Small shop with WooCommerce and Hybrid Core

1. 

   Brian Krogsgard (Member)
   Posted 6 months ago | Permalink

   I launched a small e-commerce site that integrates Hybrid Core and WooCommerce. I was responsible for design and development. I'm not much of a designer, much less for feminine sites, so don't judge me too much : )

   The development was interesting. You can read why I used Woo instead of Jigoshop (the e-commerce plugin it was forked from) in another thread, but I'll speak of the development of a WooCommerce theme, as it's most applicable, though they're both very similar.

   There are hooks everywhere in WooCommerce. You can filter and add functions to your hearts content. The code was well organized and fairly easy to find. There's a templates folder, but more importantly there's an actions and functions folder. This makes WooCommerce quite customizable, and easy to enable / disable / change things from a single theme setup function.

   You can also completely override templates in a custom 'woocommerce' folder in your theme directory. You can override quite a few templates this way. Just be careful you don't override a hook that has an important function connected to it and not program it back into your template.

   The only other issues were deregistering and registering the shop wrappers to work with my theme, which is well documented how to do. Finally, I really don't understand why the plugins even have a call to get a sidebar. They shouldn't do that at all in my opinion, so I took it out.

   CSS can be done a few ways. You can override styles in your theme directory, but you may get stuck having to use !important a few times that way. It's best if you're doing a parent theme to just not use WooCommerce CSS, copy their css file, and include it in your theme to edit that way.

   Variable products in WooCommerce are awesome. Granted, this site has waaay to many variations per product, but the way it handles them is much better than Shopp (the other e-commerce plugin I have familiarity with variations). Most of what I mean by this is the ability to use *any* x *any* variations so that if you have 3 colors and 5 sizes you don't have to configure 15 variations.

   I'm sure this site still has bugs, and the owner wants to spice some areas up a bit, but all in all it was pretty smooth. I hope this may help some of you.

2. 

   dronix (Member)
   Posted 6 months ago | Permalink

   Hey Brian.

   I like the site. The design is pretty nice and the layout is well structured.

   I've never built an e-commerce site so I apologize for my short feedback.

3. 

   Brian Krogsgard (Member)
   Posted 6 months ago | Permalink

   @dronix Thanks! This is actually my first time in freelance to do so as well. Since I started this one I've worked on a bunch with my day job, which is how I have familiarity with Shopp. This site went from Cart66 > Jigoshop > WooCommerce so I'm glad to have it off my plate. And if you're doing this in the future, add a solid 20 hours for e-commerce... minimum.

4. 

   Nic (Member)
   Posted 6 months ago | Permalink

   Thanks for the write up! It is always good to hear first hand experience from other people on subjects like this.

   I will only add that if you are outside major markets like USA, UK and Europe look carefully at your e-commerce solution's gateway support. I figured I would use PayPal, but since our local PayPal does not run in our local currency, I ran into problems with price conversions. Ultimately it was the payment gateway support, and some really obtuse language from PayPal that caused problems.

   Do your homework beforehand, and make 100% sure that if PayPal is in your country, that it supports your local currency. If not, make sure there is already existing (or you can code your own) local gateway support.

5. 

   Craig (Member)
   Posted 6 months ago | Permalink

   Hey Brian,

   Great job and probably a one of a kind integration, very nicely done, I like more minimal layouts for shopping sites.

   Timing is everything I guess I have been looking at woo only because as usual in my experience any e-commerce site depends upon the clients needs for a payment gateway, shipping rules, tax, and a number of other complexities. I purchased Cart66 and gave it a go, luckily I read a post by Patrick over at DevPress which led me to back out quickly.

   I have never been convinced or been a huge fan of WordPress and e-commerce, it has come a long way, perhaps with Jigo doing a fairly nice integration.

   Hey great job and you always are doing great stuff for the community at large.

6. 

   iamcanadian1973 (Member)
   Posted 6 months ago | Permalink

   Brian,

   I usually use Cart66, and I like its flexability, there are some ecommerce websites I've built that needed the seperation that Cart66 offers or else it would not have been possible.

   But it lacks in hooks, so you can't go creating your own shipping module or payment gateway unless you want to edit their code. And for me that is a huge downfall to Cart66 when creating ecommerce solutions.

   Many clients have requested Canada Post for dynamic shipping calculations, but Cart66 limits you to what they have.

   So with Woocommerce, they have available addons, I'm guessing this means the ability to write our own gatways, shipping modules and anythign else we desire and have no issues including them?

7. 

   Brian Krogsgard (Member)
   Posted 6 months ago | Permalink

   @Craig - Thanks : ) I think you give me too much credit. I too ended up not using Cart66 from Patrick's warning.

   @iamcanadian1973 - Woo does have lots of addons and you can write your own. I bet if you bought a similar addon to your own you could figure out how to write the one you want, assuming the corresponding api is friendly.

8. 

   iamcanadian1973 (Member)
   Posted 6 months ago | Permalink

   Brian,

   that is the plan, to buy somehting similar and make my own. :P

   It's usually the best way to go.

   Thanks for your input, always very helpful.

9. 

   Justin Tadlock (Key Master)
   Posted 6 months ago | Permalink

   Brian, thanks for writing this out. It's always nice to read someone's opinion you can trust on these things.

10. 

    Brian Krogsgard (Member)
    Posted 6 months ago | Permalink

    @Justin - My pleasure. I hope to go into more detail with using WooCommerce soon on my blog or elsewhere.

    My implementation here is pretty much the out-of-the-box version, except integrated with Hybrid Core. There's a lot of potential to do cool things though, and I'm looking forward to exploring them.

    One example of what I want to do is create attributes to do more than just select slight variations, but to create a retail and wholesale view of a site with different pricing based on logged in user roles. That would really help with my company, and it's on my short list.

11. 

    VehiCROS (Member)
    Posted 3 months ago | Permalink

    I just started using WooCommerce, and so far its worth trying, still lacks some perfection offered by WP-eCommerce but Offers some nice features that WP-e-Commerce does not.

    I just purchased and installed the Canada Post Shipping Add-On and its as if its not there at all, like it doesnt work, doesnt do anything...... ???? I sure Hope I was not ripped off? it was $50

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