You can view the presentation below…

The WordPress Melbourne Meetup is for anyone interested in WordPress, no matter whether you’re a first time WordPress user or an experienced developer, there’s something for everyone. Plus, it’s a great way to get involved with your local WordPress community. We’re currently alternating between advanced and beginner topics at each Meetup, so come along and join the fun!

In fact, typically there are more end users than developers that attend, but at WordCamp Sydney I think we managed to turn that around as there seemed to be lots more developers this year.

The talks were split into two tracks. A ‘high-tech’ track that was more suited to developers and a ‘low-tech’ track for the more user oriented. You can find a complete list of everyone who presented on the weekend, over on the WordCamp Sydney website and their slides can be found on Slideshare.

Welcome to WordCamp!

The first day kicked off with Dee Teal (@TheWebPrincess) doing the formal welcome and providing some general information about the weekend. After that, we had what was probably the best talk of the weekend. Brent Sheperd’s (@ThenBrent) Keynote Address, Word To The Future. Brent talked about the history behind WordPress and what we can expect in the future. His overall presentation was fantastic, as were his slides.

One of the other highlights of the first day, for myself personally, was Jordan Gillman’s (@jordesign) presentation, Responsive WordPress. Jordan talked about how the mobile web has really taken off over the past couple of years and what we can do to to make our websites display substantially better on these smaller devices.

As well as listening to all the other great speakers over the weekend, I was also lucky enough to make a presentation myself. My session, Getting to Grips with Firebug, was to show people how they can perform some basic site debugging and styling using this awesome browser add-on.

The first day wrapped up with an After Party at a nearby hotel. This is always a great time to catch up with everyone over a few drinks. Especially with the guys & gals from other States, who I don’t get to see on a regular basis.

Day 2

Day 2 started a little later than the first day, thankfully. In the morning there was an awesome Q and A session where people could ask anything WordPress related. The answers were provided by some of Australia’s WordPress elite, including the likes of Dion Hulse, Gary Pendergast, Ryan McCue, Bronson Quick, Japh Thomson, Anthony Cole and a number of others. These guys really know their shit and there was some really interesting information to come out of this session. If you were at #wcsyd but didn’t get to this session, I highly recommend watching the video when it comes online!

Another really interesting talk on Sunday was by Lachlan MacPherson (@lachlanj), There is More than One Way to Skin a Theme. Lachlan is the co-founder of Sennza, a company he started with Bronson Quick. He presented some fantastic examples of some of the more challenging and interesting projects that Sennza have worked on and how they used WordPress to implement these sites for their clients. I always find it amazing seeing how other developers tackle some of the more intricate and challenging sites like the ones presented here.

Day 2 wrapped up with a Farewell from Dee and the other organisers along with a few special prizes and giveaways.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Overall, WordCamp Sydney was a huge success! It’s fantastic when such an awesome community of people like this get together. A huge thanks also needs to go out to the awesome organisers, Dee Teal, Tracey Kemp, Alison Van Hees and Peter Bui. They did a truly awesome job putting everything together leading up to the event and also with keeping it running smoothly over the two days. Two thumbs up, guys! Well done!

This has been my third WordCamp so far, the first being up on the Gold Coast late last year and then another over at WordCamp NZ earlier in the year. I can’t wait for the next one to come along!

If you’re looking to create an online store for your product, what better way to do it than by using one of the most popular and robust Content Management Systems available; WordPress! There are several different eCommerce plugins available now for use with WordPress and one of the more recent arrivals on the scene is WooCommerce by WooThemes.

Back on August 25 2011, WooThemes announced that they were about to release a new eCommerce WordPress plugin called WooCommerce. They did this by forking the JigoShop eCommerce plugin from Jigowatt, which was licensed under GPL. You’ll find numerous comments from within the WordPress community both for and against this and Jigowattt also posted their own views the day after the announcement. It’s eight months down the track now though and going on peoples reactions, it seems that WooCommerce is definitely making their mark in this field. After numerous updates, tweaks & bugfixes, the current stable version (as of this writing) is Version 1.5.4.

Features

The basic WooCommerce plugin is completely free to download and use. It’s built on top of standard WordPress Custom Post Types and straight out of the box, is extremely powerful with a lot of functionality. WooCommerce comes with all the standard features that you’d expect within an eCommerce plugin such as;

• Various types of reporting on sales, customers and stock
• Dashboard widgets that allow you to keep an eye on various aspects of your store from the main WordPress dashboard page
• Shipping & Tax settings
• Customers & Orders
• Product & Inventory
• Marketing & Promotions including the ability to add “coupons”
• And most importantly, various Payment Gateways & payment methods

There is also a wide selection of “extensions” that can be downloaded from the WooThemes website. Some of these are free, but most will set you back a small fee. There are several notable ones specifically for the Australian market such as the NAB Transact payment gateway, Australia Post Shipping Calculator and the Australian eWay payment gateway. Other useful extensions include;

• Dynamic Pricing – Gives you a powerful system for creating four different types of bulk discounts and price adjustments
• Gravity Forms Add-ons – Provides advanced product configuration forms that contain conditional logic, pricing fields, user input prices, conditional-pricing fields and conditional submit button logic
• Per Product Shipping – Allows your store admins to define a separate shipping cost for each individual product
• Table Rate Shipping – Extends WooCommerce’ default shipping options giving you highly customisable shipping options including the ability to define shipping rates location, price, weight, or item count

One other extension that I think is worth mentioning is one that I found on the IgniteWoo website. WooCommerce Wholesale Pricing creates a “Wholesale Buyer” user role and adds a wholesale price field to all of your products. This allows you to create users that can view seperate “Wholesale” prices for each of your products, once they’re logged in to their account.

