Ben Huson

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…

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Since last Friday (25th January 2008), we have been experiencing problems with some third-party shopping carts integrated with PayPal, in particular osCommerce and WordPress E-Commerce. The error message that occurs is:

“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