Things have slowed down on Shopp lately as I’ve had to meet other project deadlines, but exciting things are still happening. For example, development of the shipping cost calculation architecture has wrapped-up. More juicy details of that and other work underway on the other side of the continue button.

The most important update is that all of the shipping calculations have been re-engineered from the proof-of-concept work to the final modular architecture that will allow for future development of other shipping calculations modules. That will eventually include development of real-time calculations for the various shipping services (UPS, FedEx & DHL).

Why all the focus on shipping calculations? From doing my homework, I’ve found it to be a core piece to the success of e-commerce store owners. For the more serious product distributors, having accurate shipping costs keeps customers happier (with more realistic costs) and encourages repeat business. However, for shops geared more for one-time or infrequent buyers, padding shipping can provide an extra profit channel. In both cases, you can see how vital it is. That’s why I’ve poured so much in to keeping it powerfully flexible.

I believe it successfully delivers a balanced solution by making it easy to setup and mange but also very powerful. For Shopp itself, it means another killer reason why it will be the best e-commerce solution available for WordPress.

In addition to the shipping work, I wrote a Flash (ActionScript 3) slideshow component that will be used to provide product image slideshows. I’m also considering an option that would allow for a pure JavaScript/CSS slideshow implementation, although I’m not too sure whether it will be worth the development time though. I’d like to hear your thoughts on this feature too. Do you even want a built-in slideshow and if so, does it matter whether it is implemented in Flash or HTML/CSS/JavaScript?

Finally, I’ve begun exploring some branding ideas. Once this is finalized I’ll be able to design a website specifically for the plugin and begin work on the documentation and bug report/support system.

I still feel I’ll be able to get the beta ready by the end of the month with the 1.0 release around the end of June. Exciting times!

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.