Also, another idea is how phpbay uses a stub template file (just html w/internal tags) to control the item/object display – so, for instance, if you have listing view + detail view, you could custom tweak the detail view/etc. and “buy” button, image, or link placement without hurting too much else.

I’ll keep checking in…

Hopefully it will be completely flexible. To be sure it is, I’m actually implementing all of the vanilla shopping interfaces that I am designing for out-of-the-box functionality using the shopp() tag so that I can be sure I’m giving everybody else the same raw flexibility that I needed to make the defaults work. Ideally, you could copy the default interfaces from the shopp plugin and drop it right in your theme to start customizing your shopp interfaces to fit with your custom theme.

That approach will allow shopp to work out-of-the-box with any theme, but also, it should help power-users and developers fully customize the shopping experience, from catalog, to shopping cart, to checkout form and receipt. How cool is that?

Keep up the good work!!

What interests me though, as a ‘power user’, is the ability to just throw out products when and where I need them via something like [ shopp("featured",3); ] or [ shopp("category","watches"); ] and style them as I please.

Is this something you’re envisioning being able to do, or is it going to be much more restricted? Looking forward to the beta!

Currently, I am still working on implementing the automagical catalog generator (a fancy way of saying product category pages). The real issue I’m having is that this is the heart of where the design and the code intersect. The techie’s need the power to customize it completely but the non-techie’s just need “out-of-the-box” functionality with “some” flexibility.

The subsidiary issue to that is, what do most shop owners want the “front page” of the catalog to look like? Unless the shop only has a few items, I’d expect that most shop owners with lots of categories really want to showcase a few “featured” products, maybe some on-sale products and some of the newest products. Then on an even more detailed level, what should individual product listings look like within those special areas? All the same, each different? There are lots of considerations and it’s just taking me awhile to get my head around it all. What I’m working up to address all of this, I think will be worth the wait.

The beta will likely not begin until the end of this month. Once I have the catalog implemented, and a few other things in place, I will have put together a preview to show everyone, either in the form of a screencast or screenshots with descriptions.

What a killer app — and oh so needed! I’m dying to integrate it into my sites and especially a current site I’m working on…

But I feel like I’ve come late to the party. In any event, if you still need beta testers, I’m so there.

Thanks for your contribution to Wordpress!

I’d be interested in beta testing if you’ve got any room left.

Thanks!

Nathaniel

While zen is a monster to customize, what I need from it, in addition to authorize.net and shipping, is the ability to do downloads. It’s capabilities to run sales is nice too. So I’d concur with others that the slideshow functionality could be added later or through a third party, but the 1.0 needs to nail these basics, which it sounds like you’re doing. Keep up the good work.