Good Looking Product Photos for WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin

The best WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin available to date is definitely the one from Instinct Entertainment. The shopping cart comes with 3 free themes and each is ready to be customized extensively.
I know there have been some browser problems with some of the themes but I think they have been worked out.

You can choose from several low cost modules to add on to the free version of the shopping cart plugin in order to have a gallery of multiple images under the main product photo, amongst other cool extras.

When it comes to the main product photo, the one you upload first when adding a new product, you may have experienced some difficulty with the way the resulting thumbnail image is cropped and re sized after uploading. This is the most important picture because its the one customers will see first. It’s been my experience that all product photos turn out the best if shot against a white background with an equal amount of empty space around the item at the top, sides and bottom.You’re going to really want to strive for uniformity because more often than not your product pages are going to show more than one product at a time.

Take a look at these 2 pictures:

goodtoo closely cropped

You can see in the 1st photo there is enough space around the product to result in a nicely resized thumbnail image. But the second photo will get chopped off because there’s not enough space around the product.

This is a screen shot of a row of products with photos that all had the same amount of white space:

a neat row of pictures
ex.1

In the second screen shot, the 1st product photo in the row shows what happens when there is too much space at the top of the model’s head and not enough at the bottom of her feet. And because the other photos in the same row have different cropping and background colors, this row does not look as neat and clean as the first.

a not so neat row
ex.2

Many online customers judge an ecommerce website’s “trustability” by how professional it looks. So spending a little extra time on your product photos will pay off with professional-looking product pages.

Multifeedsnap Plugin Can’t Fetch Ebay RSS Feeds-They’re Too Long!

I don’t use Twitter that often but people use Tiny URL on Twitter all the time because of the 140 character limit per Twit. Seeing this made me think what if I used it to shorten Ebay Feed URI? It was worth a try. So I went to TinyUrl.com and pasted my monster Ebay RSS URL in the transform box and got a tiny url to put in the
[ feedsnap] shortcode [ /feedsnap] Now the plugin shows the feed. And I am happy again.

This reminds me of another Ebay related rss problem. Finding the rss button at the bottom of my Ebay Advanced search result pages. I just couldn’t find it! I asked Ebay support. Got back some whiffle about clearing my cookies and cache. Turns out I was using the Beta Advanced Search. I opted out of this and now I can find the RSS button at the bottom of my advanced searches.

Invalid argument foreach() error in WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin

my cart iconFor the longest time I held off upgrading any of my client’s stores using WP-Shopping Cart plugin because on my test install of WP I could not get RC1 3.6.8 to work.But it really bothers me not to use the latest version of something so on one client site I did the upgrade and tested it out.I got the same exact errors I got on my test install after trying to checkout/submit and have the payment sent to PayPal.

The old invalid argument foreach() error.

Going to the forum I did not see a way to fix this probably because everyone has different causes for this error? I’m not really sure but there should be definite documentation on how to get rid of so people can have a working cart.

Error Log Messages
This error:
WordPress database error Unknown column ‘files’ in ‘field list’ for query INSERT INTO `wp_cart_contents` ( `prodid` , `purchaseid`, `price`, `pnp`, `gst`, `quantity`, `donation`, `no_shipping`, `files` ) VALUES (’18’, ’75’,’64.50′,’0′, ‘0’,’1′, ‘0’, ‘1’, ”) made by nzshpcrt_submit_checkout

Led to this error:

PHP Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /xxx/web10/xxxx/pow.xxxl/htdocs/site/wp-content/plugins/wp-shopping-cart/merchants/paypal_multiple.php on line 82

And this all led to the cart being empty and the logs printing the price as 0.00. If the cart can’t put the order into the wp_cart_contents table it can’t process the order. Not being able to fill in the info leads to a PHP error.

Let’s look at this message again:
WordPress database error Unknown column ‘files’ in ‘field list’ for query INSERT INTO `wp_cart_contents` ( `prodid` , `purchaseid`, `price`, `pnp`, `gst`, `quantity`, `donation`, `no_shipping`, `files` ) VALUES (’18’, ’75’,’64.50′,’0′, ‘0’,’1′, ‘0’, ‘1’, ”) made by nzshpcrt_submit_checkout

Everyone of those fields has to be in the wp_cart_contents table in your WP database.If your cart works perfectly all the way up to trying to test if orders can be processed- chances are when you upgraded a field or 2 even were not created.This can happen to WP upgrades as well.It is not a failing of the cart plugin.The fact that some people have no problem upgrading anything speaks to this.

