My new design for an online store especially for music downloads (with sample audio!)

Music store design - samples, downloads and non-digital cd as products all on one page

Musicians of all types, from Indi-Rockers to Death Metal monsters and even Classic Rock tribute bands need to be able to sell their music online. There are lots of sites they can join that will do it for them like e-music and cdbaby and they make it real easy… But the bands aren’t selling on their own terms, on their own web site, with their band logo and all of that extra nice nice-ness.

So when I was asked by ON to develop an online store for them of course I grabbed a fresh copy of WordPress + wp-e-commerce and got to it.

My 1st challenge was finding an audio player that was customizable with CSS (not Flash!) I was so happy to find this plugin Haiku minimalist audio player. This plugin let me paste a shortcode into the product editor so that before customers are ready to buy they can hear a sample of the song. Customers can add multiple tracks to the cart and they can also choose a format, wav or mp3. ON also wanted to be able to offer the option to download the entire album (in both formats) and/or the option to buy the physical cd.

So on one side of the product page there’s the artist name & photo (the cd cover art as a featured image) and under it there is a list of 3 products: Buy CD, Download Album (MP3) and Download Album (WAV).

The new version of wp-e-commerce makes it easier than ever to mold your product pages any way you need. I really love how much easier it is to handle Variations now. So well done! The best decision GetShopped made was to go with the way WordPress works now – quite a bold thing to do because it required a complete revamp of their plugin. So I have much respect for them. Talk about wanting to be Future Proof. I love that.

Why Beta? Because I used the Product Page template.I should have used the Category Page template. I haven’t yet handled Single Product Pages,either. But its a good start!

Lightspeed Tech Support Sends Me a Web Store 2.1.1 Bug Report Confirmation

On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 10:31 AM, LightSpeed Support wrote:

[edited] the information about the bug and the fix are all public information. When Web Store was converted to “open source”, we moved all the development including issue tracking to Github.com, a huge and public development site for hosting code. It includes an issue tracker where we post the bugs (or they are reported by clients), and also you can see when the item was fixed and exactly what changes were made in the code.

The issue is listed here:
https://github.com/lightspeedretail/webstore/issues/71

You can see it was posted on August 25th by Jonathan Serafini and the fix was posted that day. The technical details on the fix is located at https://github.com/lightspeedretail/webstore/commit/d93f74dd67a628b1559f261435d0c94be4d0708c

I need to clarify that fixes are put in a “beta” version of the software for further testing and then released to the public later, we never recommend running beta software on a product site. I say this to make sure [edited] doesn’t get confused that it was “fixed” on the 25th. It’s all about the release date. We modified the “release” branch yesterday, which you can see here https://github.com/lightspeedretail/webstore/branches/release and that’s my username ktwbc attached. This change along with others are part of 2.1.2 which we are releasing today.

Best regards,

Kris White
Support Specialist
[edited]

Embed Audio files for music product in LightSpeed web store

Out of the box, LightSpeed web store is not as robust as some other eCommerce solutions. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to make it more robust. One such example: creating a solution to hear music samples in a Single Product detail page on the web store. We didn’t want to just click over to an external site (like the vendor’s wholesale page which had provided the samples). In my solution the customer does not leave the page to hear them.

I created a custom post type in WordPress for each CD/album title being sold on the web store. Each post has its own music player loaded with a playlist (of song previews). The .mp3 samples were uploaded with the Media Uploader and a music player WordPress plugin called Haiku was activated to play the samples. Then the links to the single custom posts were embedded in the appropriate LightSpeed Product Cards and then web store was updated.

When the link in the product description is clicked, the custom post loads and plays the samples in a lightbox window (using Fancybox which ships with web store), so the customer never has to leave the product details page to listen before they buy. All you have to do is embed the link to the custom post type in the product description and voilĂ .