part of this process includes stripping out some of the less-used parts of WP e-Commerce and turning them into plugins. Once such example is the automated ‘Also Bought’ functionality which can be found in the Marketing tab of WP e-Commerce settings.

I have worked extensively with WP e-Commerce over the last 2-3 years and frequently try to get involved wether it be fixing the odd bug or helping out on the forum – when I have time ;) so I jumped on board to help separate the ‘Also Bought’ functionality into a WordPress plugin.

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I recently tried out Joost de Valk’s Google Analytics for WordPress (version 4) and was happy to see it supported ecommerce tracking for WP e-Commerce.

I had the latest version of WP e-Commerce installed, version 3.7.6.7, and configured the analytics plugin to track transactions but for some reason my ecommerce purchases were not being tracked by Google Analytics.

I did a bit of digging around and discovered the Analytics plugin was looking for the global variable $cart_log_id from which it could get the transaction details, but this variable did not seem to exist (it did seem to be in pre 3.7.6.x versions of WP e-Commerce though).

I have submitted a patch for this for the forthcoming WP e-Commerce version 3.8 (which is currently in beta and looking great, by the way).

In the meantime, if you’re having this problem here’s how you can fix it…

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WP e-Commerce 3.7.6 now includes better support for paging on category pages.

The latest release contains a suite of functions (my little contribution) to help you customise how pagination is displayed in your WPSC templates.

You can find an in-depth look at these functions and how to use them in the WP e-Commerce Documentation.

Below are some quick examples of what you can do…

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By default the terms and conditions link on the checkout page in WP e-Commerce activates an overlay popup containing the terms and conditions text you have specified in the admin.

But what if you want the link to redirect to a page instead of triggering this popup? You just need to make a small change to your checkout template. Here’s what you need to do…

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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…