A few years ago we wrote this post about wordpress store. this post was very popular and useful but since then a lot of things have changed in the wordpress world.

here are the main steps to create your own wordpress store in 2012:

1. install wordpress.
2. choose the right e – commerce plugin for your needs.
3. pick one theme answering all your design wishes.

Installing WordPress

if you wish to install locally you can use xampp.

if you want to install on a server, most of them have auto install for wordpress.

Download the latest release of WordPress.

Unzip the downloaded file to a folder on your hard drive.

open a new database with phpmyadmin.

more details about how to install wordpress:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

E – Commerce Plugins

the most popular and most used plugin is WP e-commerce. (http://getshopped.org/)

but there are more plugins:

Ecwid

Ecwid is a free full-featured shopping cart and an e-commerce solution that can easily be added to any blog or Facebook profile. It offers the performance and flexibility you need, with none of the hassles you don’t.
“Ecwid” stands for “ecommerce widgets”.

eShop

eShop is an accessible shopping cart plugin for WordPress, packed with various features.

Jigoshop

Jigoshop is an eCommerce plugin for WordPress developed by professionals with years of experience delivering online shops for global brands.

 Cart66

The Cart66 WordPress ecommerce plugin makes it easier to make money online than ever before.  Not only can you sell physical products, digital products, and services, Cart66 will also turn your WordPress site into a membership website allowing you to sell subscription access to your content.

Shopp

Shopp is built to belong in WordPress: seamless administration tools, widgets, shortcodes, custom menus, post types and taxonomy support – take your pick. Shopp is the WordPress e-commerce plugin that sets the bar for a natural WordPress experience.

woocommerce

Transform your WordPress website into a thorough-bred online eCommerce store. Delivering enterprise-level quality & features whilst backed by a name you can trust. Say hello to WooCommerce.

 Wordpress Store Themes

Sentient

Sentient is a smart, innovative WooCommerce theme. Products are cleverly aligned using jQuery masonry allowing you to cleanly showcase a great number of products on your shop pages without any wasted space. Sentient has also been fully optimised for use on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.

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WP Flexishop 2

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ShopMe

“ShopMe” is a theme designed and developed by us in collaboration with wpfeed.com. the theme is working with wp e-commerce newest version 3.8 which is now intended to work with the latest wordpress releases and use the custom post type features.

you can create your own store very easily now. the theme features a very fancy carousel, top products in homepage and sidebar widgets. you can control the main menu and some more options comes naturally with the theme.

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ReStored – WP Ecommerce for Easy Digital Downloads

ReStored is built to make use of the Easy Digital Downloads ecommerce plugin, making your WordPress install an awesome looking store. ReStored makes it easy to get your digital products front and center to start making sales.

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Argentum

Argentum is a WooCommerce theme featuring a unique, responsive design optimised for mobile devices. It is the perfect theme for selling your catalog of products, small or large to users at their desktop computers, or on their smartphones.

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Mazine WordPress Theme

Flexible e-commerce theme, with wp-e-commerce plugin, ajax contact form, animated sortable gallery and much much more

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SiSo: Woo Commerce WordPress theme

Mojo Themes – All e-commerce themes

ThemeForest – All e-commerce thems

Popularity: 1% [?]

Pinterest design is spreading very fast, it’s unique and very accessible, as usual wordpress developers takes the opportunity in two hands and creating wordpress themes looks like pinterest.

Pinterest Theme

Pinterest WordPress theme is a premium theme that exactly resembles your favorite Pinterest site. The theme delivers multi column layout with facility to add any number of pins to the pinboard.

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Gridnik – Elite Portfolio WordPress Theme

Gridnik is a WordPress Theme for those who dare to be unique! With it’s flexible layout it can be resized to large sized monitors or even to small and narrow screens e.g. Mobile Phones. It also comes in 9 slick colors enhanced with 15 font’s options served by Google! Can you feel it?

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The Narrow Way WordPress Theme

The Narrow Way is a powerful WordPress Theme Pack including 2 stand-alone themes

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FolioGrid Pro – A Next Generation WordPress Portfolio Theme.

Designed to be a fluid WordPress Portfolio Theme, FolioGrid has shown an impressive flexibility to be used for much more. Video embedding, fluid layouts and multiple colour schemes make FolioGrid Pro great.

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iPhoto Free WordPress Theme Like Pinterest!

Create amazing photo blogs with the iPhoto free WordPress theme! The theme is a best of clone for Pinterest!

