Running straight out of the box, Shopp will store any product images that you upload in the database rather than as regular files. There’s method in the madness here – the idea is that even a novice user can upload product images without fear of problems such as file permission errors rearing their ugly head.

On the other hand, this approach can have a negative impact on the site’s performance. You can of course switch to file based storage but if you don’t discover this option straight away then there is a good chance that a large chunk of your product images will already be tucked away in the database with no means of extracting them back into regular files. Meanwhile, image requests follow this sort of flow:

• Instead of being served directly by the web server, product images have to pass through an extra layer – the Shopp Image Server
• The Shopp Image Server connects to the database, searches for and retrieves the requested image
• … And then sends it back down the line to the web browser

If we could at least eliminate the extra database work, and better yet facilitate direct access to the images, we could be looking at a real performance advantage. Enter Shopp Image Tools[1], which tries to solve this problem in as user-friendly a way as is possible, helping to free all of your product images from their database-table prison, setting them up as regular files.

Check at a glance how many images are in the database and migrate them with the click of a button. Direct Mode is an experimental feature that can offer an additional performance boost.

Once installed you will be able to access Shopp Image Tools through the aptly named Image Tools menu option, located in the Shopp settings menu. There isn’t a great deal to it – click on Run Conversion Tool to start the conversion process, and click on Enable Direct Mode to try and minimize calls to the Shopp Image Server. [Read more...]

Now you can associate an image with a product and use it independently of the product gallery

Shopp  comes complete with some fairly comprehensive image handling capabilities, but separating out product images so some will be used in the product gallery and others elsewhere isn’t too easy.

Chris Jumonville of Digital Sky Design identified a situation where it was desirable to have a representative image for use within category views – but didn’t want that image to be included as part of the product gallery. We figured that adding a post thumbnail or featured image capability to Shopp would be a neat solution here.

And so … Featured Images for Shopp was born. Upload and activate like any other plugin and voila – you can assign featured images from right in the product editor.

By default these will be used in place of the product.coverimage template tag’s default output (though this behaviour can easily be turned off by using a simple filter).

There are a ton of possible uses for this, you’re limited only by your imagination. [Read more...]

The odyssey to make Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin play nicely with Shopp continues! Version 1.2 of my Shopp SEO Glue plugin is now available and introduces support for product categories.

It is of course in need of a little more road testing – so feel free to grab a copy and take it for a spin.

The Shopp product category editor sporting a new meta box (containing the WordPress SEO fields used for taxonomies).

I first created a custom categories widget for Shopp last year. It was a solution to a very particular problem, which went something like this: let’s say you have a Brands category and you wish to display a list of all the sub-categories of Brands, but not the parent itself, how can you do that and place it in the sidebar?

A convenient tool to list categories

Without resorting to custom code and template tags, which many people are unfamiliar with, there was no easy way of achieving this. My widget resolved this issue and was great in various other scenarios too – in all honesty it did however suffer from a number of issues.

• It featured an overly complicated user interface (in the widgets admin screen)
• Merchants had to be comfortable with the process of retrieving category IDs which many found to be neither intuitive nor convenient
• They then had to choose a load of options such as Ignore Parent Categories or Include Children and maintain an idea in their head as to how this would all pan out
• Though it could produce hierarchical lists it didn’t handle orphaned children very well

The latest version, 0.5.4, aims to tackle a whole heap of these issues. The rest of this post is going to explore that in a little more detail. If you’re really here because you want to get your hands on the widget, then simply head on over to Google Code and download it! Like any other WordPress plugin you can simply upload the zip archive from the comfort of the plugin manager. Update: now available on WordPress Extend. [Read more...]