Getting started

The WooCommerce plugin installs like any other WordPress plugin. Upon activation, you’re prompted to let the plugin create a number of default WordPress Pages. These include account admin, shopping cart and checkout pages, among others. These default pages include the necessary WooCommerce shortcodes relevant to each page. Of course, if you don’t want to install these default pages, then you can simply skip this step.

After the plugin is activated, two new menus are added to the left hand navigation in the WordPress dashboard, WooCommerce and Products. The WooCommerce menu provides you with the various options for configuring your store;

• Settings – Allows you to configure all the default settings for your shop such as country & currency types, tax settings, payment gateways and numerous others
• Reports – A number of reports can be produced on sales, customers and stock
• Orders – Allows you to view all the orders made through your online store
• Coupons – Allows you to add coupons which can be redeemed by your customers

WooCommerce Settings

Prior to adding all your products to your store, there are a number of settings that need to be configured. All these settings can be accessed through the WooCommerce > Settings menu option.

General

The General settings tab allows you to configure the base Country/Region for your shop as well as the currency and the countries that you’ll ship to and various other settings. WooCommerce also comes with some default styling. You can enable or disable this CSS stylesheet here.

Catalog

The Catalog tab allows you to confgure your product data such as where Category information is shown, the units of measurement for products that specify the weight and dimensions, currency specifics and whether to allow product reviews. You can also specify the dimensions for catalog images, single product images and product thumbnails.

Pages

The Pages tab allows you to configure which of your WordPress pages are used for each of the main pages within your shop such as displaying your list of products, customer shopping cart information, account information pages and checkout pages. Most of the pages defined here will be set to the default pages created during the plugin activation process, if you chose to allow WooCommerce to automatically create those pages for you.

Inventory

The Inventory tab allows you to define whether you keep track of stock. If you do, you can enable low or out of stock notifications and even stop out of stock products from displaying.

Tax

The Tax tab allows you to configure tax rates, if required, including the ability to specify different rates based on the Country/State or a local Postcode/Zipcode.

Shipping

The Shipping tab allows you to specify the various shipping options available to your customers. You have the choice of Flat Rate, International Delivery, Free Shipping, Local Delivery & Local Pickup.

Each shipping method also it’s own options that can be configured, based on the particular method. Shown below is the Flat Rate shipping page where you can specify the type of shipping calculation (ie. Per order, Per Item or Per Class), you can specify the default cost & handling fees along with any extra shipping options and rates.

Payment Gateways

The Payment Gateways tab allows you to specify the different options for collecting payments from your customers. There are four default options available; Direct Bank Transfer, Checque Payment, PayPal and Cash on Delivery. As mentioned earlier, there are also numerous payment gateway extensions that can be downloaded from the WooThemes website. You’ll find that these will be specific to particular countries.

Each payment method has it’s own settings page that can be configured. The options available will vary according to the payment gateway. Shown below is the PayPal settings screen that allow you to define your PayPal email address and a description to show your customers on checkout, among other settings. You also have the option to enable the PayPal developer sandbox which is extremely useful for testing payments when setting up your online store.

Emails

The Emails tab allows you to configure email settings for administrators (eg. New order notifications or Inventory notifications) and customers. You can use the default email template and specify your own colours and header image or if you’d like more advanced control you can copy the email template and make modifications to that.

Integration

The Integration tab lets you configure social media sharing options either via ShareThis or ShareDaddy, which is a sharing plugin bundled with JetPack. You can also add in your Google Analytics ID.

Adding your content

The next task after configuring all your store settings, is to start adding your products. Thankfully WooCommerce makes this a fairly painless process. Simply select the Add Product option from the Products menu.

Since WooCommmerce uses standard Custom Post Types, the Add New Product page looks just like any other WordPress Post or Page edit screen, with the addition of some extra fields.

When adding a product, you have the choice of four options; Simple product, Grouped product, External/Affiliate product or Variable product. You can also specify if the product is virtual or downloadable. When adding downloadable products, you are given the option to upload the file and specify download and expiry limits.

• Simple product  – Will usually cover the majority of products. Simple products are shipped and have no options
• Grouped product – A collection of related products which can be purchased individually. For example, a PS3 could be a grouped product as there are 80GB, 120GB and 200GB variations of that same parent product
• External/Affiliate product – A product you list and describe on your site, but is sold elsewhere
• Variable product – A product which has several different variations, each of which may have a different SKU, price, stock options etc. For example a tshirt that is available in several different colours and/or sizes

As you’d expect, you can specify all the usual infomation when adding a product such as price (regular & sale), tax, weight & dimensions. You can also specify and track the stock quantity, if so desired along with other “related” products that you wish to up-sell/cross-sell. It’s here that you also specify each option for your variable or grouped products.