The wp_cart_contents table.
——————-Type——– –Collation — —-Attributes— — — —Null—- — Default
purchaseid—–bigint(20) ——– —– — -UNSIGNED— – — — -No—— ——0
prodid—— – bigint(20) —– —— — — -UNSIGNED– — — –No—— ——0

——————Type———- —–Collation——- —-Attributes— ——Null——-Default
price——-varchar(128)——–latin1_swedish_ci ————– ——–No———-0
pnp———varchar(128)——–latin1_swedish_ci ——– — —– —-No———-0
gst ———varchar(128)——–latin1_swedish_ci ——- ——— – — No———0
quantity– –int(10)———————————— -UNSIGNED— — No ———-0
donation– -varchar(1) ——— latin1_swedish_ci—- —— — —— No ———0
no_shipping – varchar(1)——–latin1_swedish_ci ——— —- — — – No ———- 0
files ——- —text—————-latin1_swedish_ci——— —— — — No ———-

I know it isn’t really a table but it will have to do.

Fixing It
First check your error logs. It’s good to check your error logs the very first sign of trouble. If you can see the same kind of errors that I printed here you are having the same problem I was: field files was not added to the wp_cart_contents table when I upgraded. How pesky.

1st, log into your control panel find Manage Mysql and when you are in the manage mysql area, click on Administer for your WordPress database.

When you are in, look in the left side panel for wp_cart_contents. Click on it.

Please check to see if a “files” line has been added after the no_shipping line in wp_cart_contents.
If not, don’t be scared. It is easy-peasy to add a field to a database table.If the field called files is already there your problem is being caused by something else.Check the table for missing fields you can use my ugly “graph” up above.There should be 9 fields.If anyone of these fields is missing from the table you are going to get the invalid argument foreach() error.

If the field for “files” was not added – no_shipping will be the last field in this table.It was for me.

Look for this option it’s usually underneath the bottom of the table (my host uses phpMyAdmin some other managers will be set up differently).

Add 1 field(s) At End of Table.

Leave the 1 field to be added. Leave the radio button for At End of Table selected.

Then look for the go button-Click go.

In the Field text box, type files and use all use lowercase.

In VARCHAR dropdown list, select TEXT.

Leave everything else alone and click the save button.It’s very important to save it or the field will not get added.

Test it Out!
You should now be able to add an item to the cart and checkout and send the payment to PayPal with no more errors and blank orders in the purchase logs,

if all your checkout and payment settings in the admin for the plugin are correct and there aren’t any other issues with the plugin besides the ones I have written about.

WP Post Revisions&WP-Ecommerce

wpsc, an abbreviation of wp-shoppingcart, a plugin for WordPress.
Post Revisions Buggy-ness & WP-Shoppingcart plugin
Most people get nervous when it comes to mySQL database tables.So I was glad to find a way to fix this bug without having to use phpmyadmin.

After I upgraded to WP 2.6 and upgraded the wpsc cart plugin to version 3.6.8 I noticed that revision-71 was being inserted into my single product urls. 71 being the id of the edited page.
This bug also happened with WP 2.6 and wp-shoppingcart 3.6.7.It only happened to pages containing wpsc short code:
[shoppingcart ] [productspage ] [tranactionresults ] [userlog ]

I did some forum searching and found this plugin by Jeremy Clark.
Re creating the bug was easy enough to do. All I had to do was deactivate the disable posts revisions plugin and edit a wpsc page. Voila: revision-pageid reappeared in the single product urls all over again.

** Note**
I’m actually using this plugin: Disable Revisions and Autosave
Link: http://exper.3drecursions.com/2008/07/25/disable-revisions-and-autosave-plugin/
Description: Disable the Revisions and Autosave functions. Original idea and code by Lester Chan and Untwisted Vortex. But Jeremy’s does the same thing. Use either one.

I re activated the plugin and deleted the product listing page. I created a new page, pasting the productspage shortcode into it. Then I checked the Admin in Settings and noticed that not only the product listing page link was messed up-the Verify Your Order link was also messed up, because I had edited that page as well after I deactivated the disable post revisions plugin.

Fixing stuff
Get this plugin
Test for whether or not you can just activate this plugin to get rid of the bug without having to delete the page containing some shortcode.If this fixes the bug you don’t need to delete pages.
If the problem still exists delete the page,copy the short code into the new one and publish it.
Check Admin in Settings in Ecommerce to see if your page urls are correct.
If they contain revision-pageid, correct the url and hit Update Page Urls.
Reload the Admin page in Settings>Ecommerce to make sure the corrected link(s) “stick”.
To make absolutely sure this is fixed go back and edit a page containing wpsc short code (just hit save).Then view the page and see if the single product links work.