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…

Basic paging

Some fairly standard paging with linked page numbers, previous and next links, and arrow links to take to to the first and last pages. You can customise the text that is used for previous, next, first and last links.

<?php echo wpsc_first_products_link( '&laquo;', true ); ?>
<?php echo wpsc_previous_products_link( 'previous', true ); ?>
<?php echo wpsc_pagination(); ?>
<?php echo wpsc_next_products_link( 'next', true ); ?>
<?php echo wpsc_last_products_link( '&raquo;', true ); ?>

Limit the amount of pages

You can limit the amount of page links to show at one time. The above example shows what happens if there are 10 pages of products, but only showing 7 page links at a time. Notice also the text describing which page you’re on and that the previous and first links are greyed out when not applicable – you can also choose to hide them instead of showing inactive links.

Page <?php wpsc_showing_products_page(); ?>:
<?php echo wpsc_first_products_link( '&laquo;', true ); ?>
<?php echo wpsc_previous_products_link( 'previous', true ); ?>
<?php echo wpsc_pagination( 7 ); ?>
<?php echo wpsc_next_products_link( 'next', true ); ?>
<?php echo wpsc_last_products_link( '&raquo;', true ); ?>

Total number of products

There is a function to easily display the total number of products. You can detect if the category has multiple pages and if it doesn’t display something like this instead.

<?php if ( wpsc_has_pages() ) : ?>
   <!-- Insert pagination for multiple pages -->
<?php else : ?>
   Showing <?php echo wpsc_total_product_count(); ?> products
<?php endif; ?>

Number of products showing

You can display an indication as to which products are showing depending on which page you’re viewing.

Showing <?php echo wpsc_showing_products(); ?> of <?php echo wpsc_total_product_count(); ?> products:

What next?

The new WP e-Commerce default themes contain examples of pagination so hop into your templates and create some nice pagination…

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…

In The Admin

In the admin, instead of specifying terms and conditions text we are going to enter a URL. Make sure your URL is a full path including ‘http://’ as this will make it easier to detect wether the content is a URL or plain text.

Changes in your WP e-Commerce Theme

Your WP e-Commerce theme files usually reside in the ‘wp-content/uploads/wpsc/themes/your-theme’ directory. To change the terms and conditions link to link to another page rather that popup you will need to edit the ‘shopping_cart_page.php’ file.

In this file look for the terms and condition code. It will be near the bottom and should look a bit like this:

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<?php if(get_option('terms_and_conditions') != '') : ?>
<tr>
   <td colspan='2'>
      <input type='checkbox' value='yes' name='agree' /> <?php echo TXT_WPSC_TERMS1;?><a class='thickbox' target='_blank' href='<?php echo get_option('siteurl')."?termsandconds=true&amp;width=360&amp;height=400'"; ?>' class='termsandconds'><?php echo TXT_WPSC_TERMS2;?></a>
   </td>
</tr>
<?php endif; ?>

What we will do is change this code so if the contents of your terms and condition is a link (beginning http://) it will write a link to that page rather than a popup. The new code with the if statement should look like this:

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<?php if ( get_option('terms_and_conditions') != '' ) : ?>
<tr class="terms">
   <td colspan='2'>
      <input type='checkbox' value='yes' name='agree' /> <?php echo TXT_WPSC_TERMS1;?>
      <?php if ( substr(get_option('terms_and_conditions' ), 0, 7) == 'http://' ) { ?>
         <a target='_blank' href='<?php echo get_option('terms_and_conditions'); ?>' class='termsandconds'><?php echo TXT_WPSC_TERMS2;?></a>
      <?php } else { ?>
         <a class='thickbox' target='_blank' href='<?php echo get_option('siteurl')."?termsandconds=true&amp;width=360&amp;height=400'"; ?>' class='termsandconds'><?php echo TXT_WPSC_TERMS2;?></a>
      <?php } ?>
   </td>
</tr>
<?php endif; ?>

And that’s all there is to it.

…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…

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.

