Get Grid View Without the Gold Cart

gratuitous blog post imageWPSC means WordPress Shopping Cart, a plugin for WordPress.

What: Too cheap to buy a Gold Cart Module for your WPSC plugin? Well, it isn’t only out of cheapness that I’m writing this (anyway I make my clients buy the module for other reasons like more payment gateways than PayPal) it’s the constant battle to optimize SEO. This shopping cart plugin is possibly the best thing to happen to WordPress but it gives less than great SEO. Duplicate title tags,missing or too short meta descriptions.

How: Use the WordPress editor in Visual Mode to insert a product group into a Page or Post.

The more familiar I get with how low ranking websites get knocked for duplicate content (yep, Google gives more leeway to popular sites with loads of incoming links and high page rank) the more value I see in adding a product group/category to a page or post rather than use the one page to show your entire store.

The editor in HTML mode will not show the shopping cart button. And if you turned this option off in your user profile you won’t ever see this button. So go to your user profile and turn Use Visual Editor back on.
So go to Write > Page and click on the cart icon to choose a category from product groups. Select, insert,save. Once you preview you’ll see that the products scroll down the page.
Don’t publish just yet.

Here is some sweet sweet CSS to fake the Grid View, save 20 bucks and get some good SEO working (that those rich guys that paid for Grid View probably won’t have).
This part is so incredibly easy I could kiss myself. In fact I will.

Fake Grid View CSS
Add this to style.css in your theme folder:
[css]
#homepage_products{overflow:hidden;}
#homepage_products .category_view_product .product_details .wpsc_product_title{font-size:12px;}
#homepage_products .category_view_product{width:200px;height:300px;float:left;margin:8px 3px;}
[/css]
The height and width and margins will have to be tweaked to fit your wishes.You can make the product titles smaller and change color.You can also have borders.It’s wide open for customization.But the float:left is what matters and creates the grid.Having overflow:hidden in the wrapper div keeps the page from looking screwy.

SEO
Next thing is to download the All in One SEO pack plugin for WordPress, unzip, upload to plugins folder, activate settle up the options and go back to your almost done Page or Post.Pop open the All in One SEO box in the editor page, below Categories. You’ll see title,description and keyword fields. Writing in your description will solve the short or missing meta description problem. If you used a post you can skip the keywords field and use tags instead. Tags are better anyway.

Use a Page or a Post?
In WordPress categories are king and you can great things with category templates.You can only use categories with posts. I would rather be able to place a single product into a Post.I think this would open up a lot more flexibility in using this plugin. This is supposed to be an option in the latest release of the plugin but either it doesn’t work or I have another plugin that breaks the button code for this. Entirely possible.

Last but not least tweak your header.php. Look for the line with html]blah blah blah [/html] delete it and paste this in it’s place:
[php]<title><?php

// Page or Single Post
if ( is_page() or is_single() ) {
the_title();

// Category Archive
} elseif ( is_category() ) {
printf( __(‘Archive for &lsquo;%s&rsquo;’), single_cat_title(”, false) );

// Tag Archive
} elseif ( function_exists(‘is_tag’) and function_exists(‘single_tag_title’) and is_tag() ) {
printf( __(‘Tag Archive for &lsquo;%s&rsquo;’), single_tag_title(”, false) );

// General Archive
} elseif ( is_archive() ) {
printf( __(‘%s Archive’), wp_title(”, false) );

// Search Results
} elseif ( is_search() ) {
printf( __(‘Search Results for &lsquo;%s&rsquo;’), get_query_var(‘s’) );
}

// Insert separator for the titles above
if ( !is_home() and !is_404() ) {
_e(‘ at ‘);
}

// Finally the blog name
bloginfo(‘name’);

?></title>[/php]

That helps take care of the duplicate title problem for categories and archives.
The all in one seo pack does most of the work and this does the rest. It’s very cool.

Why your installation of WP-Ecommerce isn’t working.

Despite the moans and cries of countless folks on the internet,I am using the free, stable release of the plugin (3.5.1) on 3 WordPress powered websites,one is updated to 2.5 the other is still 2.3.3(come on it’s only been a few days!) the other is my testing plugins wordpress install.

And since I am not an API level developer/coder my conclusions are as such:

  • You might have to rework the theme you use.
  • You may not have set up your PayPal website payments preferences properly.
  • Your theme may not have wp header();
  • Or wp_footer(); in the right places.

In the sites I have this plugin I made the themes so I know exactly what’s going on in the header,footer and in the index.php content divs and the sidebar.While this may give me an unfair advantage over users who are using a free theme they installed 2 years ago,I think any properly coded theme can use this plugin.

The activated plugin injects stuff into your footer.php.
Upon activation, view source and you will see loads of strange html in the footer along with all the strange html you put there.

**Note: this is out of date! you don’t have to do this anymore**

You’ve got to FTP into your wp-content/plugins folder and open up the ecommerce plugin file “sharethis.php” go to line 10 and change true to false,i.e:
@define(‘wpsc_akst_ADDTOFOOTER’, false);
// set this to false if you do not want to automatically add the Share This form to the page in your footer

If you don’t have ftp you can use the file manager in the wordpress admin to get to the file but good luck finding the path and if the permissions aren’t at least 755 or even 777,you can’t edit it this way, anyway.Get Filezilla
it’s free and so easy to use…

I hated this injecting html aspect of the plugin and nearly didn’t use it because of it.Luckily you can take it out.
If you are on IIS switch hosts.
Seriously.

I really don’t get why so many folks have so many problems with this plugin!
For trishamcbridedance.com it worked right out of the box,so to speak. There’s nothing that special about the hosting we both use (PowWeb) except the people behind it do seem to care that things are adjustable for their users.Hardly anything is off limits to a PowWeb user,from a direct .htaccess editor to php.ini.
New accounts are out of luck tonight,though as they are doing things to the mySQL servers and all attempts to access these websites tonight are met with an error establishing database connection message.
But since I am an old and gray customer of 2 years I seem to be on the mySQL server not being messed with.And so I can write this lovely and informative post.

I’m very happy with both carts.Trisha’s website is selling something that people want and so she has made sales.The other website is selling books and as we all know it takes a genius to sell a book.I may not be a genius but I make up for what I lack in sheer persistence.You will buy a book from stonestreetpress.com one day.They are very beautiful and unique. If you ever want to know a little about Irish history or food or some of it’s prominent figures in history,these are the books for you.Or if you just want to own something beautiful to look at,too.
And not all the books are about Irish stuff,either.There’s a funny one about snoring and also one about Christmas,1935 in Germany.And we all know what was going on back then,or we ought to know,anyway.
Support a local artist! Support an Irish artist! Support an artist! Support poetry!
Then you may return to watching America’s Next Top Model knowing you have exposed yourself to a little culture,ha ha.

Awright sales pitch over.
I do what I can.