If you’re interested in providing discounts for your customers, WooCommerce also allows you to create coupons. Coupons can be used to provide your customers a cart discount, a cart % discount, a product discount or a product % discount. Coupons can be configured to expire after a certain usage limit, a certain date or even to never expire. You can also apply/exclude them to/from a certain product or product category.

Browsing your store

Since the WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, it can be implemented in any theme you want, however if you’re not wanting to performing any extra styling yourself, then you’re best to implement the plugin on a site that has been optimised for WooCoomerce. The WooThemes site has a number of ready made themes that are styled specifically for the WooCommerce plugin. You can also find a number of other sites such as Themeforest or Mojo Themes that have various WooCommerce styled themes. One of the themes that I tested the plugin on was the Wootique theme. This is a premium theme that’s available for free from the WooThemes website. The WooThemes website also has  a demo of Wootique using the WooCommerce plugin.

I also tested the plugin using the standard Twenty Eleven WordPress theme. Although WooCommerce comes packaged with a default stylesheet which does look reasonably good (and can be disabled within the General settings page), you’ll find it’s not styled quite as nice as some of the ready-made WooCommerce themes that are available.

If you’re interested in testing out the WooCommerce plugin, it comes with a dummy_data.xml file that you can import to populate your site with dummy data. Alternatively, you can also download this file from the WooCommerce GitHub site.

As mentioned earlier, when first activating the plugin, WooCommerce will create some default pages for you. To display other content within your theme, WooCommerce provides quite a number of different shortcodes. They also provide quite a few different Widgets that can be added to your site for searching, displaying ‘Featured’ products, displaying product categories & tags and displaying recent reviews, just to name a few.

Viewing Reports and Orders

Like all good shop owners, you’ll want to keep track of all your product sales and orders. There are anumber of built in reports that allow you to do just that. There are reports for Sales (Incl. Overiew, Sales by day, Sales by month, Product sales, Top Sellers and Top earners), Customers and Stock.

Using the Orders menu option you’re also able to view a list of all the orders made. Clicking the Order # displays the order in full including all the products for that particular order (& variations if appropriate), the customers details and total costs (incl. discounts & tax).

Conclusion

Overall, I think WooCommerce is an extremely solid eCommerce plugin. It has a wealth of standard features and is fairly straight forward to setup, no matter whether you’re using a WooCommerce optimised theme like Wootique, or your own custom theme.

The interface is very easy to use and will be very familiar to anyone who’s used the WordPress Dashboard. The settings pages has the familiar WordPress layout, utilising the tabs across the top of the page. It’s good to see this standard WordPress layout, unlike some theme or plugins that opt to style their settings pages completely differently.

Adding products into your store is also very straightforward. It also provides quite a few choices, as standard, allowing you to setup various types of products.

The WooCommerce site also provides some decent documentation if you need to use it and although I didn’t look through it all, the pages I did look at were well written and easy to follow.

Overall, if you’re looking to implement an eCommerce solution using WordPress, you’d be wise to checkout what WooCommerce can do for you.

When CPTs are stored within the WordPress database, the CPT name (ie. the first parameter used within the register_post_type() function) is stored along with the rest of the Post data. If, for some reason, you need to change your CPT name, any data that you currently have stored for that Custom Post will disappear from with the WordPress Dashboard after the name change. In actual fact, the data is still obviously in the database, it’s just assigned to a Custom Post that no longer exists. Getting your data back is a fairly easy process but you do need to be confident with using phpMyAdmin and as a precaution, you should definitely make a backup of your database prior to making any changes.

Within phpMyAdmin, run the following SQL command on your database, replacing custom-post-type-name with the actual name of your Custom Post Type…

SELECT * FROM wp_posts where post_type = 'custom-post-type-name'

After running the above SQL, you should be displayed with a list of your Custom Posts. There are two fields that need to be updated within each Post. The guid field and the post_type field. The guid field contains the URL of your post and as part of this URL, the CPT name is included. The post_type field simply contains the actual name of the Post Type. Simply edit each row of data, carefully replacing the Post Type name in both the guid field and the post_type field. After making the changes, log back into your WordPress Dashboard and you should find that all your Posts are listed once again.

One last important point to remember when creating CPTs, is that the Post Type parameter that you use within the register_post_type() function must be a maximum of 20 characters and cannot contain capital letters or spaces.

I hope you find this useful and if so, feel free to leave a comment

During our discussion we also touched on topics such as GeoTagging networks like Foursquare, (the recently bought out) Gowalla and Path.

The MotleyCrue Cast is a podcast for creative individuals both freelance and professional in any field, hosted by Joshua Rapp of Rappsody Studios and Jane Clark of Teakettica, and produced by Pablo Lara in association with The Motley Design Crue.

You can listen to the podcast on the Motley Design Crew site or you can even subscribe via iTunes. Go check it out. You know you want to!