Here’s a weekly update on where development stands with the WordPress e-commerce plugin, Shopp. My feeling is that providing a weekly update will continue to help generate excitement about the project and to demonstrate my commitment to bringing it to the WordPress community. I can also use regular updates to describe specific features in much greater detail by breaking up coverage while fielding comments and questions specific to them. So here’s where development stands, one week after the first public announcement…

Order Processing

I’m happy to say that order processing is working beautifully. The first Shopp-powered site is processing orders perfectly and provides the proof-of-concept that the plugin architecture is already a solid foundation to work from.

Order Management

With that, development of the order management interfaces has been underway. The initial admin interface that shop owners will see when they access the plug-in’s menu is the order management screen. So far the order list shows the basics: order date, customer name, customer’s location, total value of the order and the status. The order status is configurable by shop owners to fit whatever workflow process they may need. Shopp will create two initial status types: Pending and Complete. For those with more needs, it can be configured to fit specific order processing needs such as: Pending, Received, On Hold, On Backorder, Complete. It’s easy to add more, and fairly straightforward to organize their order.

I also have plans to add the ability for internal notes about the order in addition to sending a notice to the customer (with a custom message) when the order status changes. I’m still working out how to attach custom fields to the order for things like tracking numbers for shipment tracking and the like. Customers will be able to “securely” retrieve and view their previous orders by providing details about the order (such as e-mail, zip and order number for example).

Product Editor

This will undoubtedly be a regularly updated entry. A vast majority of development in the product editor this week focused on categories. Product category assignment in the product editor works fairly closely to the WordPress 2.5 category assignment when writing posts. You can add new categories right in the product editor, and you can assign multiple categories. For a time, I considered utilizing the existing framework of WordPress categories for Shopp, but ultimately opted not to. I determined that there would be cases when you would not want product categories (say if you have hundreds of them for your catalog) interfering with post categories and vice-versa. I can only imagine the nightmare of having to pick out post categories out of hundreds of mostly Shopp categories. That’s not to say that I couldn’t make a case for having merged categories. However, I felt that most of the benefits of a unified category scheme would be able to be duplicated in the separate Shopp category system. This approach also helps maintain some level of feature independence so any future development with categories will not be locked to WordPress category development.

Customization

A working proof-of-concept is allowing this feature to get underway. Along with using shortcodes to customize placement of the various ordering-related interfaces, Shopp owners will be able to fully customize almost every aspect of the buying interfaces. Let me break down what that means. As a Shopp owner/developer you will be able to “easily” customize every customer interface (catalog, cart, checkout, order receipt, etc). For anyone that’s ever tried to hack a plugin and run into roadblocks, this is huge. With a healthy working knowledge of HTML/CSS and armed with a development guide (which isn’t ready, but will be) you can use the shopp PHP “tag” to build completely customized templates. So if you have the know-how, you can create templates for all of the public interfaces that seamlessly integrate with your site’s layout and style.

That’s it for now. If you have any questions, thoughts or comments about these features or the plugin in general, drop me a comment below. Thanks for your time and interest!

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