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Imbalance 2

Imbalance 2 turns you WordPress-based website to an attractive blog, portfolio or even online magazine. This free template designed in strict modern style with a minimalistic touch. Imbalance 2 can easily fresh up your web-magazine or blog. Due to modern flexible features and layout Imbalance 2 fits to almost any project and your visitors won’t remain indifferent.

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ecoStrips

A funky new theme to showcase your posts in a slick, dynamic wall that arranges itself beautifully based on the user’s screen size. Also bundled is the ‘Dynamic filter’ plugin that lets your users filter your posts dynamically with one click. Get on with the Pinterest craze with ecoStrips!

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Gridler – WordPress Portfolio Theme

Gridler is a grid-based portfolio theme with a tumblr style blog supporting a range of post formats.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

sometimes you wish not to display one or more of your authors in RSS feed of your blog, it can be a test user or any other reason.

here is the code to paste in your functions.php

function wp_exclude_author($query) {
 if ($query->is_feed) {
 $query->set('author','-1'); //Author ID
 }
return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts','wp_exclude_author');

if you wish to exclude more authors just use space and another user ID with minus, like that:

$query->set('author','-1 -5'); //Author ID

Popularity: 3% [?]

Sometimes in your theme you want to display random posts or maybe random related posts in your sidebar,

here’s an easy way to do it.

in your single.php or index.php, change the main loop to:

<?php

query_posts(array('orderby' => 'rand', 'showposts' => 1)); 

if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> 

<h1><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>">

<?php the_title(); ?></a></h1> <?php the_content(); ?> 

<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

Popularity: 3% [?]

if you are using facebook comments social plugin for your blog comments, you can use this code snippet to display comments counter.

paste it where you want to display the counter. if you’re outside of the wordpress Loop use - get_permalink( $id ); instead of the_permalink();.

<fb:comments-count href=”<?php the_permalink();?>”></fb:comments-count> Comments

Popularity: 2% [?]

From version 3.1 wordpress has an admin bar at the top of the blog displayed all the time if you are logged in. if you with to remove it from the theme and not by css tricks, paste this code into your functions.php:

remove_action('init', 'wp_admin_bar_init');

Popularity: 2% [?]

let's say you have a sponsored author you want to display in bold or

maybe change the font size or color. you can do it automatically with WordPress.

inside the function.php paste this function, just don't forget to change

the NAME_OF_AUTHOR to the name of the author you wish to take care of.

function custom_author_name( $name ) { global $post; if ($name == 'NAME_OF_AUTHOR'){

 $name = '<font color=#761B4A><b>' . $name . '</b></font>'; } return $name; } 

add_filter( 'the_author', 'custom_author_name' );

Popularity: 2% [?]

when sharing on facebook or even pressing the "like" button,

your featured image of the post will show as the default image.

if no featured image you can tell the function to use your LOGO.

just paste this code in functions.php, don't forget to tell

the function where your logo is (SOURCE_TO_YOUR_LOGO).

function insert_image_src_rel_in_head() {

 global $post;

 if ( !is_singular()) //if it is not a post or a page do nothing
 return;

 if(!has_post_thumbnail( $post->ID )) {
 $default_image="SOURCE_TO_YOUR_LOGO"; 
 echo '<meta property="og:image" content="' . $default_image . '"/>';
 }
 else{
 $thumbnail_src = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_post_thumbnail_id( $post->ID ), 'medium' );
 echo '<meta property="og:image" content="' . esc_attr( $thumbnail_src[0] ) . '"/>';
 }
 echo "\n";
}
add_action( 'wp_head', 'insert_image_src_rel_in_head', 5 );

Popularity: 2% [?]

very easily you can disable the sometimes annoying  message from wordpress reminding you to upgrade your wordpress. it is recommended to turn it off especially in multi author websites.

in your function.php, paste this code:

add_filter( ‘pre_site_transient_update_core’, create_function( ‘$a’, “return null;” ) );

Popularity: 2% [?]

Google is trying to compete with facebook’s like button. they released a social button called +1 (plus one), when you want to show that you loved the article (somebody said “like”), you press on the +1 button and the counter adds one.

Now you can add +1 button to your wordpress website, we suggest to wait a few weeks to see if it’s not just a “buzz” but if you want to add it here are the steps:

1) go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/index.html.

2) customize and choose the setting for your button.

3) copy the lines in the text area :

<!– Place this tag in your head or just before your close body tag –><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js”></script>
<!– Place this tag where you want the +1 button to render –><g:plusone></g:plusone>

and add it to your post or insert to a page in your theme.

THAT’S IT!

Popularity: 3% [?]