Where are these classes included?

wpsc
Included in every WP e-Commerce page.

wpsc-home
Included on the main WP e-Commerce shop page.

wpsc-single-product & wpsc-single-product-id
Included on single product pages. The wpsc-single-product-id class allows you to set css rules for a single product based on the product id.

wpsc-category & wpsc-category-id
Included on category and individual product pages. The wpsc-category-id class allows you to set css rules for different categories. As these classes are also applied to single product pages, if a product appears in more than one category you could style a product page differently depending on which category you click through from.

wpsc-group-id
Included on category and single product pages. The group id is set based on the group in which the current category resides.

wpsc-shopping-cart
Including on the shop cart checkout page.

wpsc-transaction-details
Including on the transaction details page displayed after a successful purchase.

wpsc-user-account
Including on the WP e-Commerce user account pages.

Ideas how to use these classes in your WP e-Commerce theme…

1. Style a special product differently using wpsc-single-product-id.
2. Style products in a sale category to display differently using wpsc-category-id.
3. Create a group for brands with brands as sub-categories and differentiate this view from your standard product categories using wpsc-group-id.

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.

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…

How to add pages to the XML sitemap

To illustrate how to implement the XML Sitemaps hook, I will base the example on the WP e-Commerce plugin (please note, I originally implemeted this with version 3.6.12 of the WP e-Commerce plugin so it may not work with more recent versions). We will create a function that will add all of this plugin’s product pages into the XML sitemap produced by Google XML Sitemaps.

The Google XML Sitemaps plugin provides the hook “sm_buildmap” which gets triggered whenever the plugin re-builds the sitemap file. We are going to create a function “wp_ecommerce_sm” which will get called by this hook.

So, here’s the function code:

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function wp_ecommerce_sm() {
   global $wpdb;
   if ( class_exists('GoogleSitemapGenerator') ) {
      $generatorObject = &GoogleSitemapGenerator::GetInstance();
      $sql = "SELECT DISTINCT * FROM `" . $wpdb->prefix . "product_list` WHERE `active` IN('1') ORDER BY `id` DESC";
      $product_list = $wpdb->get_results($sql, ARRAY_A);
      foreach ( $product_list as $product ) {
         $purchase_link = wpsc_product_url($product['id']);
         $purchase_link = str_replace('&', '&', $purchase_link);
         if ($generatorObject != null) $generatorObject->AddUrl($purchase_link, time(), "daily", 0.5);
      }
   }
}
add_action("sm_buildmap", "wp_ecommerce_sm");

The main points to note in this function are…

Check that the Google XML Sitemaps exists (is installed):

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if ( class_exists('GoogleSitemapGenerator') ) {

Get an instance of the Google XML Sitemap plugin:

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$generatorObject = &GoogleSitemapGenerator::GetInstance();

Loop through all our additional pages that we want to add to the sitemap, in this case the WP e-Commerce product pages:

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$sql = "SELECT DISTINCT * FROM `" . $wpdb->prefix . "product_list` WHERE `active` IN('1') ORDER BY `id` DESC";
$product_list = $wpdb->get_results($sql, ARRAY_A);
foreach ( $product_list as $product ) {
   // Add pages to sitemap here
}

And within our loop, add our pages like this:

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if ($generatorObject != null) $generatorObject->AddUrl($purchase_link, time(), "daily", 0.5);

And lastly we need to add the hook to call this function whenever the XML sitemap is rebuilt:

add_action("sm_buildmap", "wp_ecommerce_sm");

Is that all there is to it?

Well, not really. Your still have to trigger the sitemap to re-build to include your new pages. You can do this manually by going to your XML Sitemaps setting page and clicking the link to rebuild to force the sitemap to re-build. Ideally however you would try to get your plugin to do this automatically whenever you add/edit/delete one of your pages. I couldn’t find an obvious hook to easily do this so that is something I would like to see adding in a future version of the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

Download

Download the above code packaged as a WordPress plugin using the link below:

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.

“Unable to process payment. Please contact the merchant as the shipping address provided by the merchant is invalid, and the merchant has requested that your order must be shipped to that address.”

PayPal’s technical team are working to resolve the issue…

For more information see the following links:

PayPal Developer Community Blog
PayPal Developer Community Forum
WP e-Commerce Forums